ANC Rejects 2010 Campus Meal Plan
The ANC Meeting
LEO’S—The Advisory Neighborhood Commission, Georgetown’s community oversight committee, announced today that it would not support Georgetown’s proposed 2010 campus meal plan. Despite heavy lobbying by the University, the ANC said it could not in good conscience support the proposal, expressing concerns about detrimental effects to the community.
The statement released today by the ANC cited dozens of examples of what it claimed were “egregious encroachments on the community,” including the university’s intention to switch to organic chicken and a controversial 20% increase in broccoli for stir-frys.
“There was just no way I or any other member could possibly vote for such a proposal,” said ANC president Mark Folger who has lived on O Street for nearly half a century and fondly remembers rejecting a Georgetown proposal in the 1960s to allow female students. “The university is simply not being reasonable. We made it explicitly clear that there could be no further expansion of the salad bar. And orange chicken? Come on. I’m not an unreasonable man, but you can only bully me so much.”
The University had announced earlier this month its intention to revamp the campus meal plan for the coming year after stumbling upon a database with over 27,000 unread dining hall surveys from the past decade. In the previously undisclosed surveys, students clamored for more options, higher quality food, and reduced noroviral loads.
Further impetus for a new meal plan came from four out of the seven working groups created by University President Jack “Hot Wheels” DeGioia. A study released in September concluded that university’s current meal plan was not sustainable in the near future and recommended drastic overhaul.
“An increase in students without an increase in nutritional standards could overwhelm University sewer systems by 2011,” the report warned, which, it pointed out, would likely have a much greater effect on the neighborhood at large.
ANC members, however, felt differently.
“We give in here and now and we lose everything we’ve worked for,” said ANC member Linda Salisbury. “Increased nutrition will only allow those rascally students to party harder, longer, and louder. We had to put our foot down. First it’s fewer preservatives and more dining locations, and the next thing you know all our houses are covered in toilet paper, there’s urine on our Porsches and then they’re stealing our priceless art and perhaps even our daughters. Has the University no decency?”
When asked to suggest possible alternatives for the meal plan, Salisbury said, “I say, put more of that norovirus in the food. My mother had a saying: a dead student is a quiet student.”
The ANC’s origins reach back to the late 19th century when concerned citizens banded together in response to the dangerous appointment of Father Patrick Healy as president, causing real estate prices to plummet and the neighborhood to fall into disrepair.
For over a century the ANC has been a formidable force in tempering the University’s goals of expansion. In 1916 the ANC rejected a Georgetown proposal to lay flowers in the Jesuit graveyard after the death of Father O’Leary, and in 1958 the commission rejected attempts to build a dog house for the first Jack the Bulldog, insisting that additional university housing would serve only to increase noise and create unbearable living conditions.
The University now has until January 27th to submit a new proposal, and an exclusively obtained copy of an early draft showed the revised meal plan would include slightly more white rice and possibly a seltzer machine on Tuesdays.
