Meal Point Overhaul Long Overdue

Dear Editor,

Thank you Melody Gaal for addressing the “”Pointlessness”” of the UCSD meal plan. It’s atrocious that all students living on campus are required to pay $1,800 with no other option.

I am a fourth-year student living in the International House, with a brand-new kitchen from Eleanor Roosevelt College’s extensive construction, and I still wince each time I’m forced to go to the dining halls to use up meal points. Most students agree that the dining halls are unhealthy and have an extremely limited selection. There is no on-campus grocery store that accepts dining dollars and offers fresh fruits and vegetables. The hole-in-the-wall Earl’s Place, which surprisingly offers some organic canned foods and cereals, is grossly overpriced. I praise the university’s effort to bring a farmer’s market to campus every Tuesday, but we are left with little incentive to spend our money out of pocket because we already have paid a fixed dining-dollar fee.

I would rather have the choice of where I spend my money. I’d prefer seeing my lunch money supporting the International Center, where volunteers prepare an open lunch on Fridays and you can meet and sit with international students. Or going to the I-House for a Global Gourmet dinner where foreign students teach a cooking class and then serve the food they prepared.

The university wants to keep the meal plan as a continued form of income. Instead, it should help students learn to eat well, make healthy decisions for themselves in their diet and get used to cooking at home and being responsible for their own grocery shopping.

The meal plan could be mandatory for first-year students only, granted that eating on campus is perhaps part of the freshman social experience. But after that, the meal plan must be optional. This way, students are more independent, can explore markets and restaurants in the San Diego community and are undoubtedly healthier without suffering the added financial burden.

– Alicia Sabuncuoglu

Senior, Eleanor Roosevelt College

San Diego Lessons Mirror Those at UCSD

Dear Editor,

UCSD and the city of San Diego have something in common, though you wouldn’t know it from their dysfunctional relationship.

With its sewer system and roads crumbling and its credit rating suspended, some in the city say they really want to find a way to build the Chargers a new stadium. And with its students’ wallets stretched by fees, the university now wants them to shell out more than $200 per year to fund the university’s athletics program. Never mind that students already pay not only for their education and the dorms, but also the construction of the Student Center and the registration-fee funded pet projects of administrators.

Fortunately, the University of California, despite its many problems, has an ingenious check against attempts by the administration to pawn off responsibility: Students have to vote to approve their “”voluntary”” fee increases.

Unfortunately, the administration has become skilled in the politics of student fees. To get students to approve the Student Center referenda, it worked in language promising that the extra fees would not be charged until after the students voting on the referendum had already graduated.

Something similar is happening with the athletics referendum. In order to convince students, who have already rejected several fee increases in recent years, to foot the bill, the university has been raising a coordinated set of red flags warning of the impending doom should the upcoming athletics referendum fail. If you can’t convince them to vote for it, scare them into doing it.

But few of their dire predictions are likely to come true. Administrators would never allow UCSD to drop down to NCAA Division III – not because they give a rat’s behind about athletics, but because few would piss off alumni and potential donors. Should the referendum fail, the most likely outcome would be Chancellor Marye Anne Fox opening up her personal vault, also known as the $1 billion fundraising campaign.

One recent observer of San Diego politics noted: “”We can’t just let our streets and sewers crumble while we watch football?””

And we can’t just let the university shirk its fiduciary responsibility, on the backs of students, while we watch water polo.

– Vladimir Kogan

John Muir College Alumnus