With so many issues that Brandeis students have to worry about on a daily basis, dining services shouldn’t be one of them. Yet this year Sodexo has implemented numerous dining changes that have caught returning students off guard and upset many who rely on campus dining options.
This year, Brandeis Dining Services have changed so that Lower Usdan will close for the weekend at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, and Upper Usdan will now be open all weekend. Upper has gained a new sandwich station called Sub Connection. The other major change is that Dunkin’ Donuts will be moving from the Village to Upper Usdan, but since it will not open until January 2017, there will be no Dunkin’ Donuts on campus for the fall semester.
The new dining changes have been advertised as making options more convenient, but overall student opinions reflect the contrary. Without Lower Usdan on the weekends, the only option for students to use a meal swipe is in Sherman or for a sandwich at Sub Connection. Losing Dunkin’ Donuts for an entire semester is inconvenient for many students, and once it reopens in January, anyone used to having Dunkin’ coffee on lower campus will now have to trek up the hill.
Despite the impact on students’ daily dining choices, very little student input was considered. No student forum was created to discuss the changes, and the Senate Dining Committee only had a limited awareness of Sodexo’s decisions. The Dining Committee met with Sodexo representatives throughout last year to discuss students’ dining requests, such as adding more retail options in Upper Usdan and making them open on the weekends. Sodexo responded to this request with the opening of Sub Connection, which along with all Upper options will be open on the weekends, and the closing of Lower to offset these costs. But the Senate Dining Committee was not aware of everything that Sodexo was planning, and could not have predicted the other dining changes that students were confronted with this year.
This is yet another example of Sodexo making dining changes without student input. In January of 2014, an email to the Brandeis community announced that from the Class of 2017 onward, every student living on campus will need to have a meal plan, even if they live in a residence hall with a kitchen. Thus for the Fall 2016 semester, all residential students are required to have a meal plan. This causes dissatisfaction among students who would rather cook their own meals in a dorm kitchen instead of paying for a meal plan they will not use to its full extent.
The fact that students are required to have meal plans only makes the dining changes more frustrating. Regardless of whether students want a meal plan or not, we should all have a say in changes that affect our daily dining options.
