Dining Hall Hours To Be Vetted

Following up on discussions from last spring, the Committee on House Life (CHL) decided yesterday to create a task force in the next few weeks to assess whether dining hall hours should be extended. The committee also discussed modifications to the annual House tutor survey.

The tutor survey proposal, originally advanced last spring, proposes using questions that examine students’ relationships with their House masters and senior tutors—similar to questions on the Senior Surveys.

The CHL also postponed a discussion on cable TV in the dorms until next month’s meeting.

The dining hall task force, which was endorsed by the CHL last spring, will be headed by Tara Gadgil ’07, chair of the UC’s Student Affairs Committee (SAC), and newly-appointed Associate Dean for Residential Life Suzy M. Nelson. The group will be composed of HUDS staff, administrators, and students from different areas of campus and will be charged with evaluating different potential options to extend the hours of Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) service for undergraduates.

“That should be put together in the next few weeks,” said Gadgil.

According to a UC student survey presented at a CHL meeting last year, 87 percent of undergraduates said that, if given the option, they would eat dinner after 7:15 p.m.

Another task force of House masters, senior tutors, and students will be assigned to think of questions for the survey in the coming weeks.

“The feedback is only useful if the questions are relevant to what senior tutors and masters want to know,” said former SAC Chair Aaron D. Chadbourne ‘06.

Next month, the CHL will also discuss the feasibility of providing all dorms with cable television, potentially by allowing students to access cable television on their personal computers, Gadgil said.

“This has been an issue that’s been lingering on campus for many years,” Gadgil said, “but we’ve been looking into this since the summer and hope to be able to implement it.”

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.