Illustration by Alicia Toldi.
Around six o’clock every evening, as I’m sitting in Coffee Grounds pretending to be productive, I hear my stomach start to growl and I begin to experience that sinking feeling of dread as I realize it’s time for dinner. It’s time to go to Harris.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are tons of things I love about Harris (like that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you spot an empty booth) but dinnertime in our dining hall is not a pleasant experience overall. Especially now, as the weather is getting colder, trudging to Harris to be confronted by a massive line of people is quite unpleasant. And by a line, I don’t just mean waiting as the person in front of you rustles through his bag for his ID – I’m talking about standing in a line that extends beyond both sets of double doors, leaving you to shiver outside in the sweatshirt you never realized was so thin.
Even after you actually get into Harris, avoid crippling yourself on the backpacks strewn on the floor and find a table that can accommodate you and your entourage, you still have to get food. The lines for food (heaven forbid it be taco night) are another debacle in and of themselves.
So why does it seem as if the entire campus is trying to cram into Harris at the same time? That’s right: because Harris closes at 7:30.
For the first few weeks of school I was willing to accept this dinnertime craze as just another part of college life to which I would simply have to adjust. However, over fall break, I had the eye opening experience of visiting a friend of mine at Skidmore College. I spent the majority of my first night recovering from my state of disbelief after we breezed into Skidmore’s main dining hall at quarter after six. This expedited entrance alone was thrilling enough, but when I learned that their dining hall stays open until eleven on weeknights and nine on weekends, my jaw literally dropped. For a school of relatively the same size I find it preposterous that the Conn dining hall only stays open until 7:30, closing almost four hours before Skidmore’s.
I’m not someone who needs instant gratification, so if I have to wait an extra few minutes to get my food I can handle it. But I find it ironic that, as a school that promotes healthy eating and lifestyles, our dining hall closes at 7:30. This certainly accomplishes the opposite. As a student without a car, if I want food after 7:30 the only things I can find on campus are baked goods at Coffee Grounds (although extraordinarily delicious and usually vegan), curly fries at Cro, or day old pizza my neighbors ordered the night before.
No wonder there’s so much talk about the freshman fifteen.
However, if there is one group of people that Harris’ hours affect the most, it is probably our student athletes. These students are some of the fittest people on our campus who practice year round while also juggling their academic schedules. Unfortunately, practices for the majority of these sports fall right within the five-to-seven time frame: prime dinnertime. The current fix for this problem is to embrace your inner senior citizen and hurry through your early bird special at 4:30, run to practice as you feel the mashed potatoes sloshing around in your stomach and later that night suffer pangs of hunger at 8:30. Lovely.
But the college has a “solution” to this situation called a Cro Pass. As the name implies, a Cro Pass is a slip of paper that allows you to eat at Cro for free, saving you from paying $5 for a bag of grapes. Aside from these day-old looking grapes, the only things to eat at Cro are a variety of pizzas, pints of ice cream and watery coffee. This assortment of food can barely be considered dinner and even at that, it is certainly not a healthy one.
Cro is not a substitute for Harris. Neither is Domino’s, Mr. G’s or Golden Wok. All I want is for Harris to stay open a little later. It could be for only a couple nights a week, even just until eight o’clock. I’m not expecting miracles here. I just want an extra half hour to sit down and eat dinner. Is that too much to ask? •
While I completely agree, I find it hard to imagine that Conn would ever do anything about this. Our school is woefully behind its nescac brethren when it comes to food services, and it’s clear that rectifying this is around the bottom of the administration’s to do list.