EDITORIAL: Charity Choas

The problems caused byThe problems caused byDining Services' poorThe problems caused byDining Services' poormanagement of The WorldThe problems caused byDining Services' poormanagement of The WorldFast for Hunger overshadowedThe problems caused byDining Services' poormanagement of The WorldFast for Hunger overshadowedthe benefits of the program.The problems caused byDining Services' poormanagement of The WorldFast for Hunger overshadowedthe benefits of the program.______________________________ These students have every right to complain. As part of the program, students who agreed to participate forfeited their meals for one day, so that the money normally used to prepare those meals was given to Oxfam America, an international hunger relief organization. But the cost a student incurs for lunch or dinner on meal plan was not entirely given to charity. Instead, the charity organization only received a fraction of that cost. Canney explained that "there's still electricity being paid and labor that's still there. It's based on the plate cost -- the cost of the food that an average student would consume in a meal." But this discrepancy was never clearly explained to the students participating. Many students thought that the entire cost of a meal, which ranges from $5.57 to $10.25, would be given to charity. The charity actually received only $2.51 to $3.65 per meal. Here's the problem: If students were aware that only a percentage of their meal would go to charity, they may have decided simply to give five or ten dollars from their own pockets to the drive, and still been able to eat the lunch and dinner for which they had already paid. By donating on their own, students would have raised more money for the drive, and would have suffered a cost less than the value of the meals. Dining Services was less than forthcoming with this information and should be held responsible. We also wonder why Dining Services' fixed costs are as much as 50 percent or more of the fees paid by students for meal plan. Is the system so inefficient that students must pay between $5.57 and $10.25 for food that carries a "plate cost" of only $2.51 to $3.65? Students who chose not to participate in the plan also have a legitimate gripe against Dining Services. As part of meal plan, if a student misses a meal during the day, he can redeem that meal at a snack bar in McClelland Hall. But the snack bar was closed on Thursday, the day of the charity drive, even though not every student agreed to participate in the program. Therefore, not only did students who participated outright lose a percentage of their money from the meals they donated, but those that did not participate and happened to miss a meal that day, also lost money for one meal because the snack bar was closed. Dining Services handled the entire program extremely poorly. What started out as a noble effort to help the impoverished turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. If Dining Services cannot solve these problems in the future, we urge the department to rethink this charity drive. While we encourage the University to help the homeless, students pay good money to receive meals on campus, and their interests must be preserved.