I'm on a boat

During one semester at my undergrad, one of the dorm buildings was stuck with a horrible and dangerous infestation of mold. This building housed over half of the entire sophomore class, and was unusable for the coming semester. So what did they do? They needed space for these hundreds of students to live. Their solution was to bring in a...wait for it...a cruise ship. Our campus is on a river, so they sailed a small cruise ship up to dock next to the old historic tall ship, the Dove. Cool right? (although truthfully many of the students complained about having to live there because they had a longer walk to class)

At the same time, a majority of the students were also participating in protests asking for living wages for many of the staff at the college (which were not so successful due to the exorbitant price of renting an entire ship).

It would seem that the ones who were paying the college were ridiculously over-compensated for their inconvenience of having to walk an extra five minutes along a lovely river, while the ones who were being paid by the college were left behind. The former were provided a space to live, while the latter were not. At least, not without getting a second job.

"Either the spatiality of justice is ignored or it is absorbed (and often drained of its specificity) into such related concepts as territorial justice, environmental justice, the urbanization of injustice, the reduction of regional inequalities, or even more broadly in the generic search for a just city and a just society."

Were the students deserving of more justice because they pay the school? Shouldn't the employees receive an equal level of benefit because they provide a service to the school? And on that note, why did only those students get to stay on the boat? Where's the justice in that? Maybe I wanted to live on the cruise ship for a semester (I didn't).


I wasn't kidding about them parking the thing right next to the poor little Dove.