No more lunch for undergrads at the Law School
Leave a CommentUpdated 9:57 p.m. In a stunning, heartbreaking and utterly tragic announcement for those who need their daily chicken avocado wrap, Yale Dining Services announced today that undergraduates on University meal plans will no longer be allowed to swipe at the Law School Dining Hall beginning this fall.
In an e-mail message to students, the executive director of dining services, Rafi Taherian, also announced several other changes, including improved buttery menus and the opening of a new “healthy, natural and sustainable convenience store.” In addition, Flex Points — renamed “Dining Points” — can now only be used on campus and not at Wall Street Pizza or Yorkside Pizza & Restaurant, where they previously had been accepted.
“Some of these changes, which come as a direct result of the financial challenges the university is facing, will have an impact in the way your meal plan is structured and we feel it’s important to keep you in the loop throughout this process,” Taherian wrote.
The Law School, for its part, says it did not seek to have undergraduates booted from its dining hall. “This is a decision that was made by Dining Services,” said Janet Conroy, a spokeswoman for the Law School. “We have nothing to do with the decision.”
The move comes two years after Yale Dining Services prohibited students from “double swiping” — skipping breakfast and then swiping twice at lunch, once for a meal and once for groceries — at the Law School and other retail dining facilities.
The double swiping episode demonstrates why Dining Services might want to ban undergraduates from the Law School altogether. Because the dining hall there is run by the Law School and not by Dining Services, several hundred thousand dollars per year in student meal credits were going to supplement the Law School dining program instead of Yale College’s as a result of widespread double swiping, administrators explained at the time.
“We felt that was a lot of money out of the board program,” said Ernst Huff, the associate vice president for student financial and administrative services.
That same logic applies here. By keeping those swipes in its own facilities, Dining Services won’t be giving up revenue — an attractive prospect in a time of shrinking budgets.
Taherian’s full e-mail is after the jump. We’re trying to get more information from Dining Services and will report back when we do. In the meantime, take a deep breath. We’re going to get through this.