Tucked away in Oxford, a rural town in southwestern Ohio, is one of the oldest universities in the country and one of its most accomplished public institutions. Miami University, lauded as one of the original “Public Ivies,” is celebrating its 200^th anniversary this year, and quite a lot of looking back — and peering forward — has been going on there.

AT A GLANCE Miami University, Oxford, OH: www.hdg.muohio.edu/EatingAtMiami/ No. of Students: 15,766 Residence Halls: 36 No. of Meal Plans Sold: 11,789 Meal Plan Sales: ~ $30 million Total Foodservices Sales: ~ $43 million Daily Transactions: ~21,600 Key personnel: Pete Miller, associate VP for auxiliaries; Bill Moloney, senior director for dining and auxiliaries; Nancy Heidtman, director, dining and culinary support services; Marijo Nootz, R.D., senior director-the Shriver Center.

That is true for its dining services as well as its academic departments. With traditions that go back to the days of in-room, coal-fired stoves and meat costing students a penny a pound, Miami Dining over the years was a pioneer in central production, progressive meal plans and computerized food production management.

Today, it operates a state-of-the-art culinary production center that is the envy of many other schools. Campus dining offers a wide range of brand, service and menu choices in refined retail restaurants. Its meal plan gives students a choice of traditional, all-you-care-to-eat dining or a declining balance program with refundable credit at year's end. And both are managed via a universal debit card that can pay for food at every venue on campus, including vending machines, sports concessions and the student center.

With all that choice, it's no wonder two-thirds of Miami's off campus students choose to buy meal plans, or that it boasts 75 percent student participation in them overall.

Making the decision to re-invest

The school's ability to offer this high level of retail-style sophistication while maintaining pronounced central production efficiency makes its operation one many schools can learn from. But when you get right down to it, the key to the program's success seems to be grounded in the continuity provided by strong leadership, management bench strength and a long-term vision shared by the individuals who have directed development of the program over the last two decades.

Much of the credit for that has to go to Pete Miller, Miami's associate vice president for auxiliaries. Miller came to the school as dining director in 1984 after a ten year stint as assistant director at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Foodservice on the campus was fragmented then. The meal plan was still based on assigned dining halls with buffet-style service. Most students abandoned it as soon as they could move off campus.

There were limited retail options in the Shriver student center, but they were managed and operated separately from residential dining. The on-campus Marcum conference center was also a completely separate entity.

Because Miami's strong academic programs had always given it one of the highest tuition rates among Ohio's state universities, its operating philosophy had focused on keeping meal and board rates low as an offset. At the same time, “the administration realized we needed to re-invest in the foodservices and residence halls, not only to bring them up to contemporary standards, but also to increase our efficiencies,” Miller says.

“The existing program was a good one, but there was a lot of room for improvement given the trends we saw in the future,” Miller recalls today. “Much of the equipment was antiquated and the ratio of student labor was fairly low. We knew we needed to give the students more dining choices.

“They were questioning why they had to eat only at certain times; why they needed permission to bring a guest to dinner; why they had to provide notice if they wanted a takeout meal; why the only retail food was at the Shriver Center, and why meal plans couldn't be used there.”

Building a management team

One main result at the time was a decision to consolidate responsibilities for operating the Shriver student center, the Marcum conference center and dining services under a single department of housing, dining and guest services. The department entered a period in which it spent several years closely evaluating its many dining facilities, programs and strategic needs and seeking to coordinate them.

It was a time of great change, and also a period when several young managers were hired who today make up the backbone of the department's senior management team. Miller was one of these.

So was Bill Moloney. A Miami grad with a degree in accounting, he had worked his way through high school and college as a restaurant manager on the side. After graduation, he'd gone on to work for a franchise company and then came back to Miami as a unit manager. Today he is the senior director for dining and auxiliaries, reporting to Miller.

Another was Marijo Nootz, a dietitian who had performed her internship at the University of Nebraska and had become assistant director of its student union. Looking to move closer to her family in Ohio, she applied for and landed a manager's job at Miami's Shriver Center and today serves as its senior director. Mike Mitroi, associate director for dining and culinary support services, also joined the organization in that era.