To the Editor:
The Feb. 28 headline, "DDS attempts to lessen costs, not reduce options" is extremely misleading. DDS hasn't cut costs at all, but merely increased revenues at the expense of students and their parents. By forcing students to spend DBA at other DDS facilities, they are guaranteed a huge windfall at the end of the spring when leftover DBA expires and students have no practical place to spend a large chunk of money. Thirty chicken parms just don't last over the interim. In addition, by increasing the on-campus minimum to $950 (and now $600 for off-campus students), low-consumption diners take on a larger role in subsidizing the DDS deficit when DBA expires in the spring. If DDS was going to impose a Topside spending limit, wouldn't it make sense to lower the minimum cost of a dining plan rather than to raise it? That the Topside spending limit is far below the average student's Topside expenditure is clear evidence that DDS has sacrificed their customers' interests for their own.
Instead of taking advantage of a captive dining audience, DDS should find ways to more efficiently serve students. Despite their protests, I find it extremely hard to believe that DDS cannot find creative ways to reduce costs. I have never seen the DDS budget, but having experienced DDS food service for the past four years, I have plenty of suggestions on how to cut costs without shafting student diners.
For example, reorganizing the staffing at Topside from two people to one could immediately boost the "low" profit margins at Topside. What is the purpose of having two staff members manage the DDS register other than to allow students to add DDS Student Supervisor to their list of leadership experiences? In all my time at Dartmouth, never has a purchase been so large that it required a separate bagger. Even when this second person does his or her assigned tasks, it can be like pulling teeth to get them to look up from their magazine or schoolwork. I don't think the student body would mind the extra effort of bagging their candy bars and Powerade if the Topside limit was increased or eliminated altogether. This is just one example, and I am sure that our capable and highly creative student body could also offer up numerous DDS cost-cutting solutions for free.
I would really like to hear what the students on the DDS advisory committee have to say, because I simply cannot believe that they approved these changes. A simple straw poll of students would indicate that while perhaps supporting DBA rollover, dropped surcharges and other positive changes, students, as a whole, would not have supported these changes in exchange for a $100 Topside limit.
DDS's first mistake may have been "approaching the Student Assembly... to recruit students." Assembly should have taken a more active role during the early stages of the process. Instead, they only took up the cause after the changes were published and the resultant student outcry reached the Assembly.
The Assembly continues to maintain that they do valuable work, but instances like this do nothing to mitigate the perception that Assembly is out of touch with the average student and lacks the power to stop ill-founded administrative initiatives before they begin. Only in the ensuing, campus-wide uproar will real changes occur.
