Last term, The Dartmouth ran a series of articles tracing the history of dining services on campus. From the early eating clubs to the current DDS system today, the evolution of campus dining is very much a dynamic process responding to the specific needs of students and the administration. That evolution is not yet complete, however, and the current budget crisis could prove to be the opportunity to seek changes in the already dated DDS system.
First, some history. Before the College found it necessary to interfere with what or where students should eat, Dartmouth students were members of independent eating clubs in the Hanover area. It is not clear if these clubs were exclusive social organizations; students basically paid board money to the owner of the club, usually a local female resident, and ate their meals at her home. This system gave students choice and provided entrepreneurial women with an opportunity to earn some income out of their kitchen. It was only in the 1920s that first-year students were required to eat on campus, and it was not until the 1930s that the same restrictions applied to upperclassmen. The various eating clubs slowly went out of business.
What followed was a slow but steady consolidation of dining options, culminating in the creation of DDS in 1989. Today, DDS effectively enjoys a monopoly and students are forced to buy non-refundable meal plans to support the joy of campus dining. To anyone familiar with third world development, this trend parallels the process of nationalization throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Just as the College saw it fit to own and operate every dining facility, governments in Africa, Latin America and Asia thought greater efficiency and faster economic growth could be attained by complete state ownership of major industries. Just as these governments realized their folly and began the process of privatization in the late 1980s, the college too should get out of the business of feeding its students. The reason is simple: it makes no economic sense. Most economists would agree that a government should restrict itself to the provision of necessary goods such as defense or street lighting for which it is difficult to determine a fair price or enforce compulsory payment. In the same way, the College should limit itself to the provision of such services as Internet access or libraries. Just as the government pays for public goods out of taxes, the college pays for the services it provides out of tuition fees. Campus dining falls out of this category. While eating is necessary, it is not difficult to enforce payment. Short of pure dishonesty, a student cannot get a sandwich at Collis and avoid paying for it. The College need not insert itself into the picture.
At the same time, College involvement in campus dining does not add any value to the experience at all. Dining at Dartmouth does not serve the function of eating clubs at Princeton or residential dining halls at Harvard. At Dartmouth, DDS puts something edible (hopefully) on the table, and students are left to their own devices to engage in conversation. Dining halls at Dartmouth are important social places, but DDS is completely independent of the process.
Rather than being beneficial to students, college ownership of dining services is actually harmful. DDS is a monopoly. While there is choice within the system, students cannot choose to leave the system. Dining plans are not only compulsory but also nonrefundable. Food quality ranges from good to barely edible. Groceries at Topside sell for inflated prices. And like most governments, the College redistributes dining dollars by forcing surcharges on small eaters and granting bonuses to larger ones.
In short, DDS should be privatized. Like all bad monopolies, DDS must be dismantled. While a return to the eating clubs of old is impossible and impractical, a new DDS system could be modeled on that. The college can retain the existing DBA system. The major change would be to break up DDS to several independent private operators. Competition needs to be reintroduced. Collis could be turned into an employee-owned entity. Homeplate and Foodcourt can be handed over to two separate companies. Topside can be tendered out to a convenience store chain with greater bargaining power like Foodstop. Smaller operations like Novack can be run as student cooperatives. Courtyard Cafe, with its central downtown location at the Hop, can be converted into a fast food outlet.
Where would the College end up? The College can enjoy a steady stream of rental income without having to worry about missing silverware. It can continue to manage the DBA system, funneling the cash to different operators depending on their sales, perhaps even taking a cut of the profits as a service fee. For students, the change would be dramatic. For once, students could exercise consumer choice, ditching dining locations that serve bad food. These operations will eventually fail and be replaced by new ones. Private operators are more responsive if the bottom line is at stake. Student advocacy campaigns, such as fair trade coffee or recycled cups, might, perversely, become even more effective. Food prices might fall if the new owners are more conscious of costs and competitiveness. Food quality, being the main engine of sales and thus profits, would rise. The perverse system of redistribution will also end.
On the downside, though, there may be two problems. Private owners may curtail operating hours or refuse to provide food (e.g. halal meals) to cater to small markets. Here, the College can step in, not to operate the dining establishment itself, but to provide incentives to lower the costs of these operations. Rental fees for the Pavilion can be set really low or even zero. The College could pay subsidies out of rental income from other places to encourage late night dining services. However, provision of such services should remain in private hands.
Can this new system of dining succeed? U.S. colleges seem to have a strange fascination for feeding students. I don't know of any places with a system the same as the one described above. However, conditions at Dartmouth seem good. Assuming each student subscribes to a $800 plan, at 4,000 students the DBA kitty is a nice unrefundable $9.6 million annually. That is the minimum figure and excludes spending by College staff and the public. Campus dining also sees less competition from off-campus restaurants in Hanover compared to colleges in urban areas like Harvard or Columbia.
It is said among the Chinese that opportunities arise from crises because the Chinese character for "crisis" is the same used to describe "opportunity." This should be the guiding principle for us in this period of budget cuts. DDS is not the final stage in the development of campus dining, but a milestone in a long period of evolution. Perhaps it's time to move on?
