Marist's Inhospitality Services

Loosening standards and inconsistent resource management from Marist College departments essential to meeting students' basic needs, including housing and the dining hall, have further diminished already questionable quality of life measurements. Find out what a $60K education will net you at this privation institution stressed under the COVID-semesters era.

Original art by Luke Carberry Mogan

Interim-President Dennis J. Murray and the Marist Board of Trustees have seemingly followed through with their promises from June 2020 that tuition rates would increase by zero percent, a statement released at a time when college families and communities were skeptical on whether there would even be a Fall semester amidst the ongoing pandemic.

The assurance had "result[ed] in some belt-tightening for the College", Murray acknowledged in his original email, as the pandemic's inevitable strains took the form of almost a dozen administrative assistants and an unknown amount of security staff being laid off.

Last June, the Circle cited the tuition and housing costs for an incoming 2020-2021 Marist freshman as totaling $61,810 at that time. Almost a full year later, Marist reports incoming freshman attendance costs for 2021-2022 to equal $60,130. Both of these estimates are before expenses such as textbooks and transportation are considered.

Decreasing by $1,680 in one year, where tuition inflation typically increases more rapidly than the rate of general inflation, both prices tower above the 2017-2018's tuition costs of $51,200. In two years time from 2018 to 2020, Marist's tuition has increased by over $10,000.

It would be natural to conclude that Marist students are the ones reaping the benefits in the tuition hikes through access to academic resources, bountiful nutritional options from the dining hall, and ample accommodations for the campus' sprawling dorms with new additions sprouting up or being acquired every few years. But always leave room for exceptions.

Marist's dining hall cuisine continues to be making headlines 40 years later, as a vintage student-survey conducted by the Circle from 1981 informed readers "cafeteria food turned out to be the most often mentioned 'worst' aspect." With the issue's front page headline reading "Freshmen: Friendly Atmosphere, Lousy Food", even Rossi's Deli didn't buy ad-space for that issue.

Only difference between freshman from decades' past and now is that present freshman possess social media tools to make their lived experiences sharable to others.

Marist Munchies is just one of several comedy accounts on Instagram that uses the platform to give a modern, viral spin on the "bad college food" trope. The above ultra-rare burger is one of many submissions the account has received from fellow students, usually freshman or sophomores.

"Most of the posts is food from the dining hall," Marist Munchies stated in an Instagram direct message. "Getting meals during campus pause using Grab & Go isn’t the best because it all feels rushed, like they kinda shove [stuff] in a box and then it gets [messed] up during transit."

Grab & Go is a recent addition to Sodexo's dining services that students living under quarantine orders, campus pauses, and general social distancing guidelines heavily rely upon. Using either Marist Dining's applications or Grubhub within their meal plan, students can place orders for food and pick them up in delivery locations designated by dorms.

This method is supposed to be safe and convenient, but students who order food this way are never sure of what quality of food they are going to receive. A Pandora's Styrofoam Box, if you will.

"Most people, from what I’ve heard and experienced, end up just throwing away the food that looks off and looking elsewhere for something to eat," Marist Munchies wrote. "Most just opt out of eating it and eat snacks from their room, visit upperclassmen who have kitchens, order somewhere off campus, or try a different dining option on campus."

While Marist Munchies was created with the intention of "laugh[ing] with other students about our unfortunate situations", its posts do showcase a number of health and dietary concerns. They have pizza shoved into containers beyond recognition, plastic fibers from packaging and stickers within the food, severely under and over-cooked (if cooked at all) items, and what some would find to be the most offensive from a $60,000 education : it just doesn't even attempt to look appetizing.

Food is one of the most basic needs that demands be met for simple survival. And many of these students are not asking for $60,000 meals every day, they just want something edible that they can eat. The recent social and COVID climates on the Marist campus alone are worthy of escaping anxieties via comfort food, which is disconcerting when the food included in meal plans students and their families pay for is found to be discomforting.

Bagel with wood in it

In-person dining, especially in the Murray Student Center Dining Hall, had been suspended even under the lighter campus pauses Marist issued on March 18 when undergoing the first leg of its COVID case spikes. The default feature of indoor dining has only been restored this past week, as Marist's active COVID case numbers have significantly plateaued and reached Level Green status for the first time all year.

"[You] can make reservations to dine in the [dining hall] but [you] can only go up for food once," one of the founders of Biggest Marist Dining Fans wrote in a direct message.

Another instance of "it started as a joke", juniors Talia Logerfo and Claire Carmello created their culinary comedy account their freshman year as a way for them and their friends to laugh off how much "[they] all hated the food."

"Probably started with the hair in the food and the pizza," they wrote when asked about their "first traumatic experiences" with the dining hall.

The pair reference the raw chicken many students have encountered in the dining hall, the above shown bagel with wood in it, and hot dogs on slice bread (the latter really just being a criticism of aesthetics).

The Marist Dining Hall's two biggest fans were interviewed by the Circle in November 2019 when their Instagram page started gaining traction after students began sending them pictures and stories of their dining hall meals.

Inevitably after the students found out about their account, so did the administration. Logerfo and Carmello were contacted by Marist's Associate Dean of Students Affairs Steven Sansola, and Sodexo/Marist Dining's field marketing specialist Kate Cole and general manager Colene Doughty to arrange meetings to discuss their account and supposedly work through constructive feedback that could help improve the dining hall options.

"The dining hall made us have a few meetings [with] them, I really do think they were effective but at a very slow pace," the account wrote in a direct message. "We made a list of complaints/suggestions kids around school said."

Logerfo and Carmello surveyed students on what changes they wanted to see within their dining hall. Their critiques gained credence as the dining hall listened to their suggestions, and implemented more fresh fruit and berries, gluten free options, smoothie Thursday's, and more. These additions did not come easy as the student pair noted the dining administrative personnel seemed hesitant to listen in these meetings.

"They seemed to care, but they also seemed kind of passive," they wrote in 2021. "But that could’ve just been [because] we have a hate page for them."

In one meeting, Longerfo and Carmello showed numerous examples of raw chicken that was forwarded to their account by other students who had been served it.

“[They] knew that the chicken was raw that night, but they did not know it was being served that way until after…They found out eventually the whole batch was raw, and they seemed pretty embarrassed about it, and apologized to us," Logerfo and Carmello said in 2019.

Editor's Note, 5/2/21 5:03 P.M. : These student complaints of entirely raw food being served came the same month when Marist's branch of Sodexo dining received a high inspection score from the Dutchess County Board of Health (100 for the Cabaret, 96.5 for the Dining Hall).

Doughty and Sansola explained they conducted random inspections of the cooking stations, walking around them to check on operations, and that the best way for them to be proactive is for students to report these incidences so management can trace back what employees were on duty and figure out who may need re-training.

But Logerfo and Carmello know when to say "enough is enough" and re-consider their dining options as tuition paying students.

"Claire and I haven’t been to the Dining Hall (DH) all semester, since we're juniors now," Logerfo wrote in 2021. "Last semester it was OK if you dined in, but I never had food delivered to me."

The quality of the meals began to drop off again as less attention was focused onto it, and the pair re-considered whether the meetings were worth it and whether the status quo had changed at all.

"The dining hall made us think having a few meetings was effective," Logerfo wrote. "Eventually there were healthier/better options in the DH for a while, but from what I’ve seen from freshmen, it seems to be going downhill again."

In the 2019 Circle Article, Marist's Associate Dean of Student Affairs Steven Sansola was quoted as saying: "It is unfortunate that this is happening at other schools. But this happens sometimes when the colleges do not engage quickly enough with the food provider and then it gets to the level where students may protest.”

Before moving on from checking the temperature of Marist food, I wanted to touch upon Marist's primary dining services provider: Sodexo. A French corporation that employs over 400,000 people across 80 countries, Sodexo's supply line of meals is not exclusive to colleges; they also serve government agencies, hospitals, military bases, and prisons (122 total in eight countries, none in the U.S.)

Sodexo is practically a resident of Marist College, as the Marist operation has gone through a few re-brandings over the past several years to envelop itself as a staple of Marist culture. In 2014, dining hall employees and personnel wore branded uniforms with the Sodexo logo and name very visible on all of them.

Starting in 2015 to about 2016, a name change occurred and employees started wearing Marist Dining Services gear. Since then, Marist's dining staff and services have assumed interchangeable brand names that are usually variations of Marist Eats, Marist Dining Services, Marist Dining Hall Services. Though they are all still Sodexo employees, the name-change solidified Sodexo's position as an in-house brand at Marist.

In 2014, there were also instances of uncooked chicken being served to Marist students by Sodexo cooks, with a handful of students experiencing bouts of food poisoning or sickness. Unaware of any reporting methods to administrators to solve this problem, this issue went unreported and only gossiped about between students. For the sake of transparency, this is when I attended Marist as a freshman and knew several people who suffered sickness that pointed to what they ate from the dining hall.

In the same Circle article from 2019 that quotes Logerfo and Carmello, the student newspaper highlighted examples of Sodexo health concerns from other universities. A freshman at Minnesota State University at Moorehead (MSUM) found a dead mouse in his creamed spinach. Cadets at The Citadel in South Carolina organized a hunger strike to protest rodent sightings in the dining hall, same old case of undercooked chicken, and even insects in their food.

The Guardian produced the 2020 documentary piece "Fight for your rights: the trade union for outsourced workers" about the catering and cleaning staff Sodexo employed at the St. Mary's Hospital in London. Represented by the United Voices of the World (UVW) union, the Sodexo staffers protested against missing paid wages, demanding they be paid the London Living Wage of £10.85/hour, and be taken on as full-time National Health Services (NHS) employees. The NHS agreed to their terms as a result of the strike, and over 1,200 Sodexo employees had been taken in by the agency.

While Sodexo's kitchen handlings at Marist are not as extreme as other colleges - Logerfo and Carmello did say a student showed them a picture of a dead spider in a salt-shaker - it does indicate a slippery slope of what students could easily be subjected to. Like in many of its other collegiate departments and crisis managements, Marist pins partial responsibility on the students for reporting these violations. Yet when exposed, the school supersedes actual accountability with promises that they will do better. And their short-term memory when handling these issues causes them to forget to do better.

Original graphic by The Poughkeepsie Observer

The phrase "Protect The Pack or Protect The Profit?" began circulating among student groups and organizations on social media when the Poughkeepsie Observer coined it covering Marist's initial COVID spikes from mid-March 2021.

Student worries arose when the first signs of a spike became apparent only a few short weeks into their return to campus for in-person classes, after an extended winter break with a couple weeks of pre-cautionary remote learning from home. The Fall 2020 semester maintained in-person learning for the semester, despite some hiccups of campus and dorm pauses, and kept to schedule by closing the campus on Thanksgiving weekend.

The fear in the Spring was that Marist would prolong in-person learning and student housing to ensure certainty of the purse that was student tuition payments. The school was staring down the bureaucratic barrel of New York State's COVID ordinances that called for campus closures if Active case numbers reached five-percent of the campus, or equal to 350 Marist students.

Following the Spring 2020 decision to close campus and fully commit to remote learning in the early months of the pandemic, students were notified of the option to receive prorated refunds on the credits leftover on their meal plans, housing deposits, and health service fees. The only mention of tuition refunds was that the prorated reimbursements could be used towards future courses or school loans.

In his email to Marist faculty, Interim-President Murray notified school staff of this decision to refund housing and meal credits, making a point to mention that "it represents a loss of more than $11 million to the College". Following that up, Murray states: "However, I think it’s the fair thing to do for our students, and that’s how Marist has always operated".

Currently, a class action lawsuit against Marist by 2020 graduate Melanie Fedele claiming her right to a full tuition refund has been on-going for almost a year. Filed on May 7, 2020, Fedele v. Marist College stipulates the university "has improperly retained funds for services it is not providing." The online learning options are detailed to be "subpar in practically every aspect, from the lack of facilities, materials, and access to faculty."

Speaking on behalf of other students, the legal statements claim :

"Students have been deprived of the opportunity for collaborative learning and in-person dialogue, feedback, and critique. The remote learning options are in no way the equivalent of the in-person education that Plaintiff and the putative class members contracted and paid for."

To add insult to injury, Marist Class of 2021 students have been pre-emptively given a green light by the administration for an in-person commencement ceremony, while its been almost a year since Class of 2020 alumni, who paid full tuition in lieu of a halted Spring semester, were promised an eventual graduation ceremony that still has not materialized.

The outcry from current students during the COVID spikes and woes of sinking an entire semester's tuition became concentrated after students first noticed a pop-up waiver that appeared on their iLearn student portal sites, highlighting the urgency to "Protect The Pack".

"Am really happy that that's coming up, the plan worked and people saw it," stated Marist Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Matthew McMahon in a Student Town Hall Zoom meeting on March 24.

The town hall addressing COVID featured a panel of administrators such as Interim-Communications Dean James Snyder, Interim-President Murray, and medical and COVID testing experts like Dr. Claudia Zegan, Haseeb Arroon, and Dr. Alicia Slater.

The panel was advertised as an open Q&A, but the chat settings for the Zoom meeting had been disabled and Marist's Assistant Vice President of IT Julin Sharp screened incoming questions to be asked through email and a survey.

Students were just then noticing this pledge that had been forwarded to them since February. If you had not signed it by then, a student's ability to access iLearn, the site where course assignments are submitted and class resources made available, would be disabled until they did so.

The "pledge" was a form for Marist students to agree to and digitally sign, waiving Marist and its faculty of any responsibility for students voluntarily deciding to participate in in-person courses and dorm living. The legal speak specifies Marist's trustees, directors, officers, and even their present contractors to be non-liable, especially in the case of a student contracting COVID, related illnesses or injuries, or even dying due to COVID.

The iLearn waiver describes any such actions and consequences to be negligible of the students' own volitions. The bottom of the waiver binds the signer, their families, and even children - namely "successors....heirs and assigns" - from suing Marist.

To put it candidly, this is a document one would sign before going skydiving, after accounting for all potential risks. Choosing to attend college for a semester is not something an 18-year-old should need a lawyer present for before signing off to it.

Many students in comments section agreed that they had never noticed this waiver before, some coming to the panicked realization that they had accidentally already signed it without reading.

"Protect The Pack overviews...key concepts of the COVID-19 [guidelines] to keep students safe," McMahon continued. "On iLearn, that was the new way of [informing anyone] who wasn't aware of that rule, an obligation..."

McMahon reasoned patching this legal waiver disguised as a student conduct pledge into iLearn would make students more aware of the dire circumstances they were breaking the rules of. He stated that a lack of awareness does not excuse a lack of accountability.

Yet it seems counterintuitive to want to bar students from the core component that actually makes them students participating in an educational institution : their classwork and grades.

The worst offense in this is not being vocal and transparent to the students about this legal waiver. McMahon understood that students "get a lot of emails and get sent clickbait", but failed to address the bizarreness of having to explain holding others accountable that late into the pandemic.

"Blame it on the students all you want...but it all starts at the administrative level," wrote The Girls of Lower New in an anonymous Circle editorial, responding to the iLearn waiver and stress of dealing with campus pauses. "If you keep deciding when you want to care about things, the students can too."

"Full disclosure, I was really concerned when I read that Circle article about the Conklin parties," McMahon stated right before he admitted not knowing about the partying occurring in the Conklin quarantine dorm despite delivering food and supplies to isolating students at Conklin most days out of the week.

By his own logic, lack of awareness does not excuse lack of accountability. And what are Marist students to do when they cannot submit their homework if not resort to mask-less partying and go viral for flipping a car over.

Change.org petition from March 2020

On Nov. 13, 2020, the international student population attending Marist was abruptly notified of the school's intention to triple winter-break housing costs for the students who opt to stay on campus during the winter holiday season. This news broke just 11 days prior to when the in-person portion of the semester was scheduled to close campus.

That meant international students had 11 days to figure out where they were going to stay for over three months from December to February, or pay upwards of over $3,000. The usual agreed upon rate of $100 per week for students staying through breaks had increased to $40 per day, which equals $280 per week.

If an international student had a campus job, they would pay $50 per week for this arrangement. But the pandemic and extended winter break suspended any reason for their to be additional employees on a nearly vacant campus.

At the time of this housing announcement, which disproportionately affected a student population who may already have been displaced by the pandemic, the Marist administration had not made any official announcements on when exactly the Spring semester would re-open.

This exact situation mirrored Spring 2020, as Marist administration and the Board of Trustees extended spring break for students in March to allow them more time to reach a decision on whether to close the campus due to the coronavirus. When a choice was made, international students were asked to find alternative housing options within 48 hours, even though they had paid for a full semester's worth of tuition and housing.

It was either find off-campus housing or return to your home country. Ultimately the issue was resolved, but only after the expected online petition and student outrage made the social media rounds, and Marist agreed to let the international students stay through the summer.

"We’re kind of lost in a sense that...everyone is dealing with finals right now...it’s a very uncertain situation for everyone, so imagine how it is for us, who are away from home, and maybe some students don’t have the resources to go back to their countries," said Marist International Student Association (MISA) treasurer Victoria Attala in an Instagram video from Nov. 2020, explaining the situation.

According to to Attala and MISA president Prashansa Malakar, both the international students and their own advisors at the college's International Student Services (ISS) department seemed to be the last notified of this decision.

"Sadly, a lot of these decisions come from the administration and the ISS office finds out about them around the same time that we international students do," Malakar wrote in a direct message from Nov. 2020.

Attala and Malakar made it abundantly clear that the international students are aware that these fees are to pay to keep the electricity and heat on, campus amenities open, and security on post. They did not want charity.

"It’s not like the students even have a choice...we feel the need as internationals to share what is happening...with students who are not international because we deserve the basic right of consideration," Attala explained in the video.

One student wrote in an Instagram comment in response to criticisms of Marist's "Protect The Pack" mantra in March:

"As an ex-Marist international student, this does not surprise me in the slightest, they made us pay the most money...We were never able to stay on campus during holidays which is why I ended up finding off-campus housing my sophomore year of college. I was almost homeless my spring break of freshman year because I didn't know that we were supposed to leave campus."

Fortunately, Attala and Malakar both found winter break housing through college friends, and the Marist administration had reached out before the semester ended, to organize meetings to assess each international students' needs who chooses to stay. Malakar wrote that some students had been offered the original mutually-agreed upon fee of $50 to $100 per week to stay on campus, but she was not sure of any specifics at the time.

A pattern is starting to show that these clashes with the university powers can be easily avoidable when handled with an appropriate amount of clear communication, timeliness and consideration for the subjects of these decisions. But those ingredients are never present and these situations swell up to confrontations between student groups and the administrative board.

The ordeals Malakar, from Nepal, and Attala, from Argentina, faced in the Fall were tame compared to the housing crises of this Spring semester. Dorm lockdowns were common in the Fall, but COVID case spikes were minimal. This Spring semester has just narrowly avoided the campus being shutdown, never reaching 350 Active cases in a two week timeframe, but still racking up over 650 confirmed cases in less than two months.

"I was put in Talmadge [Courts]," stated sophomore TJ Scarpa who had tested positive for COVID this past semester. "I had a perfect view, a window seeing all the kids pulling in with the van: I saw 40 to 50 [students arrive] there in my ten days at Talmadge."

In addition to Conklin, Talmadge was the other quarantine and isolation dorm students were moved to after testing positive. Rooms at Talmadge were dual occupancy, but housed up to four exposed or COVID positive students at a time.

Scarpa questioned the safety of placing four individuals with an airborne respiratory virus in close proximity to one another. The living spaces were cramped, as one roommate took up most of the kitchen space so he could do his schoolwork.

"[Like in Conklin] if there's three people [to a room] and two move out, there's no new two people until that third leaves," Scarpa mentioned about the rooming mismanagement by Marist. "I just never understand their logic."

His friend who was also quarantining in one of these dorms had an entire four-person space to himself after the other three students had left or returned home. The option to leave quarantine housing and just return home was regularly suggested and asked about.

"Marist was adamant on letting people go home," Scarpa stated. "I was asked twice a day, once when food was delivered and when security [would make rounds], asking if I could go home."

"I would get calls from my quarantine coordinator, checking in to see if you can go home. I'm not bringing this home to my family and elderly grandma. Just because you do not have the infrastructure to [handle] and house every one else."

Conklin, on the other hand, gained the reputation of a party house over night after the Circle editorial released. Conklin residents did not even know who was quarantining because they were positive and who was isolating because they were exposed, they were all intermingling. McMahon's unawareness and the quarantine housing's confusing inventories are evident as it is really unclear what information was ever really clear in the first place.

After social media activism, news articles, email campaigns, signed petitions, and protests, time and time again Marist has proven that it cannot treat its student with the decency that should be guaranteed in a large-scale social contract that involves the exchanges of tens of thousands of dollars at a time.

Victoria Attala addressing the international housing situation

An act such as signing the iLearn waiver legitimizes the notion that all this is normal when students willingly accept these bare-bone conditions correlative of attending college during a pandemic. If Fedele v. Marist College ends up not holding any legal water, it should at least stand on the moral grounds that the college - both past and present - has not met students with the dignity and respect it advertises, diverting away the resources it's so fond of.

Marist promises to keep its students fed, offer them a top-tier education, and manage to keep a roof over the heads of people traveling half the world over to attend. But they fail to serve food items that resemble food, retroactively bar them from the sole resources that allows them the means to be a student, and forget to communicate when exactly a roof won't be over their head.

The odd theme continuing to rear its head around the corner in recent events is the fact that Marist is never sure of who it should be protecting their students from.

When students are seeking protection from other students, it is apparently "on them" to be their own advocates. When a microscopic invader the likes of the coronavirus makes its way through dormitories, the students hold their breath for administrative leadership to make a call.

But when the basic demands of ordering a sandwich, turning in homework, or just wanting to be the first to know whether you have shelter or not cannot efficiently be met, that's when students should start asking whether administrators truly value the university and the responsibilities they hold over it, or just the idea of a university.