AT A GLANCE Name: Middlebury College Dining Services Enrollment: 2,400 Meals Served: 7,000 a day Board Dining Venues: 2 full-time, 1 part-time Retail Outlets: 3 on-campus, 2 off-campus plus 1 c-store Staff: 100 FTEs Management: Matthew Biette (director), Brad Koehler (general manager-commons operations), Bo Cleveland (executive chef), Richard O'Donohue (commons chef, Proctor Hall), Christopher Laframboise (commons chef, Ross Hall), Ian Martin (commons chef, Atwater Hall/Language Tables)

The traditional role of dining services in onsite environments has been to be reliable, unobtrusive and supportive of the larger institution's mission. Nowhere has that been truer than at Middlebury College, a private liberal arts institution of higher learning located about an hour south of Burlington between Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains in Vermont's bucolic backcountry.

Consider the meal plan…or better yet, the lack of it in any meaningful sense. At Middlebury, being a resident student — which in effect describes almost everyone in the 2,400 undergraduate enrollment — means you automatically have free run of the dining halls just about all day long. If you're hungry, or just want to grab a quick beverage or snack, you go in and get it. There are no checkout lines.

Sticking to Values

“The idea is that students are here to learn, and food shouldn't be something they have to worry about,” says Matthew Biette, director of dining services for the past six years. “Universal access also eliminates any economic differences among students, so you don't have a situation where one student eats whatever he wants while another is limited by a tight budget.”

That egalitarianism is part of Middlebury's culture, which also very prominently emphasizes sustainability. The school has been at the forefront of the campus “green” movement, incorporating environmental stewardship into its mission statement and making an aggressively ambitious commitment to be carbon neutral by 2016.

As a result, Middlebury has consistently ranked among the leaders on the College Sustainability Report Card issued by the Sustainable Endowment Institute, a major barometer of “green-ness” in American academia. A major contributor to that track record has been the dining service, which received an “A” grade in the most recent report for both its local purchasing and its waste management efforts.

But commitments to sustainability and mission support are easy to make in flush times. It is hard times — when endowments shrink, budgets are put under pressure and students curtail their discretionary spending — that really test the depth of a school's and a department's commitment.

And that is a test that Middlebury Dining Services, along with the college, is determined to pass. The department, like all others at the college, has had to re-examine its budget in light of the new fiscal realities. That process has yielded a 25 percent reduction in labor (through attrition, not layoffs, Biette is quick to point out) and some trims in services. Catering has been cut back, one dining hall taken mostly off line and hours at the other two somewhat curtailed. Biette has also instituted small cost saving measures around the edges, such as eliminating juice from the evening meal, when it was sparsely consumed anyway.

A New Dining Balance

But despite the economic pressures, the commitments to support the educational mission and the college's “green” focus remain solid for now. In fact, in some cases, changes made to support the sustainability mission have also had the practical effect of producing cost savings. Case in point: trayless dining, introduced in 2007 primarily as a moral imperative to reduce the carbon footprint, has ended up saving money on food purchases.

If you are a student at Middlebury, getting a good meal may literally be the least of your worries. With campus commons dining available every day from seven in the morning to eight at night (except for a two-hour gap in the middle of the afternoon), you can walk in anytime you want, as often as you want, and take whatever you want from what is being served at the time.

It sounds comprehensive, but the all-day service one sees today on the Middlebury campus is actually a truncated version of what was offered as recently as a year ago. Instead of three dining halls open all day, only two — Ross and Proctor — now offer that service. A third, Atwater, is open only for a limited breakfast service during the week.

LIKE THE KITCHEN AT HOME, ONLY BIGGER. Students at Middlebury have the run of the dining halls almost continuously from morning to night, with no restrictions on access. The team managing this enterprise includes (below, l. to r.) General Manager Brad Koehler, Executive Chef Bo Cleveland.and Dining Director Matthew Biette. Photo: Brett Simison

In fact, full hot breakfast service is now available only at Ross Dining Hall, which also opens for dinner an hour later (5 pm) than Proctor because the light early dinner traffic didn't justify two dining venues opening at 4 pm (both, however, close at 8 pm).

The recent changes followed an extensive initiative dating back to the 1990s to convert the campus to a commons system. That initiative produced Ross Dining Hall in 2002, the first on campus with a modern exhibition station style of service. Ross was followed by Atwater, which opened to great fanfare back in the spring of 2005.

Featuring modern display cooking centered around a stone hearth oven and massive windows opening to spectacular views of the Green Mountains, it was designed to meet the latest standards in sustainable construction (for example, the stone and wood used in its frame came mainly from local sources, and it features a “green” roof planted with grass and shrubs as natural insulation).

Atwater set a new standard for commons dining at Middlebury, but the slump in the economy that began in 2008 forced a rethink in how board dining services can be offered on campus in a way that maintains the school's values while accommodating the new fiscal realities.

The solution involved taking one of the three operating dining halls off line. The logical candidate for this was Atwater, which had the smallest capacity. The other two venues were then modified to accommodate the larger crowds expected.