By Joseph Scariano

It’s 6:45 in the evening. Just like many Fordham students, you’ve finished your classes for the day and are ready to eat dinner and continue your bustling life. You walk over to the Marketplace, or the caf, our main food option on campus. As you walk through the doors of the McGinley Center, you see the massive line and can only mutter one thing: here we go again.

At colleges and universities across the country, having reliable food options is not only an important part of student life but can have a negative or positive effect on the outward view of the school. At some schools, there are hundreds of different variations of meal plans, while other schools do not offer meal plans at all. Fordham University, despite its high tuition, has poorly managed the food options on campus while simultaneously taking steps in the wrong direction toward making meal choices better for students and staff. Without a doubt, having inadequately run food options on campus is a detriment to student life.

Fordham is under contract with Aramark, which is one of the largest food providers in the country. As a nearly 15 billion-dollar company in revenue, Aramark’s employees should be held to the highest standards, right? If you answered yes, you’d be in unison with nearly everyone that Aramark caters to. However, speaking from experience, I have witnessed and received some of the poorest displays of customer service and food quality. As an example of the underwhelming food service, let’s get back to our story about the caf.

As the line slowly dwindles down, you wonder why there is only one employee swiping ID cards at one of the peak hours of the night. After swiping into the caf, you set down your bag and jacket and walk into the food court where there are long lines at every station. You finally settle on one of the stations where you wait 20 minutes to get your food, but, after a long day in class, it feels like a lifetime. Following this waiting period, the wild manhunt for utensils and a cup ensues. By the time you’ve gone to every station that has utensils and cups and come up empty handed, you realize that nearly everyone else waiting around in the food court is in the same predicament as you. Finally, once you’ve waited around and received your utensils and cup, you find that all of the soda machines have run out of everything except water.

Does it seem a little peculiar and illogical that during the peak hours of service there is very little management oversight to make operations run smoother? Aramark managers, as representatives of Fordham, need to do a better job in making food options on campus more accessible and efficient. There is no reason that an after-class caf trip should be a whole ordeal and take unnecessary time out of students’ busy lives. These inefficiencies and shortcomings make getting food anywhere on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus simply dreadful.

Despite these factors, I feel it is even more disappointing that Fordham has not recognized the need for better food operations. This year, Fordham opened up a Starbucks on the first floor of Dealy Hall. While this may seem like a great addition, consider the fact that nearly every other food option on campus sells coffee. Not to mention, a partial menu of Starbucks already exists in Dagger John’s. This area in Dealy was the perfect place for Fordham to open up another option for students to buy food. By opening up another food option in Dealy Hall, a portion of the crowds that frequent places like Cosi and Urban Kitchen during peak dining hours would be drawn to Dealy due to its central location. A move to amend the problems with food operations around campus would have been very logical and well received. Instead, Fordham took a step back and opened up a Starbucks where the employees seem like they have never seen the inside of a coffee shop.

Some students around campus feel like it is the employees at the many food locations around campus who are the problem. However, I would argue that all the employees are fully capable of doing the jobs they are employed to do. The managers of these locations do not possess the skills necessary to manage people and run the operations of a restaurant. Especially in the food industry, managerial skills are crucial to the day-to-day workings of an establishment that sells food. When I go to places on campus such as Cosi, Urban Kitchen and A Crust Above, there is visibly very little organization and thought behind how orders are taken, made and given to customers. This lack of structure leads to chaos during peak hours, orders frequently being made incorrectly and long waiting periods.

Under the surface, there are definitely many contractual and logistical issues that Aramark and Fordham’s administration deal with that students do not hear about. However, Fordham must take ownership of its multitude of food issues if it wants to become the up and coming American institution that it has been making strides to be. When I walk around campus and see the stairs of the Lombardi Center being redone while of the imminent problems with food on campus remain unaddressed, I come to wonder whether Fordham’s administration lacks a pulse on matters related to student life, or merely the vision to improve them.

Joseph Scariano, GSB ’20, is an applied accounting and finance major from North Brunswick, New Jersey.