Ferris State University should put the needs of its students before the needs of the public.
I’ve been attending FSU for three years now. Over time I have watched two cafeterias on campus close and one be renovated. There are now only two dining options for students with meal plans like myself.
The new Rock Café is great. Students, faculty, and the public all enjoy it. There is a problem though. Students pay thousands of dollars to eat there and sometimes they cannot even find a place to sit or are treated rudely by non-student patrons.
I have encountered the problem of not finding an open table to sit when I go to eat meals multiple times. I don’t understand why I’m paying so much money for nowhere to sit. If the Rock cannot accommodate all of its students then it should not try to accommodate the public.
Another thing that really irritates me about the Rock is how they bring high school students in to eat. These tour groups are commonly referred to as “white- baggers” by the student population.
I understand that the school needs to attract new students, but why can’t they schedule these students to eat at the cafeteria after 1 p.m.? They commonly bring them in at 11 a.m. or noon when actual FSU students are trying to eat during the only times they have available.
It’s hard not to get irritated when you have only a few minutes to eat and every food station is backed-up and you have to wait 15 minutes just to be served. It’s also extremely frustrating when entire sections of the Rock are reserved. We pay good money to eat there and should be able to sit wherever we want.
More problems arise when the tour guides for these groups tell FSU students they have to give up their places for these high school students. It boggles my mind that these people could be that rude. I have literally seen tour guides tell students who pay thousands of dollars to eat at the Rock to get up from their table so a high school student could sit there. Needless to say, I had a few choice words with them.
One thing I am sympathetic to is that the Rock Café receives revenue from allowing the public to dine there. That’s fine. This doesn’t mean that it’s a family restaurant though. At the end of the day it is a college cafeteria and college students have their own culture and way of doing things and the public should respect that.
I’ve seen parents come in with their children before and let them run around completely unsupervised. I’ve also witnessed these people cut to the front of the line, thinking they had some sort of right to do so. Personally, I get irritated with these types of people because after a long day working on my 18 credits and going to my two jobs, the last thing I want is to be irritated by things like this.
People from the public should also understand that most college students swear and they also talk about things like sex. If you don’t want to hear this or you don’t want your child to hear these types of things then you probably shouldn’t take them to a college cafeteria because that’s what the Rock is, a college cafeteria.
I think these are serious problems that FSU students are being forced to deal with. It might be a good idea for Ferris to start being a little bit more considerate to those of us that pay for this institution to operate. n