University Decommissions Dining Halls, Forces Students to Scavenge for Scraps

By Elena Eiss '28

Princeton University has just announced its decision to decommission all campus dining halls. While the University saw a decrease in Frist Food Gallery “Late Meal” hours and funding for Tacoria at RCA study breaks in the fall, the decision to halt dining hall services entirely is a complete surprise for the campus community. “First they say we can’t cook our own food, and now they say we can’t be served it either?” says first-year Mary Angriman, referencing the University’s additional plan to axe independent dining. “Guess it’s Wawa for me.” Other students have resorted to scavenging for food, sourcing their meals from the trashcans outside of Witherspoon Cafe and Coffee Club. “If I close my eyes and try really hard, I can kinda imagine that the coffee grounds I’ve scooped out of the trash is actually Whitman chicken,” says Jonathan Doerr ‘27. The decision comes after President Eisgruber ‘83 announced the university’s intention to reduce budget growth in the next fiscal year in his yearly State of the University letter earlier this month. Though he claimed that the university was “back and better than ever” from a Wintersession-less winter recess, budget cuts would still be “huuuuuuge” in order to “make the University great again.” His discussion of the letter at the Feb. 9 CPUC meeting was met with raucous applause from half his audience and chants of “Prince-ton U, Prince-ton U, Prince-ton U!” The Princeton Tiger’s reporters arrived at the “RoMa” Rockefeller-Mathey dining hall today at 10:59 AM just as its doors were closing for the last time. The servery and vast halls inside were completely empty, but a crowd of agitated students gathered in the Rocky Common Room. They shouted and held signs with the messages “Hey, so this just happened,” “Umm like… everyone needs to eat, guys,” and “This decision does not eat (and neither do Princeton students),” among others.