Feeding Time

Students who ventured up the Quincy dining hall stairs around 7 p.m. on Sunday were welcomed back from spring break not by the smiling face of the card-checker and the enticing aroma of vegetable lasagna, but by the cold, hard bars of a closed metal gate. In a scene that was echoed at Eliot House, which was one of the few upperclass dining halls open the night before College classes resumed, chaos reigned in the servery and in the seating area as students scrambled to get their hands on food and then chairs before either ran out.

Apparently, no one had told the chefs at Quincy, Eliot, Pforzheimer, Currier, and Annenberg that they would be cooking for the entire campus that night. The overcrowded dining halls forced students—or at least the students who came early enough to get food at all—to eat outside and in JCRs. At Quincy, those who arrived half an hour before the usual closing time of 7:15 p.m. were turned away, told that there was no more food to serve, nor trays to serve it on. And those who were “lucky” enough to arrive during normal hours were indeed fortunate in comparison—some intrepid students successfully located a bowl of chicken rice soup and a fork to eat it with.

Jami Snyder, a spokesperson for Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS), claims that the rush of 900 students served in Quincy on Sunday night—a number that does not include those turned away, but is still larger than that night’s Annenberg horde—was “completely unanticipated.” In the past, she said, “there has not been a need to open every dining hall…the night before spring break.” But it is common sense that with classes resuming the next morning, most students are back on campus (and hungry) by Sunday night. After all, if the College librarians figured that students would need space to study on Sunday night—and fully reopened the libraries at noon on Sunday accordingly—we can reasonably expect HUDS to show similar foresight and fire up a few more ovens. In the future, we hope that, after a vacation, HUDS errs on the side of reopening too many dining halls early instead of not enough.