You have just won the lottery. Your grand prize is five meal swipes per week at any of the following locations: eating clubs, co-ops, dining halls, retail dining locations, and late meal. What do you choose to do with these swipes?
This was the decision a randomly selected group of 300 juniors and seniors faced in the spring of 2023 during the dining pilot, an eight-week experiment for a more integrated upperclassmen dining experience.
“There were concerns [of] a lot of segregation between students in not being able to eat meals with their friends that were on different dining plans, and they wanted to provide a sort of a swipe exchange option to test out at the time,” said Naomi Frim-Abrams ’23, then the president of the Real Food Co-op. The program gave five meal swipes per week at no cost to the participants to a group of juniors and seniors randomly selected to represent Princeton’s various dining constituencies — co-op, sign-in club, bicker club, campus dining, independent — effective at any of the aforementioned dining locations.
Though the dining pilot was intended to bring upperclass students closer together on a day-to-day basis, the reality strayed far from the desired outcome. According to the Dining Pilot Final Report, 27.4 percent of meal swipes were used at Frist Late Meal, 53 percent were used at dining halls, and hardly any were used at eating clubs, with survey respondents highlighting “logistical complications.”
The University’s announcement last week that it would eliminate the “independent” dining option and require upperclassmen living on campus to purchase one of three possible meal plans has prompted significant backlash from students. Administrators have pointed to a series of studies — including the dining pilot, whose participants have all since graduated — as justification for the change.
In many ways, student criticisms of the latest dining changes have mirrored criticisms of the dining pilot: a lack of transparency among University decision-makers coupled with concerns from eating club leaders about their long-term operations. But if its goal was to introduce a new era of campus dining that dramatically broke down walls between various meal plans, the dining pilot was not successful.
The pilot was first brought to co-op and eating club leadership, including the Graduate Inter-Club Council (GICC) and the Inter-Club Council (ICC), in the spring of 2022.
The University developed a working group for the project, later known as the Dining Pilot Task Force, which consisted of University administration members, Undergraduate Student Government (USG), Campus Dining, ICC, and co-op student leadership. The task force was responsible for designing the pilot and collecting data throughout the process.
However, the student body was first made aware of the project and the working group after it was leaked to The Daily Princetonian in September 2022. In response, USG hosted an assembly with undergraduate students to have a conversation about dining at Princeton and circulated a feedback form to collect students’ opinions regarding the pilot. The results revealed that 74 percent of survey participants held “mostly negative” views.
In response, a group of six students, including then-USG president Mayu Takeuchi ’23 and future USG president Stephen Daniels ’24, released a five-point proposal in October 2022 to propose short- and long-term suggestions to the dining program in general. The recommendations included giving independent students access to meal exchange, initiating campus-wide conversations about exclusionary aspects of eating clubs, and opening a campus pub that would welcome all members of the University community as an alternative to eating clubs. The group of students included Frim-Abrams, Mutemwa Masheke ’23, a residential college advisor and the Young Alumni Trustee for the Class of 2023, as well as the then-presidents of Ivy Club and Terrace Club.
After the pilot was leaked, USG advocated for greater student representation in the task force. “Given that the university was proceeding with the dining pilot, USG wanted to make sure student voices were represented in the process and shaping the decisions that would ultimately affect their dining and campus experience,” said Takeuchi.
Although more students began to take part in the task force, many had logistical concerns throughout the implementation of the dining pilot. Members across dining affiliations echoed worries about reaching full capacity in dining spaces, being unable to prepare enough food for everyone, and eroding the sense of community amongst their members, according to former USG Campus & Community Affairs Chair Isabella Shutt ’24.
By the time the pilot launched in February 2023, there were already some restrictions on participants’ use of swipes. Some clubs and co-ops required people to sign-up in advance to ensure that the kitchens could prepare extra food in advance. Additionally, eating clubs and co-ops could host “blackout days” for members-only meals and events. Colonial Club elected not to participate.
“If the experiment is, ‘Let’s see what happens when we break down the barriers to communal dining,’ then barriers were never truly broken down because of the way it was implemented,” said Shutt.
The pilot was particularly unpopular among eating club members. According to the 2023 Senior Survey, over 30 percent of eating club members and 28.6 percent of co-op members held strongly unfavorable views towards the pilot. Of those on the independent dining plan, however, only 11.5 percent felt strongly unfavorable towards it.
As private spaces funded by their members, eating clubs’ operational models catered to a specific, known number of people. They argued the dining pilot threatened this model by giving an unknown number of students free access, which would disrupt their logistics and meal planning.
“Our kitchen can’t handle having extra swipes,” Cannon Dial Elm Club member Camille Reeves ’23 said at the USG meeting in October 2022.
“I [feel like] it was created in order to fail so that the eating clubs could point to it and say, ‘see, it actually doesn’t improve community,’” Shutt said.
According to Takeuchi, the report of the pilot had two major findings, one of which is that half of the respondents would not be willing to pay extra for these swipes and that there was “strong demand” for Late Meal due to the convenience of its hours.
The latest changes to dining have addressed one of the dining pilot’s findings: Upperclassmen who purchase the Block 32 plan, open only to those on eating club or co-op plans, will be able to use their swipes at Late Meal. While financial aid will be adjusted to account for the cost of the Block 32 plan, some students will still be left paying more to the University than they would have otherwise.
Despite a seemingly blockbuster idea — five swipes a week to any dining venue — the dining pilot was ultimately not generalizable to wider implementation, the report warned.
“The findings are really inconclusive at best,” Takeuchi said.
Jamie Creasi is a contributing Features writer for the ‘Prince.’
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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