Financial Reasons Prevent HUDS From Extending Hours

To the editors:



Re: “Getting What We Pay For, editorial, Feb. 27.

The reason why the Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) board fee has not been raised to accommodate dining beyond 7:30 p.m. is as follows: The tuition that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) sets for an undergraduate education is tracked very closely relative to Harvard’s peer institutions to ensure that Harvard’s does not increase significantly more than any other institution in a given year. Harvard works very deliberately to ensure that its tuition is not the most expensive of the Ivy League schools. For this reason, a tuition increase in any form is highly scrutinized. Given the financial struggle that FAS currently finds itself in, it retains as much of the annual tuition increase that it can to help address the FAS budget deficit. In this way, FAS limits the amount of any increase that is passed on directly the College. The net effect is a lack of funding for numerous student life initiatives, including the HUDS meal plan. In the past years, fuel prices and labor wages have risen dramatically but FAS has been unwilling to increase HUDS’s portion of the tuition to account for this, resulting in a net loss in services. HUDS performs incredibly well given their financial constraints. I am certain that HUDS, the Committee on House Life, and the College would all consider increasing the board fee to accommodate longer dining hall hours. Yet doing so is the ultimate decision of the Dean of the FAS. And this post and the body it oversees has taken the rather narrow view that an undergraduate education takes place in classroom and not the dining hall.



JUSTIN H. HAAN ’05

New York, NY

February 27, 2007



The writer, a former Crimson editor, was the Harvard College Campus Life Fellow in 2005.