I’ve sat on the Haverford Student Council’s Dining Advisory Committee this year, here are a few ideas and priorities for Haverford Dining that I’ve picked up.
Before I get into it, I’d like to applaud the dining team for working to increase service this semester. Compared to the fall, we now have the stir-fry and quesadilla stations at dinner time, more food options during dinner, and several of students’ least favorite meals have been removed from the rotation.
Late night food options
I was naive when, before college, I envisioned grabbing a full meal in the middle of the night. I realize now that dining here can’t match the resources of a state school, but I think there are some feasible improvements we can make to late night dining.
We should have snack and drink vending machines in the library cafe, and beyond that, we should have autonomously available pre-made foods. Think of studying at 12am: it’s been six hours since you’ve eaten dinner, and you’re starving. But wait! Just down stairs, for the price of a meal swipe (meal plan equivalency), you can buy a sandwich from a vending machine. Sure, it’s not the best—it’s from a vending machine, after all—but it gets the job done, and you’re grateful that it’s there.
In this process of stocking the library cafe, we should move that smoothie machine in the Dining Center to the library cafe as well, and make sure that it, as well as the vending machines, accept dining dollars. Suddenly, in the most convenient place on campus, there are 24/7 snacks, drinks, smoothies, and sandwiches.
Now, the dining team has looked into library vending machines, but the libraries have been reluctant in the past due to mice risk. I think that we should reconsider for a few reasons. First, students already bring food (DC takeout boxes, delivery orders, food from the library cafe etc.) into the library all the time. If the building can handle this, I don’t think it’s justified to block vending machines. Second, I take issue with our implementation of the honor code if we can’t even trust students to clean up after themselves (and have them actually follow through with that). I understand that mice are a serious risk to valuable items in the library collection, so we could restrict food in the archives and special collections sections.
A late night food solution will be especially needed if the DC’s operating hours are retracted to an 8pm closing time, which, as I’ll get into shortly, is being discussed as a way of freeing resources for extended Coop hours.
Extending Coop hours
I’m strongly in favor of opening up the Coop for dinner. In the recent town hall meeting with Dining Services leaders, Director Tom Mitchell shared that they were considering closing the DC at 8pm on weekdays instead of 10pm due to resource constraints, and shifting the Coop’s schedule later—eliminating breakfast (9:00am – 11:00am) in favor of staying open until 9pm. While it would be unfortunate for the DC to close earlier, I believe that shifting the Coop’s hours is a worthwhile tradeoff for the following reasons:
1. According to Mitchell, the Coop serves an average of only 30 students for breakfast daily, while they take several hundred orders from lunch until closing. This low demand for Coop breakfast makes sense: It’s common for college students to skip breakfast altogether on busy mornings, and for those who don’t, the DC breakfast is solid. Losing Coop breakfast wouldn’t be the end of the world.
2. Results from the Dining Advisory Committee’s survey last semester show that students rated lunch meals higher on average than dinner meals. Despite this preference for the DC’s lunch, students still choose to go to the Coop as an alternative in high numbers during lunch hours. It follows that if the Coop were also available as an alternative to DC dinner, there would be a high demand.
3. The Coop serving as a dinner alternative would provide useful feedback for the DC. In Dining Advisory Committee meetings, Mitchell has expressed that judging student’s meal preferences is difficult without much direct feedback. They’ll get an anecdotal survey response from a student who apparently hates turkey dinners or something, while also observing that they ended up serving 15 trays. The natural question is: if the students dislike the turkey, why did they eat so much more than usual? My answer would be that there aren’t very many alternatives to the DC hot dinner, so students are going to make do, even if they would prefer other DC meals. However, if they could go to the Coop for dinner, maybe Dining would notice that on the day of a specific meal in the dining center, the Coop was packed, and served 50% more dinner orders than usual, which would be a great indication to switch up the menu next time.
In past years, both the Dining Center and the Coop were open from 7:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. While this would obviously be preferred by students, lunch and dinner exclusively seems to make more sense for the Coop under limited resources.
More student workers, with higher wages
Dining at Bryn Mawr has a certain theme that is largely missing from the Haverford DC experience: student workers. At BMC, it’s students who scan your OneCard, students who serve you food, and students who clean up after closing. Haverford Dining has some student employees, but to a much lesser extent.
I think that this is a missed opportunity because student employees can be cost saving, as student wages are quite low, and there is a vast supply of student workers. Staffing is one of Haverford Dining’s biggest challenges on the management side. On some occasions, vacant positions have gone months without any qualified applicants. I believe that student workers can help alleviate this challenge, but a few changes need to be made to make it work due to the training and reliability challenges of using student workers.
First, the college should approve higher wages for student dining workers (while remaining cheaper than full time employees, who are paid at least $18/hr plus benefits per a workday posting). This should not be done via an increased minimum wage for student workers, but rather a raise for dining student workers specifically, as it is clearly a less desirable and more involved job than staffing a desk at the library, for example. Dining already pays about a dollar more than other student jobs, which is clearly not sufficient to entice students over the desirability of other, easier, student jobs. This would help solve the first hurdle: getting enough interested and committed student applicants.
Secondly, there should be certain incentives for the most reliable student workers. Mitchell has expressed challenges with students dependably fulfilling their shift schedules. Also, keeping student workers throughout the year, which allows them to learn more complex and useful tasks at the Dining Center, has proved difficult. Someone who works the entirety of a semester, beginning to end, and maintains a strong attendance record throughout should get a reasonable bonus or pay bump. Finally, in order to get reliable, long-term, student workers it may make sense to copy Bryn Mawr in requiring first-year student workers to work in dining (though I have reservations about this one).
Bryn Mawr’s dining halls and our own library cafe already do a great job involving students in running their services—it should be possible for the dining center to accomplish this as well. The key is to find a way to get students to show up every week at the same time, and to do so for a semester, or a year straight.
I share these ideas in an effort to increase student idea generation, feedback, and long term planning for dining. The administration at dining is extremely receptive to student feedback, and they’d love to hear your ideas. If student priorities are feasible and properly articulated, changes will be made. If you have thoughts and ideas, please email me ([email protected]) and make sure to fill out the survey form in the DC.
