McCabe Defends Dining Hall Complaints YET AGAIN

Author: [no author name found]

In his editorial ("Reflections from Med School on the Value of a Liberal Arts Education," The Middlebury Campus, Oct. 30, 2002), Danny Choi '01 noted that "at the risk of opening healing wounds" he wanted to address the dining issue I first brought up two months ago.
Choi made quite a few assumptions about the College dining, one of which was "let's assume $29,600 covers tuition, $2,100 covers room and $2,100 covers board". Choi also noted, "let's assume that you eat 660 meals a year at Midd". 660?! Well, I thought that since we were diving back into the subject, I would do some research of my own and come up with my own figures.
For starters, it appears to me that we are actually at Middlebury learning and playing for 203 days. This excludes breaks and vacations, logically, but includes Saturdays and Sundays. Supposing that we did eat three meals a day for each one of those 203 days, we would have had 609 meals at Middlebury during one year of tuition. This seems to throw off Choi's initial assumption, but there is more. From what I understand, Middlebury operates under the impression that students will most likely eat the brunch offered on weekends. So that would reduce the figure to only 551 meals. In terms of the actual breakdown of tuition, that seems a bit fuzzy. I searched the Handbook and financial sections of the College's Web page and found no actual breakdown, but it appears that $2,300 is the agreed figure for a year of dining.
Doing the math we see that this is over $4 per meal. But we don't eat all these meals, do we? Choi seemed to think that 660 was a conservative estimate, but statistics quoted in the article "Should Dining Offer More Choice?" (The Middlebury Campus, Oct. 30, 2002) revealed that Middlebury students only eat one-third of the meals provided in their dining plan! Since the dining plan is pretty mandatory, we now see that about 183 is the rough estimate of meals we eat per tuition making the total per meal … $12!
Now that's a bit high, and it is the student's choice to not capitalize on their dining plans, so getting quite sick of all the mathematics I went to the Dining Services Web page to see what they approximated the value of their meals at. It turns out a dinner here at Middlebury is worth $8.
So it is with these facts, not assumptions that I will continue my point, which is, and always has been, that with the construction and build-up of anticipation for a brand-new dining hall and what should have been an improvement in dining schedule, food and convenience, Middlebury students did feel shafted.
Middlebury did not add enough dining staff to accommodate the new dining hall and instead the existing staff was sparsely re-allocated amongst the dining halls and the schedules were revised to try and make the addition of a huge dining hall possible without the addition of more workers. Proctor was closed on the weekends, Hamlin and Freeman were put on weird schedules and the students were left asking, "What just happened here?"
And it is even more evident that I was not alone in my disappointment. The student body spoke out and now Proctor is back on the weekends, deli meat is back in Proctor in the evenings and the facility is open until eight again.
Students have a sense of entitlement at this college, and I would hope so for what we pay to go here and the sheer intelligence of most of the student body. I have a sense of entitlement to write editorials about what the student body wants to read; stuff that relates, and complaints — petty as they are when put in real world context — that they are currently having. Most of the bothered people responding seem to think that we shouldn't be complaining — about much of anything — with how beautiful it is here, and how amazing it will be to have a liberal arts education.
I did complain about the new dining situation, and interestingly, I found it reflected the voice of many inconvenienced students, who now can enjoy improvements in dining. There will be more complaints from students that will eventually reflect changes. Sure, we're all pumped about getting an amazing education. But that doesn't mean we're going to just walk around and stare at the foliage and landscape in a euphoric daze without an opinion in the world. Then where would this institution be?
Anyone else want to talk about dining?

Sarah McCabe is a sophomore from New York