Saturday is NIU Cares Day, a meritorious volunteering opportunity organized by Student Involvement & Leadership Development. This event is a perfect literary device to make a larger point: This one day leaves 364 days in which NIU doesn’t care. Instead, what if on NIU Cares Day, NIU magically changed into an institution that actually served the students? Here is my two-year anthology of the most popular campus complaints from sources, friends, co-workers, eavesdropping and personal experience.

Now, many students say Health Services only offers two diagnoses: mono or pregnancy. Students needing a psychiatrist get 10 minutes after the paperwork. There is no dental or vision insurance. Physicals involving blood work or urine are simply not offered, not because of cost, but because they simply don’t do that.

On NIU Cares Day, there will be decent health care, dental and vision insurance, basic services and enough time with psychiatrists to positively affect mental health.

Now, many students end up with classes they don’t need and don’t want, and that don’t pertain to their careers. These students often end up in careers they have no interest in, the result of following advice from advisers who have to work with nonexistent classes and a lack of faculty to teach them.

The urban studies minor has not had the faculty to teach its core class ECON 385 for three semesters. Students seeking alternative options must meet with Sue Doederlein, associate dean of liberal arts and sciences, who has been out of the office for weeks because her husband, the only adviser who allows journalism permits, is on extended medical leave. The department’s receptionists are “not sure when she will be back.”

On NIU Cares Day, students will get classes they need, faculty to teach classes that don’t exist and administration to help students when other administrators are unavailable.

Now, most students can’t take the words “residence hall” seriously. For food, they choose between over-fried cheese sticks or “healthy” boiled cauliflower. Alternative diets get meal options no one will touch, or pasta somehow rock-hard and mushy at the same time. Bosco sticks look appetizing, but will give you diarrhea. Many students get gastrointestinal discomfort from most of the food on a regular basis anyway.

On single-occupant floor “communities,” most people never leave their rooms. The hallways are painted a depressing gray or in scary pastels. Clean Access causes more problems than any Internet service anyone I know has ever used. The elevators break weekly. Lounges have uncomfortable furniture, and the walls are thin enough to hear whenever your neighbor’s boyfriend is over, through the best times and the worst times. If the beds don’t cause back pain, you can sleep until the sounds of passing cars, drunk pedestrians or the Huskie Buses wake you up. If you could only lower the heating temperature, you could close the window.

On NIU Cares Day, students will get “residence halls,” instead of “dorms.”

Surely you have your own complaints. NIU should make NIU Cares Day every day. Then, students will have nothing to complain about.