Duke's dining system is awful. Any system that results in students eating repugnant, $9 chicken wraps while checking their e-mail in a dorm room, all by their lonesome, deserves to be drastically overhauled.
We need to choose between proper communal dining and leaving students' nutrition up to the free market. The messy compromise that we are currently victims of needs to go.
Our dining plans incorporate elements of the dining plan system found at places like Yale and Oxbridge, and the complete food-freedom at Carolina. The result, however, is blatantly ridiculous. In fact, it should be apparent to any critical mind that we have managed to import the worst of both worlds.
The contemporary rationale for communal dining is that it increases a feeling of community, facilitates long dinner table conversations and ensures that students take in sufficient nutrients. I would claim that the Marketplace does just that, despite its occasional shortcomings.
The solution Duke has found for upperclassmen, however, is simply dumb.
The very term "dining plan" is a joke. Our dining plans are nothing but an elaborate sales tax scam. By paying with points instead of dollars, the tax that would normally be added at our campus magically disappears.
I know that Duke loves to screw over our hospitable surrounding community, yet directly stealing from the state budget seems to push even Duke's limits.
Think about it. If I want to buy a sandwich at say, Alpine Atrium, I can avoid paying local taxes by walking to the Duke Card office and depositing the price of a sandwich into my account.
The madness continues. Every Duke student knows that calling dollars 'points' removes a certain mental barrier against overspending. Last semester, I drank my signature drink--an iced mocha with an extra shot of espresso and a mint shot--by the gallon. At a whopping average of $4.25 per cup, I became a true Starbucks victim. Did I care?
No. It was on points.
Only on the last day of last semester, when I, armed with cash, paid nearly 10 bucks for a grilled cheese sandwich and a smoothie, did I realize what I had been subjected to all along. I had never seen these prices. In fact, Alpine Atrium does not even have most of them listed.
Spending a minimum of $1,315 a semester on food of questionable quality seems a bit odd. Especially when this money can get one quite far in local eateries. At walking distance from campus, mainly on Ninth Street, plenty of dining options are available with competitive, if not lower prices. Once again, the local community bears the brunt of our dining system.
Duke Dining Services enjoys a dramatic monopoly, for no good reason.
America has become great because of its competitive market. If people get to decide where they want to spend their dollars, suppliers have incentives to offer quality food at reasonable prices. Right now, Duke eateries do not need to put much effort into their product. Rick's Diner, for example, is usually pretty busy--yet it received the lowest rating of all campus food outlets.
Maybe food points give our parents a sense of trust. Two lines of reasoning would counter this argument. First, it is about time that students learn to handle their own budget. Once we enter the much dreaded "real world," we'll discover that grocery stores expect you to pay with real money. And, here it gets tricky, we'll have to decide how much we are willing to spend on food.
Some practice in the safe confines of Duke might not hurt.
Second, the points system has become a big laundering operation. While Duke is telling Mike's parents how well he is being taken care of, food points are being pumped into the bottomless pit called Washington Duke Inn. Afterwards, Mike calls his parents to ask for more food points; he is poor and hungry. The result?
Cocktails on points. (And possibly more infuriating, Mike is missing out on the infinitely better food at the Magnolia Grill.)
If Dining Services would use their monopoly wisely, maybe I would not be as exasperated. But it has handed over our dining experience to Aramark, a company with an awful labor relations track record, and food far below par. To me it did not come as a surprise that DSG put the multinational on probation. Apparently, Director of Duke Dining Services Jim Wulforst was flabbergasted.
The time has come for Duke to choose.
One option I would fully support is introducing communal dining. (Perhaps even alongside a college system--I know Robert Keohane would love to see that happen.) True, the monopoly of Dining Services would persist, but it would serve the larger goal of intellectual development. Long dinner table conversations, possibly even with faculty presence, would bring us yet a little closer to the Ivy ideal.
Another option I would endorse is to change to the system our beloved neighbors in baby blue have in place. At Chapel Hill, getting a dining plan is completely optional. If Duke would do the same, Durham businesses would flourish, prices would go down and quality would increase significantly.
Let us just get rid of the status quo.
Maybe Wulforst should spend a little less time on Super Bowl bets, and a bit more on his actual job--creating a sensible dining system at our beloved University.
Joost Bosland is a Trinity sophomore. His column appears every third Thursday.
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