Dartblog

In a column in the D entitled Dining Halt, Leonard Lewis makes an observation about Dartmouth Dining Services that I have heard before from football players who eat at EBA’s and other local establishments:

Many students, however, would prefer to buy DDS food on an item-by-item basis and spend more of their money at Hanover-area grocery stores and restaurants. Anyone who has cashed out at Home Plate with a $15 meal has probably noted that he or she could have eaten well at Yama for the same price.

How is it possible for students to eat at a Hanover restaurant for a price equivalent to a meal at Thayer?

A local restaurant has to cover the cost of its investment in equipment, the mortgage on its building, and it needs to earn a profit on its capital to make the whole effort worthwhile. Beyond that, the restaurant staff takes your order, prepares your food specifically for you, serves it to you at your table, and busses your plates and cutlery when you are done.

In contrast, DDS has no investment to pay for because donors covered all the initial cost of construction, it probably runs at a loss, and it serves you hockey pucks from a steam table as you stand in your very own food assembly line. You bring your food to table yourself, and you bus your own plates. And Thayer certainly gets better prices on the products that it buys compared to a local restaurant because it is a high-volume purchaser and a reliably solvent customer.

If you are a confirmed reader of Dartblog, the answer to the above question should be obvious to you. If not, let me give you a hint: expensive labor, lush benefits, long vacations, and slow-moving management. DDS is being run for its employees — not its customers.

If you accept the present situation, and you feel that it is part of social justice for students to overpay at Thayer for mediocre food, well, I guess that you also feel that it is just to pay a great deal of money for an education that it not nearly as good as it could be. I don’t. Dartmouth employees should be paid the level of wages and benefits that prevails in our community. The surplus should go to hire new professors, or — here’s a radical idea — to allow for tuition increases that stay in line with inflation.

Note: It is high time to have an independent company come in and run DDS — just like the competent hotel company that will soon manage the Hanover Inn in a professional and economical manner.

Correction: The first version of this post assumed that Dartmouth does not pay property tax to the Town of Hanover on Thayer Dining Hall. An alert Dartblog reader pointed out that the College does indeed pay tax on Thayer, along with dormitories and other parts of the College that are not considered to be part of its academic function. A phone call to the Town Assessor, Mike Ryan, confirmed this point. Apologies for the error.