My favorite place to eat on campus is the Refectory. My next favorite spot is Chick-fil-A.
And I get to pay an increased fee for the privilege of eating at both. It should be clear to you by now that the so-called “emergency” dining fee added at the end of last year isn’t a one-year thing. I wish DSG President Mike Lefevre the best in his continued efforts to end the fee this spring, but I doubt he’ll be successful.
Last semester I wrote that Duke Student Government might make a real contribution to student life if they were to put together a long-term plan for dining at Duke, something not yet done. Why not go ahead and be the first to state what we want and why and how we plan to get there?
How we eat is part of campus life. Students should be able to break bread together as an essential part of being a community. Food has a role to play in the social life of campus as well as in its intellectual life. Real changes to dining are needed to make the house model work, and they could even, if done well, go a long way toward tackling the “campus culture” issues we so love to discuss.
The recent addition to DSG of a vice president for residence life and dining is a great opportunity to move forward with a new dining initiative. Whoever is chosen to fill the position ought to move ahead right away.
This new position in student government will be of particular use to students because it parallels another position recently created during reorganization of the divisions of Student Affairs: the assistant vice president of housing and dining. On the administrative side that new position is filled by Rick Johnson, who comes to Duke from a similar position at Virginia Tech. He’s been here all of three weeks and has jumped right in—learning about Duke’s dining operation, getting perspective on our coming transition to the house model and listening to his staff and to students.
I sat down with Johnson at the Devil’s Bistro this weekend and asked him some of the questions that would need to be answered for any thoughtful student-led dining initiative.
Where do we want to be when it comes to dining? Johnson says Duke ought to have “the best dining program in the nation.” Along the way to that world-class program, Johnson will take a “student focused” approach, in which incremental changes are tested with students to “make sure we’re going in the right direction.”
One of the biggest changes on campus in the near term is the transition to the house model. It is a far cry short of the full residential college system à la Yale demanded by the late Reynolds Price. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work to find the “synergies” (Johnson’s term) between dining and housing in the new model. Johnson shared that “a large part of the conversation [about changes in dining] is going to be: How do we connect dining to the house model, and the house model to dining?”
As much as I bemoan the University’s reliance on capital construction to catalyze changes on campus, we really do need a West Union renovation. Without dining halls attached to each house, or to groups of houses (something Johnson rightly calls “Physically... really difficult.”), students need a bigger and more comfortable Great Hall and newer kitchens. At the very least.
The idea behind dining at Duke must be community. The administration is looking for ways to build a “framework” that allows student entrepreneurship when it comes to building communities. Why wouldn’t students themselves set the objectives for that framework?
It’s fair to say that we want better food, and we want it cheaper. And we’d like plenty of options—sit-down service, grab and go, open early, open late. But how do we see dining in the student experience? If it doesn’t matter all that much, then go ahead and pay the extra fee and go on about your business.
If, on the other hand, we think that dining, like housing, can play a transformative role in the student experience, then we ought to come out and say so. We ought to work with Assistant Vice President of Housing and Dining Johnson and other administrators to build a plan for dining, just as we helped build a plan for residential life in the new house model.
In creating Johnson’s position, which combines dining and RLHS, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta put “a huge chunk of student life under one umbrella.” DSG is about to select Johnson’s student counterpart.
I wonder what type of plans the two might hatch together?
Gregory Morrison is a Trinity Senior and the former Executive Vice President of DSG. His column runs every Tuesday.
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