GSAS Students Raise Complaints Over Dining Hall Restrictions and Reliability

While dining options at Harvard have long since been criticized by undergraduates, students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences face a different problem: they can only eat at one dining hall. And sometimes, that hall can’t serve them food.

At a November meeting, the GSAS Student Council raised concerns about the restrictive meal plan and expensive food prices at Lehman Hall Commons, the GSAS dining hall.

“It’s not open for breakfast. It’s not open on the weekend. It’s not open during holidays. It’s not open during move-in week. It’s not open during finals week, with some exceptions, so there are very reduced hours compared to the dining halls for other students,” Julia Kempton, a master’s student in Middle Eastern Studies, said.

“There have also been a number of incidents in the last couple of weeks where food has run out during meals, or the dining hall has closed early because they had no options remaining, or they ran out of vegetarian options,” Kempton said.

Students who live in a GSAS dorm are required to purchase a meal plan along with their housing. Each meal plan consists of a declining balance card of $1,543.24 for the fall semester and $1,371.76 for the spring semester. Unused funds do not get refunded at the end of each academic year.

For GSAS students living on stipends, the dorms are an affordable option amidst high Cambridge and Boston housing prices. However, GSC members said the mandatory meal plan adds unavoidable costs to residential housing. Students living at other graduate school housing — such as Harvard Law School dorms — are not required to join a meal plan as part of their housing contract.

“Do we raise the stipend for students to be able to afford stuff? Or do we try to lower the price of what’s offered here?” asked David A. Caldas, a master’s student in Medical Anthropology and the co-chair of support for the GSC.

Many GSAS students are also required to commute to other schools for class, such as Ph.D. candidates in STEM subjects who have to take classes at the Science & Engineering Complex or M.D.-Ph.D. students who take classes in Longwood. However, their dining plans do not allow them to spend more than $100 of their meal plans per semester at other campuses.

Raima Islam, a master’s student in computational science and engineering, said she often eats lunch at the SEC Café and misses dinner at Lehman around two or three times per week.

“There’s a very high chance we might run out of the balance and have to use our own money,” Islam said. “So I feel like the credit limit should be increased.”

Commutes can leave students with leftover dining dollars, even as they spend money out-of-pocket at other graduate schools.

“There are some students who use all of their dining dollars who can’t afford food,” Kempton said. “Then there are other students whose money goes to waste every semester, and they have to find some other way to get their food.”

GSAS students have also expressed some discontent with Lehman Hall’s prices. Though meals at Lehman Hall typically cost between $10 and $16, the School of Public Health has breakfast and lunch specials — known as Daily Dollar Deals — for as low as $1.

“It seems like the prices here are higher than they are in the Kennedy School or Law School dining hall — which are the only other places I’ve been. And those places definitely have more options in terms of food,” Kempton said.

According to a spokesperson for Harvard University Dining Services, identical items — like a can of Coke or a bag of chips — have consistent prices across different locations, but prices may vary for other menu items due to serving sizes or differently sourced ingredients.

The spokesperson added that the Commons has not stopped serving hot food prior to its scheduled closing.

“The confusion may have come in students seeing a station in the process of replenishing and assumed it to be closed,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement.

Ashley Ayuso, a sous chef for The Commons at Lehman Hall, said that if the dining hall runs out of a protein or food option, they will swap it out, but they don’t typically run out of food.

“We normally replenish with something different,” Ayuso said. “So, either fish or beef but it’s always an option.”

Kempton, however, had a different experience.

“They ran out of protein on a Friday afternoon, and they were apologetic,” she said. “They offered me a cookie, but they couldn’t offer me lunch.”

—Staff writer Maeve T. Brennan can be reached at maeve.brennan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @mtbrennan.

—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.