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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

RPS has limits

For some reason, the University cannot make a meal plan work. Instead of working against Residential Programs and Services by protesting changes that are only a possibility at this point, students should work with RPS to figure out why the system isn't working.\nI hear students complaining about having class during the short time their dining hall offers dinner or not being able to make it to Wright food court before everything but Sbarro closes. \nRPS is spread too thin. For whatever reason, it can't handle keeping all the dining halls open and offering good service. \nThe meal plan committee wants to solve this problem. If this means dining halls will close so others can stay open longer and offer more services, so be it.\nAt Purdue University, the school has 11 residence halls and 17 places to eat, not including the restaurants in its student union.\nIts plan operates like the old IU plan -- by using "meals" instead of "points" to pay for food. Thirteen of Purdue's dining halls serve traditional meals, where students can use their "meals" to buy food. The remaining four accept what Purdue calls "dining dollars" - similar to IU's old point system. \nIf students wanted to eat at places such as Eigenmann, they could use these extra points on their meal plan to buy food a la carte. Once those points were gone, they could either pay out of pocket or go to dining halls. \nIU last used meals instead of points my freshman year, so most students now have no idea what I am talking about. But students weren't happy with the meals system -- they wanted to eat at places like Wright and Eigenmann. \nRPS listened, and the current system was born. This is only the third year for this plan, so cut RPS a little slack. No, things are not perfect. Yes, there are valid complaints about lack of service and early closings. Yes, dining is in a sad state right now. And closing several dining halls would be an inconvenient. But the service they are offering now is inconvenient, too. \nUnder the meals system, students complained because traditional dining was one of their only options. Now students are complaining because the dining halls -- traditional and food court -- aren't open long enough and aren't providing the service they expect. \nWe can't have it both ways. RPS has a finite amount of resources to work with.

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