Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1997/04/16/shut_it_down.php
Wednesday, April 16, 1997
When I was a freshman I would eat on campus all of the time. I was young, dumb, and I didn't have a lot of money. I'd eat anything: Bolognese pasta with a congealed fluorescent orange sauce, fried fish sandwiches topped with a slab of melted American cheese, or hamburgers that weighed three times more than they should because their buns were soaked in grease. I once ate a soggy salad littered with dead aphids. I had heard that aphids contain the essential mineral zinc. When you order a sandwich at Food Court they soak the bun in some kind of yellowish butter concoction before tossing it on the grill. The stuff stank and tasted terrible, but I ate it anyway. I'd spend at least $400 more than my meal plan each term.
As I matured into a sophomore I started eating on campus less and less. My stomach couldn't take the constant assault of grease — I once got violently ill from a buffalo chicken sandwich. Instead, I'd eat off campus, or order food to my room. I've even started to cook my own food. The quality is much better at a comparable price. Last term I only spent $200 of my DBA [Declining Balance Account], and my parents got over $200 back.
Now, I hear that Dartmouth Dining Services is losing over $600,000 a year. To stop the hemorrhage, DDS Director Pete Napolitano is pushing for a mandatory $800 a term meal plan. None of the money will be refundable. Essentially, students will be forced to eat on campus and, frankly, I don't think that my stomach can take it. I'd rather eat a dew-soaked spider web than another Food Court buffalo chicken sandwich.
Needless to say, this plan has been extremely unpopular on campus since it was announced last week. Columns have appeared daily in The Dartmouth. and students are talking about it all over campus. The administration has succeeded in making the students mad. To compound the problem, Director Napolitano refuses to release the Dining Service books for public scrutiny.
I wonder how DDS can be losing any money. They have a regular clientele and students can charge the food onto their student ID cards. And the food is expensive. A single slice of cheese pizza at Food Court costs $1.75. Back home in Newark, a pizza delivery man who charged $1.75 for a slice of pizza would be quickly dispatched by gunplay.
Maybe the answer lies in DDS' enormous bureaucracy. Currently, sixteen administrators work at DDS alone. Back in the day, there weren't sixteen administrators at the College, yet Director Napolitano once held DDS up as a model of efficiency because they only had sixteen administrators.
If the bureaucracy is the problem, then the College Workers Union certainly isn't helping. Anyone who has ever been inside Food Court has seen idle union workers aimlessly milling about. A friend once complained about an employee who was handling one order at a time, while the line for the grill stretched out the door. The Food Court manager said that it was the guy's first week on the job, and that several other people had already complained about him. However union rules stipulated that nothing could be done until the man received a certain number of complaints. When I went into the Hop yesterday, four people were on break, while four people were manning the grill. And it still took ten minutes for me to get my food.
Regardless of the specific problem, DDS is losing a lot of money. Students don't want to eat there. Rather than force students to eat on campus, DDS should cut back its services. If they privatized, they wouldn't be allowed to lose so much money. Any business manager, given the resources of DDS, could turn a profit within a year. I'd rather see Dining Services completely shut down than be forced to eat on campus.
At the very least, Director Napolitano should be fired. He has failed to turn a profit for years. In a normal corporation he would have been canned years ago — or at the very least dispatched by gunplay. The students are dissatisfied, and he doesn't care. Dartmouth has traditionally been a place where the needs of the students have come first. The College annually had the highest rate of student satisfaction in the nation. If the College continues to show such a disregard for its students, it will lose considerably more money in future alumni donations.