By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
Last year, I took a trip to Durham to visit some high-achieving friends at Duke. In more ways than one, it’s an impressive place: straight-A students, legendary athletics, beautiful buildings — the list goes on.
But what they do best is the late-night meal.
Despite a Hogwarts-esque campus, a student population that’s seemingly allergic to both B’s and pimples and dominates over Baylor on the basketball court, I never felt any inferiority on that trip or in the following weeks. I remained, for several reasons, very grateful for my life here at Baylor.
There was one thing I couldn’t shake.
As my body sank into a wheezing air mattress in the middle of my friend’s dorm, I felt a familiar feeling for college-aged guys — the late-night stomach grumble that calls you out of bed and into the kitchen. But I commented dismissively about my hunger and lay back down.
Instinctively, I assumed everything would be long closed, as it was 1 a.m. on a weekend.
Fifteen minutes later, I was eating a restaurant-quality cheeseburger at Pitchfork, one of Duke’s 34 on-campus dining spots. Not only was the food frighteningly delicious, but the kitchen would also continue to serve students for another two hours.
This is no unusual thing at Duke. Pitchfork is open until 3 a.m. four nights a week, and it’s one of five spots on campus that consistently remain open past midnight.
It’s not improved academics, better athletics or campus beautification that I want to see Baylor compete with Duke over. It’s not even the number of dining options or the food quality that had me wishing Baylor made changes — I’d much rather stick with Baylor’s more modest options if it means avoiding Duke’s $5,000 per semester meal plans.
But more than anything I saw that weekend, the gap in dining hours was the one thing that seemed like it could and should disappear without students footing a massive bill.
As a freshman, I recall planning my weekends around dining hall hours, which, for an unlimited meal plan, seems rather limiting. Two years and one new food supplier later, Penland Hall is still the only spot that stays open past 9 p.m., and it happens only four nights a week. In that time, Baylor also closed Brooks Great Hall without meaningfully changing other facilities’ hours.
Weekends are also challenging. On Saturdays, the meal options shrink down to just Penland and a few spots in the Bill Daniel Student Center. And Sundays are equally sparse, with Penland open for about six hours and East Village open for four, while the rest of campus shuts down.
While Duke has more upperclassmen who live on campus than Baylor does (and thus focuses more on on-campus dining), the raw number of students on campus is not all that different. The demand, from this perspective, must be there.
Baylor is not short on dining spots as a whole, either. Not counting the faculty center or law school cafeteria, the university has 18 different food options, including three dining halls and six franchise restaurants across campus. But still, even with thousands of students on campus, there are times of day — especially nights and weekends — when getting something to eat is more difficult than it should be.
While it may not affect my other off-campus classmates and me, it seems only fair to give on-campus students more flexibility with their dining options. Between the hours of 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., there should always be a dining option available that students, especially those with unlimited plans, can count on — which means keeping not just restaurants, but dining halls open.
