Harvard University Ditching ‘Pub Night’ Menu After Students Complain
“HUDS tonight is giving school lunch pre michelle obama”
Inside every liberal is a fear that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time.
The Harvard Crimson reports:
Harvard University Dining Services Walks Back New ‘Pub Night’ Menu After Student Complaints
Harvard University Dining Services walked back spring 2025 changes to its weekend dining hall menus on Tuesday after students complained that the new options were “junk food.”
HUDS introduced the “Pub Night” theme, serving mozzarella sticks and burgers on Fridays and pizza and chicken tenders on Saturdays, in an attempt to draw students back to dining halls on the weekends.
But outcry among undergraduates prompted a swift about-face.
“Effective immediately, we are transitioning back to the old menus and style of service, to include traditional hot entrees, starches and vegetables,” HUDS spokesperson Crista Martin wrote in an emailed statement on Tuesday afternoon.
She added that HUDS made the switch after receiving “feedback from some number of students who did not appreciate the menus and wished us to return to the previous dinner formats.”…
“Dinner, I feel, is the meal that HUDS does make like an actual meal — like entree, vegetable, lots of nutritional variety and availability,” Unini said. “And I don’t know if this food is doing that.”
One post with more than 400 upvotes read, “HUDS tonight is giving school lunch pre michelle obama” — invoking the former first lady’s efforts to improve the nutritional standards of school lunches.
Some students said they were particularly frustrated by the limited options for students with dietary restrictions.
Arjun Nageswaran ’25, who is vegetarian, said on Saturday that the current selection “makes it difficult to find a nice warm meal when your only choices are between mozzarella sticks and burgers.”
Taj S. Gulati ’25, sitting in the Eliot House dining hall for dinner on Saturday, pointed to his vegan friend and said, “That guy is just eating like a bowl of black beans every day. It’s insane how bad it is.”
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Comments
Liberalism is a deep rooted fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying freedom.
The students are their customers. I don’t see anything wrong with giving them what they want. If that means healthier food, so be it. I have more important things to get upset about. Like all the money USAID was apparently giving to Hamas both before & after October 7. (Source JNS.org)
Reading comprehension is key. Some students wanted the pub food….these students complained in reaction to offering the pub food.
These students complained in reaction to offering nothing but pub food.
I see no evidence that any students wanted the pub food in the first place, but even if they did, the hall still has to cater to all the rest of the students who don’t want that. They’ve paid for their meals, now you are obligated to feed them food they can eat, and that they reasonably expected when they contracted for it.
The campus dining room is not your Moma’s kitchen. You don’t normally get individually cooked to order meals. Economics dictates meals served in volume. Want special service be prepared to pay more. This sounds more like the campus caving to a liberal minority contrary to wishes of the majority who are eating on campus. Sounds to me the dining hall was trying to draw students in on weekends who otherwise were going off campus to eat tavern food.
These are not some weird idiosyncratic diets we’re talking about here. We’re talking about normal dietary restrictions or strong preferences that many people have, and that a service that purports to provide all a customer’s meals must cater for.
You have no evidence of what the majority wants, but even if you were right that doesn’t justify the place starving the minority.
I bet you would be making a very different argument if they’d gone the other way and started providing only bland boring rabbit food, cutting out anything with meat, fat, salt, sugar, or any of the other things that the nanny-staters think none of us should have.
Who would give a thumbs down to this statement?!? We all know it’s true!
“after receiving “feedback from some number of students who did not appreciate the menus ”
Meaning 8 emails from students, 4 of which were Muslim, 3 were blue-haired vegetarians and one guy who is gluten-intolerant.
I don’t think that is a fair assessment. This generation of young people was raised to think differently about food, and food in their dining hall should provide them with nutritious choices that they can eat and enjoy. This “pub menu” switch obviously doesn’t fill that bill.
More for the rest of us
Mais fica.
The Portuguese version is so poetic.
(Mah-sh fee-ca)
pointed to his vegan friend and said, “That guy is just eating like a bowl of black beans every day. It’s insane how bad it is.”
Well, that’s his choice, isn’t it? And it’s not a healthy one.
We had “good” and “bad” options when I was in school. If you wanted supposedly healthy, then you ate in the chow hall; if you wanted “pub fare” you ate in the equivalent of the student union (rec hall).
I do wonder if they did a survey/poll asking what students might like to see as weekend options. (“What food would bring you back to the dining hall on weekends?”) But heaven forfend they listened to those people instead of the whiners – who probably didn’t even fill out/return the survey.
They apparently did this in response to student feedback and then offended another group of perpetually offended students.
This seems like an unforced error to not offer more than one option of dining style on a campus this large.
“more than one option”
What, there’s a lawn out front for the vegan guy. isn’t there?
It’s a campus of 30,000 students for crying out loud? Are they unable to provide multiple dining options at a place as fancy as Harvard? This seems like failure theater of unforced errors at its finest.
At MIT, just down the road, we had two full dining halls with “actual meals” at traditional hours, one at each end of the campus; plus two student grills with extended evening hours, similarly situated; plus an actual pub for the grads and faculty. And that was 55 years ago. It’s not hard to do it right.
You pay for a meal plan. You don’t get to choose what is offered for food. Don’t like it then cancel the meal plan and buy your own food.
When you offer a meal plan and take people’s money for it, you can’t suddenly switch it to a restricted menu that many of those customers can’t eat.
I’d bet that had they switched to a menu that was exclusively vegan, low-fat, low-salt, low-sugar, and low-anything-else-that-tastes-good, you would not have the same attitude you’re displaying now.