It's official - University professors are interested in having an on-Grounds faculty dining facility in which they can enjoy lunch with one another, University guests and students.
Faculty Senate members recently learned the results of a survey asking faculty about potential plans for an additional University dining facility. More than 70 percent of the 250 faculty members who responded said they would use such a facility, and more than 90 percent said they would prefer the service to be on Grounds.
Almost 80 percent of the respondents said they normally take visitors off-Grounds for lunch, and 36 percent said they eat off-Grounds themselves.
Darden School students Rodney Hicks and Scott Potter are heading an initiative to create an on-Grounds dining facility for faculty and issued the survey in late February. Responses were due March 9.
The survey was designed to gauge faculty interest in a new faculty dining facility, and to find out what elements were considered most important in such a facility.
Faculty members' overwhelming support for an on-Grounds dining facility "absolutely squares with the information we have from three years ago" when the Garden Room was proposed in 1997, former Faculty Senate Chairman David T. Gies said.
The Garden Room, which was located in Hotel E on the West Range, functioned as a full-service restaurant that served lunches to students, faculty, administrators and their guests, with the idea of fostering a stronger intellectual community at the University. It closed before the fall 2000 semester because it did not receive enough patronage.
According to Faculty Senate Chairwoman Patricia H. Werhane, Hotel E is not well-suited to be a faculty dining room because it is small and not configured well for a restaurant inside.
The proposed Student Center and the Digital Village, which will integrate technology for humanities and social sciences, are potential locations for a new dining room, Werhane said.
Although most of the survey responses confirmed prior expectations of the Faculty Senate and Darden students, some ideas were unanticipated.
"The thing that stands out to me the most is how many faculty members wanted a vegetarian menu," Hicks said.
Werhane said she was surprised that some faculty stated they would not be willing to pay for a faculty dining room because they felt the University should subsidize it.
Although schools such as Harvard, Georgetown, Stanford and the University of Chicago subsidize faculty dining, Werhane said she believes the University should not take money out of its operating budget to finance a dining room.
More important concerns, such as construction and employee salaries, are still high on the University's priority list, she said.
Hopefully, alumni will see this as a "giving opportunity" and will contribute to a faculty dining room, she added.
The effort to develop a faculty dining room is part of the Darden School's volunteer organization called Opportunity Consultants, Inc. It is staffed by first- and second-year Darden students.
For future development, the logistics of the dining room project will have to be accepted by Opportunity Consultants, Inc. next year, a decision that the group will make at the beginning of the Fall 2001 semester.
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