Food for Thought Goes Hungry at Princeton

At the start of the academic year, Princeton University announced that, effective immediately, faculty and staff members who are “non-advising fellows” in one of the seven so-called residential colleges would no longer enjoy meal privileges in their college. The reason is, of course, the “new financial environment.”

Princeton’s endowment is so large that Malcolm Gladwell famously quipped a few years ago that the university is “the world’s first perpetual motion machine.” Nonetheless, let’s suppose that the war between the Trump administration and presidents like Princeton’s Christopher Eisgruber—arguably the leader of the Trump resistance, academic branch—really does mean that belt-tightening is necessary. The question then is whether this particular form of cost-cutting, which was not deemed necessary in the new financial environment of 2008, makes sense. In my view, it does not.

The soul of the university is intellectual, so I take for granted that the most important features to preserve in a time of crisis are serious classes taught to serious students by serious professors, along with the best libraries and laboratories that the budget allows—and, ideally, the best theater, concert hall, and art museum. This is not to denigrate the soccer team, the crêpe station in the student center, or three-ply toilet paper in the dorm bathrooms. But these are not essential to the university’s mission.

That said, if you are going to maintain a storied American college campus, there has to be more than a little attention to life outside the classroom as well. And this is where the dining halls come in. When I was an undergraduate at Yale in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and when I was a young faculty member at Princeton a decade later, the options for food in the residential college dining halls were just fine, but most students today, spoiled for choice, would scoff at the limited menus of a generation or two ago. What the dining halls did have, however, was intergenerational camaraderie. Some members of the faculty, staff, and administration were always present, not just on special occasions; so, often, were their spouses and children.

[RELATED: An End to the Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino? RFK Might Finally Make College Food Nutritious]

In more recent years, at Princeton and other institutions I had occasion to visit, these intergenerational interactions continued, and perhaps even became stronger, as the alimentary offerings grew and grew. There’s nothing like having students and professors break bread—or eat nigiri and crêpes—to humanize each group in the other’s eyes, especially when faculty brats are running circles around tables of charmed undergraduates. And, provided you have a meal plan, dining hall culture is an egalitarian activity: you don’t have to teach or be enrolled in a specific class, or be a soccer coach or a soccer star, to partake in it.

There is a great deal of bloat in elite universities with multi-billion-dollar endowments, and it is easy to make a list of things that might be axed, even without the putative need to save money. Least controversially, it is widely acknowledged that the astonishing proliferation of administrators at many institutions is an embarrassment that needs correction. At Yale, for example, the numbers suggest that each undergraduate has his or her “own personal bureaucrat.”

As far as Princeton is concerned, there is a notable admission in the opening paragraph of the dean of the college’s letter announcing the suspension of meal privileges: the decision a few weeks earlier to discontinue “Wintersession”—a program of two weeks of “non-graded learning and growth opportunities” instituted in 2021 and run by four administrators, the status of whose jobs is now unclear—was among the “significant adjustments to continue to provide the best possible education for our students.” While Wintersession may have been a good idea in principle, it did not appear to excite many Princetonians, and even the upper administration has had to admit that, in practice, it was not part of “the best possible education.”

By contrast, making faculty and staff—and, at least to some extent, their families—welcome in dining halls on campus is an excellent move in principle and, in my experience, often an excellent move in practice, too. Indeed, both as a freshman and as a tenured professor, I considered the ease with which faculty-student interactions could and did occur in Yale’s and Princeton’s residential colleges to be among the reasons these institutions were rightly judged to be extraordinary. I know that I was not alone.

Thankfully, Princeton is not canceling meal privileges for faculty and staff members who advise students in the residential colleges, only for the non-advisers. (Whether most of these advisers are actually any good at advising is another matter.) Still, if you want to encourage all professors to have a stake in campus life beyond their narrow departmental responsibilities—to feel that what they do is a vocation rather than just a job—then a very good way of doing this is to tell them that they, too, may take a tray, join the line for waffles, spaghetti bolognese, or ice cream, and sit down with students and colleagues from across campus for the occasional informal meal in a lively setting.

[RELATED: Fast Food Wages for Fast Food Education]

I do not know how much it costs an institution to offer “free” meals, but it cannot be tremendous. At Princeton, for example, there appear to be around 450 non-advising faculty and staff fellows across the seven colleges. My guess is that, on average, these fellows eat—or used to eat—one meal every two weeks during term time: some many more, yes, but others rarely. Perhaps, then, that is fifteen meals a year, most of them lunches.

To put this into perspective, Princeton requires all freshmen and sophomores to purchase an annual dining plan for $8,720 that offers an unlimited number of meals, including during fall and spring recesses, plus twenty guest meals; as for juniors and seniors, they have the option of purchasing a plan that gives them 210 meals for $3,380, which comes to $16.10 per meal. Meanwhile, individual meal rates for faculty, staff, and guests are $14.60 for breakfast, $17.90 for lunch or brunch, and $25.05 for dinner (the student rates are modestly less).

If my calculations are misguided, I trust that someone will let me know, but I’ll generously assume that it costs Princeton around $300 per year to feed each non-advising fellow. The total cost for the non-advising fellows is thus perhaps $135,000. To put this into perspective, that’s barely more than the current tuition—leaving aside housing, meals, and other expenses—for two undergraduates: $65,210 per student. And the endowment, at last report, was a cool $34.1 billion.

The bottom line is this: a serious educational institution that wishes to save money should eliminate nigiri and crêpes from its dining halls before removing the adults.

Image: “Rocky Dining Hall” by Joe Shlabotnik on Flickr