Forbes residents often complain about the crowds that flock to their fabled Sunday brunch. But lengthy lines for an omelet at the Inn pale in comparison to the throngs that have swarmed Whitman for almost every meal since the dining hall opened at the beginning of the semester.
"It's becoming extremely overcrowded all the time," Whitman resident Eric Schlossberg '10 said. "More than twice, we've had to sit on a window ledge to eat our meals because all of the tables are full and all of the couches are full. Several times we've wandered into the private dining hall to eat in there."
"The food is delicious, and that's part of the issue because everyone wants to eat there," Schlossberg explained. He added that on one night, the dining hall ran out of food before 7 p.m.
Both Whitman and the newly renovated Rocky-Mathey dining hall — which has also seen an overflow of hungry diners from all areas of campus — have had to feed many more students than they were designed to accommodate. The crowds at both locations point to a more general campus trend: Students are foregoing the old dining halls, especially Wu and Wilcox, in favor of the new, renovated ones.
Antoine Kahn and Jeff Nunokawa, masters of Mathey and Rocky, sent an apologetic email to their students last Thursday acknowledging the overcrowding problem. Last Wednesday night, they noted, the dining hall served 800 people.
"We realize how frustrating this is, and we are in the midst now of resolving these problems," Kahn and Nunokawa said in the email.
Whitman's administrators, however, have put a more positive spin on their dining hall's popularity.
"We here at Whitman are thrilled that students are responding so positively to our dining hall," Whitman Dean Rebecca Graves-Bayazitoglu said in an email. "Our dining services team, led by Chef Manager Daniel Slobodien and Operations Manager Laura Carter, is doing a phenomenal job accommodating so many students with such high-quality fare."
The clusters of small tables in Community Hall were designed to create a more intimate, less institutional environment than the long tables typical of University dining halls. This seating arrangement, however, has made it very difficult for Whitman to accommodate the large crowds arriving each day.
"I think the problem is maybe in the tables and how small each table is," said Margaret Byron '10, the student manager of dining services in Whitman. "If they had long tables like those at any other dining hall, they wouldn't be overcrowded."
College administrators and kitchen staff expected that many students would be eager to sample the food at the Whitman and Rocky-Mathey dining halls. But, at least at Whitman, they did not anticipate that this initial curiosity would become a daily habit.
"Everyone thought the overcrowding would go away once the year fully started, but it's just as strong as ever," Byron said.
Aside from the one night it ran out of food, the Whitman dining hall has generally been able to satisfy diners' hunger, Byron said. "The staff are doing a really excellent job of keeping us fed," she said. "It's just the seating [that's] the only problem."
Indeed, students desperate to find a seat at Whitman have taken to tossing personal items at empty tables before getting their food in order to reserve spots in the dining hall. "[It's] common practice now to see shirts and purses all over the empty tables," Schlossberg said.
"If it were only Whitman students, I'm sure that wouldn't be such a problem," Schlossberg added. But he noted that students from all over campus, especially Butler, are eating in Whitman as well.
"I know a lot of students come from Wu," he said. "For people who are in Bloomberg, it's almost easier than walking around the construction. Wu is two minutes away, and it's less desirable, so I see a lot of Butler kids, which is totally understandable — I'd probably do the same thing."
Byron, however, said she is confident these problems will be addressed.
"I think that mxaybe it hasn't been long enough," she said. "You can probably safely make a guess that they'll change the seating in the near future. There's still room for change."
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