RHA survey shows little support for trayless dining
Opposition numbers dropped but remain the majority.
Published Dec. 8, 2009
A survey gauging student interest of trayless dining and other campus issues showed a majority of students oppose trayless dining.
The survey, sponsored in part by the Residence Halls Association, showed 65.4 percent of the students who responded oppose trayless dining and 34.6 percent support it.
“The way I’m leaning toward is not doing it yet,” RHA President Rachael Feuerborn said about trayless dining.
Feuerborn said RHA is considering doing a few more trayless challenges next semester. Last year, the amount of people who opposed trayless dining was around 75 percent, as compared with around 65 percent from this year.
“It’s really up to me at this point, because we’ve done the survey, and we have the results from trayless,” Feuerborn said. “So, the battle now is weighing the 35 that do support trayless and 65 that don’t. I will be meeting with CDS to discuss this.”
Feuerborn said most students might not weigh the inconvenience of trayless dining correctly because of the inherent inconveniences with it.
“I don’t really care about trayless personally,” Feuerborn said. “But I feel that if I talked with someone who was against, I could persuade them to think differently. Most people, I think, are stuck on the inconvenience, rather than on the environmental benefits provided by trayless.”
The survey also asked whether students would be interested in paying more money individually to receive a higher quality cable service — one that included HD content and premium movie channels.
A majority of the students who responded, 81.6 percent, would not prefer to pay any more money for premium content. Of the students who voted in favor of paying more money for premium programming, 16.9 percent were willing to pay up to $50, 1.5 percent were willing to pay anywhere from $50 to $100 and 0.67 percent were wiling to pay more than $100.
“We had a meeting with the technology supervisor, the faculty supervisor and the guy that runs the show,” RHA MUTV/Channel 22 liaison Roman Shmulevich said. “What happened was that we were shooting around ideas. Some students proposed paying a higher premium to get a box installed into their dorm, or wherever they lived on campus, that would provide digital cable, like what you can get at home.”
The committee is open to discussing the changes in the future, Shmulevich said.
“I think it will get brought up again," Shmulevich said. “Personally, as MUTV chairman, I want to see some sort of an option to students who want better TV. I want to see options such as HBO or Starz.”