Keep Unlimited Dining Intact

Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) has commendably continued to seek out solutions to offer students late night dining options. After concluding that leaving dining halls open later is financially infeasible, HUDS has come up with new proposals which would give students options among multiple meal plans for the first time. Despite the allure of choice, we hope the current one-size-fits-all system stays. Any curtailment of the equitable and unlimited access to dining halls currently shared by students would seriously compromise House life.

Under one proposed framework for new meal plans, students would be able to select from among two equally priced options. One would be the current plan, which allows for unlimited meals in dining halls. The other would restrict the number of meals per week a student could eat in dining halls but would give the student a larger amount of Board Plus dollars to spend at on-campus eateries such as Lamont Cafe, the Greenhouse Cafe, or the impending Queen’s Head Pub. Such a plan has some clear benefits. Students would be able to eat more meals during late-night (or late-late-night) hours when the dining halls are long closed but a few campus cafés are still open. Moreover, even with unlimited meal plans, many students prefer to take a mid-day bite at an eatery rather than trudge back to a more distant House.

But giving students the choice of meal plans would be unacceptably detrimental to House life. Currently, the dining hall is the space and atmosphere that is, in almost every way, the social and economic equalizer within the Houses. Anyone can enter when they like, eat with friends as they wish, go back for seconds, step out for a few minutes, and return to rejoin other friends. Limiting some students’ access to their own House dining halls—even if it’s their own choice to do so—will significantly reduce this social dynamic of the dining hall. Students on a mixed meal plan will have to think twice about tapping their weekly allotment for any given meal. And failing to swipe in or leaving the dining hall with food in hand, rather than constituting minor misdemeanors, could quite literally come to be viewed as theft.

It is also important to point out that the boon to students opting for extra Board Plus would hardly be commensurate with what they would otherwise be getting in a dining hall. Because the marginal cost of feeding students in dining halls is considerably less than it would be to feed them in campus eateries, students would unlikely be compensated sufficiently to pay for full meals through Board Plus.

Harvard has created a tremendously inefficient decentralized dining system, one in which 14 small dining halls serve small groups of students, in the name of fostering residential House community; a worthy cost for a worthy end, which we hope is not undermined. So long as it is serious about its commitment to House life, the dining hall should continue to be the centerpiece of openness, a kitchen open to all House residents rather than a restaurant for paying customer.