To the editors:
It isn’t necessary for me to highlight the condition of the Orleans Room for the past few weeks; as students who live and eat on campus, you already know, and as civilized people, you’d probably vomit. The conditions of the cafeteria that students are expected to eat from over the course of a four-year education at Loyola are currently far from any kind of recognizable standard.
Beyond the overcrowded dining area and the absence of food (in variety and physical presence), the most striking of these poor conditions is the sanitary situation. One need not explore the slums of Kigali to get a flavor of the third world – a whiff towards the back of the cafeteria is experience enough.
What makes this situation even worse is that this is not the service we have always received. There’s a reason Tulane students outnumbered Loyola students in the O.R. two-to-one all of last year. The O.R. used to be superior in terms of quality and service; it is now a shadow of its former self. Whether this is due to administrative problems or recent hires is not for me to say; I am not an employee of Sodexo. What I can say is my heart goes out to the employees of the O.R. who have been there since my freshman year – good, hard-working people – who are now forced to work in these substandard conditions.
None of this is to say that we as students expect Ruth’s Chris-quality food, winged armed chairs and leather-bound books along the wall—far from it. But please, Sodexo, do humanity a favor and start providing the services for which you charge students thousands of dollars per year.
Christopher Bournés
Political science senior
