OUR PROFESSORS as well as our other employees are underpaid in comparison to their colleagues in different states. The crew team (one of the best in the nation) rakes leaves to raise money for their season every year.
What's the point? Given the University's uncomfortable fiscal situation, the new Observatory Hill Dining Hall is an improvident expenditure that, in effect, leaves students with an inferior dining hall.
That the new dining hall was a squandering of monetary resources is a common subject among upperclassmen at the University. The dining hall, after two years of planning and two years of construction, cost the University approximately $23.5 million. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of where this money could be better spent: hiring new professors, paying them more, creating more student scholarships, putting in more funds for different sports, etc.
The University, however, has already spent the money on the new dining hall, which has turned out to be quite a disappointment in at least two different ways.
First, all upperclassmen who have paid the new O-hill a visit are well aware that there has been absolutely no change in the (already poor) quality of food. Our food, compared to other Virginia schools such as James Madison, fails without question. That $23.5 million can be spent on a new dining hall without any money going to food quality is unfortunate for our student body.
Second, the new layout is undeniably and frustratingly inferior. According to Elizabeth Bowling, O-Hill's construction project manager, the old O-Hill was too small for the number of customers using it. Given this problem, one would imagine the new O-Hill would be constructed so as to minimize crowding. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Three weeks in operation, the stairs leading to the dining hall's card swipe have been, hour after hour, inundated with student inflow. Perhaps more agitating than the stairs is the dining hall itself, which has several bottlenecks that increase traffic congestion around entrances to where the food is located. This makes it nearly impossible to enter the dining hall without facing significant traffic. Most importantly, however, is that the areas where food is provided are too small, effectively making the already long lines seem even worse. All of these situations clearly suggest that the new O-hill layout has not addressed the overcrowding problem merely by providing more space for seating.
Furthermore, the layout seems to be set up in order to discourage students from eating more. Not only does the crowding dissuade students from waiting in more lines, but the food is much farther from a majority of the cafeteria's seating. Obviously the farther students sit from the food, the less likely they are to make the walk for seconds.
That these changes were meant to minimize student consumption is probably specious, but they nonetheless do at least seem to have this effect. Even if the layout doesn't minimize per student consumption in practice, anyone who has visited the new dining hall can clearly observe that the problem of overcrowding has more likely been agitated than assuaged.
The upside to all this? Granite counters, terrazzo floors, more seating and a better view of Alderman Road. This "silver lining" is hardly worth the $23.5 million that it cost.
If students wanted aesthetic beauty, they could simply go for a walk down Central Grounds. However, when students go to dining halls, they are, for the most part, looking for a palatable meal in a stress-free environment. Instead, they receive the same mediocre food (albeit from a wonderful staff of O-Hill workers) in a stressful and crowded environment. These problems may seem relatively minor until one realizes that $23.5 million was spent to alleviate them. The new O-Hill, as a dining hall and as an investment, is thus a failure that will hopefully suggest the school spend its money more wisely.
Sina Kian's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com.
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