Boston is losing a major landmark that has stood for 115 years.
Matthews Arena opened two years before Fenway Park and 18 years before the old Boston Garden.
“Every time you step on this ice, walk in this building, it’s a privilege,” said Vinny Borgesi, captain of the men’s hockey team at Northeastern University. “There’s so much history behind it.”
Originally the Boston Arena, the building opened in 1910, quickly becoming the spot for high school and college hockey.
“I’ve been in and out of that building for 60 years or so, and that’s what made it special on Monday,” said Joe Bertagna, the former Hockey East commissioner who grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts.
He and others college legends took part in a final skate Monday. Bertagna recalled playing at an exhibition game against Czechoslovakia at the arena while skating for Harvard University.
“I also lost my last high school game in double overtime to Melrose High, one of our rivals,” he said.
The Celtics and Bruins started playing in building, and it attracted countless politicians and entertainers, as well.
Northeastern has owned the aging arena since 1980 and considered whether it should be renovated or replaced.
“There’s some nostalgia. There’s some sadness,” said Jim Madigan, the school’s athletic director. “But at the same time, we can’t get in the way of progress, and so you look to what the future will bring.”
A state-of-the art venue is now set to replace the old one. It won’t open until 2028, requiring the school’s teams to play all their games on the road for two years.
“Yeah, it’s a little bit of difficulty, but I also think that it’s something we can rally around, a little bit of an underdog mentality,” said Dylan Hryckowian, an assistant captain with the men’s hockey team.
The last game will be Saturday night, when Northeastern’s men’s hockey team takes on rival Boston University.
Northeastern says demolition will get underway this winter.
Two attorneys representing Duhamie withdrew from the case in January, court documents show. A public defender who replaced them could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.
Jason Duhaime
Northeastern University
Duhaime worked as the university’s new technology manager and director of the Immersive Media Lab. In September 2022, he called the university police to say he’d collected several packages from a mail area, including two Pelican hard plastic cases, and that when he opened one of the cases, it exploded and sharp objects flew out and injured his arms.
Duhaime’s 911 call sparked a major response from law enforcement, who evacuated the area and called in the bomb squad.
“Throughout the course of our investigation, we believe he repeatedly lied to us about what happened inside the lab, faked his injuries and wrote a rambling letter directed at the lab — threatening more violence,” FBI Boston Special Agent in Charge Joseph Bonavolonta said at a 2022 news conference.
He showed police the letter he said he found inside the case, which claimed the lab was trying to get people to live inside a virtual reality world and was secretly working with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the U.S. government.
“In the case you got today we could have planted explosives but not this time!!!” the note read, court documents show. “Take notice!!! You have 2 months to take operations down or else!!!!!”
But Duhaime’s story quickly unraveled, according to the FBI. They didn’t find anything in the cases and noted the letter appeared to be in pristine condition. The FBI said Duhaime had superficial injuries to his arms, but no damage to his shirt sleeves. And when agents searched Duhaime’s computer, they found a copy of the letter in a backup folder that he’d written a few hours before calling 911.
“Bomb hoaxes like the one the defendant fabricated here have real life consequences. Communities are put in fear, law enforcement personnel are diverted from other important duties and there are significant financial repercussions,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy said in a statement. “As we experience a wave of bomb hoaxes in schools, houses of worship and other gathering places, we will work closely with our local, state and federal partners to hold accountable anyone who tries to inject fear and distress into our community.”
Northeastern, a private university, has more than 18,000 undergraduate students and 22,000 graduate students.
On Tuesday, curiosity finally got the best of me. How potent could Panera’s Charged Lemonades really be? Within minutes of my first sip of the hyper-caffeinated drink in its strawberry-lemon-mint flavor, I understood why memes have likened it to an illicit drug. My vision sharpened; sweat slicked my palms.
Laced with more caffeine than a typical energy drink, Panera’s Charged Lemonade has been implicated in two wrongful-death lawsuits since it was introduced in 2022. Though both customers who died had health issues that made them sensitive to caffeine, a third lawsuit this month alleges that the lemonade gave an otherwise healthy 27-year-old lasting heart problems. Following the second death, Panera denied that the drink was the cause, but in light of the lawsuits it has added warnings about the drink, reduced its caffeine content, and removed the option for customers to serve themselves.
All the attention on Panera’s Charged Lemonade has resurfaced an age-old question: How much caffeine is too much? You won’t find a simple answer anywhere. Caffeine consumption is widely considered to be beneficial because it mostly is—boosting alertness, productivity, and even mood. But there is a point when guzzling caffeine tips over into uncomfortable, possibly unhealthy territory. The problem is that defining this point in discrete terms is virtually impossible. In the era of extreme caffeine, this is a dangerous way to live.
Most people don’t have to worry about dying after drinking Charged Lemonade. The effects, though uncomfortable, usually seem to be minor. After drinking half of mine, I was so wired that I couldn’t make sense of the thoughts ricocheting around my brain for the next few hours. Caffeine routinely leads to jitteriness, nervousness, sweating, insomnia, and rapid heartbeat. If mild, such symptoms can be well worth the benefits.
But consuming too much caffeine can have serious health impacts. High doses—more than 1,000 milligrams a day—can result in a state of intoxication known as caffeinism. The symptoms can be severe: People can “develop seizures and life-threatening irregularities of the heartbeat,” and some die, David Juurlink, a toxicology professor at the University of Toronto who also works at the Ontario Poison Centre, told me. “It’s one of the dirty little secrets, I’m afraid, of caffeine.” Juurlink said he occasionally gets calls about people, typically high-school or college students, who have ingested multiple caffeine pills on a dare or in a suicide attempt.
You’re unlikely to ingest that much caffeine from beverages alone, yet the increasing availability of highly caffeinated products makes it more of a possibility than ever before. Besides Panera’s Charged Lemonade, dozens of energy drinks contain similar amounts of caffeine, and some come in candy-inspired flavors such as Bubblicious and Sour Patch Kids. Less potent but highly snackable products include caffeinated coffee cubes, energy chews, marshmallows, mints, ice pops, and even vapes. Consumed quickly and in rapid succession, these foods can lead to potentially toxic caffeine intake “because your body hasn’t had time to tell you to stop,” Jennifer Temple, a professor at the University of Buffalo who studies caffeine use, told me.
More than ever, we need a way to track our caffeine consumption, but we don’t seem to have any good options. In all of the lawsuits against Panera, the basic argument is this: Had the company more adequately warned customers of the drink’s caffeine content, perhaps no one would have been hurt. But most of us just aren’t used to thinking about caffeine in numerical terms the way we do with calories and alcohol by volume (ABV). Caffeine intake is generally something that’s not measured but experienced: I know, for example, that a double espresso from the office coffee machine will give me the shakes. But even though I knew how much caffeine is in a Charged Lemonade, I had no idea how much of it I could drink before having the same reaction.
The FDA does have a recommended daily caffeine limit of 400 milligrams, the equivalent of about four or five cups of coffee. “Based on the relevant science and information available,” a spokesperson told me, consuming that much each day “does not raise safety concerns” for most adults, except for people who are pregnant or nursing, or have concerns related to their health conditions or the medication they take. The agency, however, doesn’t require food labels to note caffeine content, though some companies include that information voluntarily.
But the numbers are helpful only up to a point. The FDA’s daily recommendation is a “rough guideline” that can’t be used as a universal standard, because “it’s not safe for everybody,” Temple said. For one person, 237 milligrams could mean a trip to the hospital; for another, that would just be breakfast. The effect of a given caffeine dose “varies tremendously from person to person based upon their historical pattern of use and also their genetics,” Juurlink told me.
Although people generally aren’t aware of the amounts of caffeine they consume, they tend to develop a good sense of how much they can handle, Temple said. But usually, this knowledge is product-specific; when trying a new caffeine product, the effect can be hard to predict. Part of the problem is that the amount of caffeine in products varies dramatically, even among drinks that may seem similar: A 12-ounce Americano from McDonald’s contains 71 milligrams of caffeine, but the same drink at Starbucks contains 150 milligrams. The caffeine in popular energy drinks ranges from 75 milligrams (Ocean Spray Cran-Energy) to 316 milligrams (Redline Xtreme), according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Contrast this with alcohol, which tends to be served in conventional units regardless of brand: a can of beer, a glass of wine, or a shot of liquor, all of which have roughly the same ability to intoxicate. Having a standard unit to gauge consumption isn’t foolproof—consuming too much alcohol is still far too easy—but it is nevertheless helpful for thinking about how much you’re ingesting, as well as the differences between beverages. Without such a metric for caffeine, consuming new beverages takes on a daredevil quality. Sipping the Charged Lemonade felt like venturing into the Wild West of caffeine.
The reason we aren’t good at thinking about caffeine is that historically, we’ve never really had to think that hard about it. Sure, one too many espressos might have occasionally put someone over the edge, but caffeine was consumed and sold in amounts that didn’t require as much thought or caution. “A generation ago, you didn’t have all these energy drinks,” so people didn’t grow up learning about safe caffeine consumption the way they may have done for alcohol, Darin Detwiler, an food-policy expert at Northeastern University, told me.
Compounding the concern is the fact that energy drinks are popular with kids, who are more susceptible to caffeine’s effects because they’re smaller. Kids tend to drink even more when drinks are labeled as highly caffeinated, Temple said, and the fact that they contain huge amounts of sugar to mask the bitter taste of caffeine adds to their appeal. Last year, a child reportedly went into cardiac arrest after drinking a can of Prime Energy—prompting Senator Chuck Schumer to call on the FDA to investigate its “eye-popping caffeine content.”
Nothing else in our daily diet is quite like caffeine. Certainly people swear by it, and its benefits are clear: Research shows that it can improve cognitive performance, speed up reaction time, and boost logical reasoning, and it may even reduce the risk of Parkinson’s, diabetes, liver disease, and cancer. But for a substance so ubiquitous that it’s called the most widely used drug in the world, our grasp of how to maximize its benefits is feeble at best. Even the most seasoned coffee drinkers sometimes unintentionally get too wired; as new, more highly caffeinated products become available, instances of caffeine drinkers overdoing it will probably become more common. Perhaps the best we can do is learn how much of each drink we can handle, one super-charged sip at a time.
Since the pandemic’s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more mid-year surges like the one that turned Hot Vax Summer on its head. Eventually, or so the hope went, SARS-CoV-2 would adhere to the same calendar that many other airway pathogens stick to, at least in temperate parts of the globe: a heavy winter peak, then a summer on sabbatical.
But three and a half years into the outbreak, the coronavirus is still stubbornly refusing to take the warmest months off. Somepublic-health experts are now worried that, after a relatively quiet stretch, the virus is kick-starting yet another summer wave. In the southern and northeastern United States, concentrations of the coronavirus in wastewater have been slowly ticking up for several weeks, with the Midwest and West now following suit; test-positivity rates, emergency-department diagnoses of COVID-19, and COVID hospitalizations are also on the rise. The absolute numbers are still small, and they may stay that way. But these are the clear and early signs of a brewing mid-year wave, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University—which would make this the fourth summer in a row with a distinct coronavirus bump.
Even this far into the pandemic, though, no one can say for certain whether summer waves are a permanent COVID fixture—or if the virus exhibits a predictable seasonal pattern at all. No law of nature dictates that winters must come with respiratory illness, or that summers will not. “We just don’t know very much about what drives the cyclical patterns of respiratory infections,” says Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University. Which means there’s still no part of the year when this virus is guaranteed to cut us any slack.
That many pathogens do wax and wane with the seasons is indisputable. In temperate parts of the world, airborne bugs get a boost in winter, only to be stifled in the heat; polio and other feces-borne pathogens, meanwhile, often rise in summer, along with gonorrhea and some other STIs. But noticing these trends is one thing; truly understanding the triggers is another.
Some diseases lend themselves a bit more easily to explanation: Near the equator, waves of mosquito-borne illness, such as Zika and Chikungunya, tend to be tied to the weather-dependent life cycles of the insects that carry them; in temperate parts of the world, rates of Lyme disease track with the summertime activity of ticks. Flu, too, has pretty strong data to back its preference for wintry months. The virus—which is sheathed in a fragile, fatty layer called an envelope and travels airborne via moist drops—spreads best when it’s cool and dry, conditions that may help keep infectious particles intact and spittle aloft.
The coronavirus has enough similarities to flu that most experts expect that it will continue to spread in winter too. Both viruses are housed in a sensitive skin; both prefer to move by aerosol. Both are also relatively speedy evolvers that don’t tend to generate long-lasting immunity against infection—factors conducive to repeat waves that hit populations at a fairly stable clip. For those reasons, Anice Lowen, a virologist at Emory University, anticipates that SARS-CoV-2 will continue to show “a clear wintertime seasonality in temperate regions of the world.” Winter is also a time when our bodies can be more susceptible to respiratory bugs: Cold, dry air can interfere with the movement of mucus that shuttles microbes out of the nose and throat; aridity can also make the cells that line those passageways shrivel and die; certain immune defenses might get a bit sleepier, with vitamin D in shorter supply.
None of that precludes SARS-CoV-2 spread in the heat, even if experts aren’t sure why the virus so easily drives summer waves. Plenty of other microbes manage it: enteroviruses, polio, and more. Even rhinoviruses and adenoviruses, two of the most frequent causes of colds, tend to spread year-round, sometimes showing up in force during the year’s hottest months. (Many scientists presume that has something to do with these viruses’ relatively hardy outer layer, but the reason is undoubtedly more complex than that.) An oft-touted explanation for COVID’s summer waves is that people in certain parts of the country retreat indoors to beat the heat. But that argument alone “is weak,” Lowen told me. In industrialized nations, people spend more than 90 percent of their time indoors.
That said, an accumulation of many small influences can together create a seasonal tipping point. Summer is a particularly popular time for travel, often to big gatherings. Many months out from winter and its numerous infections and vaccinations, population immunity might also be at a relative low at this time of year, Rivers said. Plus, for all its similarities to the flu, SARS-CoV-2 is its own beast: It has so far affected people more chronically and more severely, and has generated population-sweeping variants at a far faster pace. Those dynamics can all affect when waves manifest.
And although certain bodily defenses do dip in the cold, data don’t support the idea that immunity is unilaterally stronger in the summer. Micaela Martinez, the director of environmental health at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, in New York, told me the situation is far more complicated than that. For years, she and other researchers have been gatheringevidence that suggests that our bodies have distinctly seasonal immunological profiles—with some defensive molecules spiking in the summer and another set in winter. The consequences of those shifts aren’t yet apparent. But some of them could help explain when the coronavirus spreads. By the same token, winter is not a time of disease-ridden doom. Xaquin Castro Dopico, an immunologist at the Karolinska Institute, in Sweden, has found that immune systems in the Northern Hemisphere might be more inflammation-prone in the winter—which, yes, could make certain bouts of illness more severe but could also improve responses to certain vaccinations.
All of those explanations could apply to COVID’s summer swings—or perhaps none does. “Everybody always wants to have a very simple seasonal answer,” Martinez told me. But one may simply not exist. Even the reasons for the seasonality of polio, a staunch summertime disease prior to its elimination in the U.S., have been “an open question” for many decades, Martinez told me.
Rivers is hopeful that the coronavirus’s permanent patterns may already be starting to peek through: a wintry heyday, and a smaller maybe-summer hump. “We’re in year four, and we’re seeing the same thing year over year,” she told me. But some experts worry that discussions of COVID-19 seasonality are premature. SARS-CoV-2 is still so fresh to the human population that its patterns could be far from their final form. At an extreme, the patterns researchers observed during the first few years of the pandemic may not prelude the future much at all, because they encapsulate so much change: the initial lack and rapid acquisition of immunity, the virus’s evolution, the ebb and flow of masks, and more. Amid that mishmash of countervailing influences, says Brandon Ogbunu, an infectious-disease modeler at Yale, “you’re going to get some counterintuitive dynamics” that won’t necessarily last long term.
With so much of the world now infected, vaccinated, or both, and COVID mitigations almost entirely gone, the global situation is less in flux now. The virus itself, although still clearly changing at a blistering pace, has not pulled off an Omicron-caliber jump in evolution for more than a year and a half. But no one can yet promise predictability. The cadence of vaccination isn’t yet settled; Scarpino, of Northeastern University, also isn’t ready to dismiss the idea of a viral evolution surprise. Maybe summer waves, to the extent that they’re happening, are a sign that SARS-CoV-2 will remain a microbe for all seasons. Or maybe they’re part of the pandemic’s death rattle—noise in a system that hasn’t yet quieted down.
Eric Enriquez is a determined student. But some days, his mental-health challenges make it difficult for him to participate in class.
“There are some days for me, personally, where I’ve struggled with mental health and it’s hard to get out of bed,” said the junior psychological-sciences major at the University of California at Irvine. “My anxiety is so bad.”
When he’s feeling overwhelmed, he appreciates instructors who are flexible with attendance and assignments, or who provide remote-learning options.
Enriquez is one of many students who believe that colleges should scale up such accommodations for academic-related distress.
Across higher ed, there’s a growing recognition of the connection between students’ well-being and their success in the classroom. “Mental health affects how students perform academically, and the stress of academics, and certainly disappointments academically, affect students’ mental health,” said Sarah Lipson, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.
Some colleges and faculty members are creating or considering new policies to support students when they need a day to tend to their mental health. But providing the kinds of academic accommodations that many students are calling for –– such as reforms to extension and attendance guidelines –– requires instructors to shoulder new responsibilities and change old habits and standards that some of them value.
Lipson said she’s happy to see that colleges and professors are thinking about ways to make academics more accommodating to those experiencing mental-health challenges, but landing on the right solution is complicated. She recommended that colleges form their plans with student feedback.
“There’s going to be different solutions for different institutions,” Lipson said.
‘I Was Worrying the Entire Day’
Last summer, Northeastern University started a new program, in response to student advocacy, that gives students two excused absences per semester for any reason. But some students say the program doesn’t go far enough.
The idea for the program, called Wellness Days, came from the campus chapter of Active Minds, a mental-health awareness group. “The importance of a wellness day is if you’re having a mental-health crisis, you should probably be taking the time to come back from that,” said Jack Ognibene, a junior and psychology major who’s vice president of the group. “It’s a similar thing to if you are sick.”
Ed Gavaghan, a spokesperson for Northeastern, wrote in an email that student feedback in a recent university survey was “overwhelmingly positive.”
While Ognibene is pleased that Northeastern officials have embraced the program, he said that Active Minds had to make compromises on its design. The group conducted its own student survey about wellness days, and one common issue students brought up was a lack of accompanying accommodations, according to Ognibene.
“There isn’t much of a difference between taking a wellness day and skipping class,” Ognibene said. “All your assignments are still due on the same day, so you don’t really have the time to rest. You also have to play catch-up because you’re missing class, and professors aren’t really providing students with the notes from class that day.”
“Thinking about all the assignments I would miss started getting me really nervous,” Umansky-Castro said in an interview. “I was worrying the entire day.”
Ognibene and Umansky-Castro said some instructors at Northeastern provide accommodations for students taking a wellness day, but others don’t.
But Ognibene said Active Minds pushed hard for students to be able to choose their days off.
“You can’t really choose a day to have a mental-health crisis,” Ognibene said.
He said Active Minds would ask university officials to consider requiring professors to offer deadline extensions and to send copies of class notes when students take a wellness day, so all students have access to the same accommodations, regardless of their instructor.
Traditional grading … focuses on sorting and ranking students. This type of approach tends to both produce enormous amounts of stress and anxiety for students.
Weighing Accommodations
At Rice University, students have advocated for a rule that would require faculty members to spell out a mental-health-accommodation policy in their course syllabi. The change would provide clarity and ensure that students in the same class received the same flexibility, said Alison Qiu, a computer-science major and student-government leader at Rice.
Faculty, however, worry that the measure would force them to make decisions they don’t feel qualified to make.
Last fall, Qiu helped author a student-government resolution recommending a mandatory-accommodation policy, as well as two other additions to the syllabi: a mental-health statement and a list of campus resources. Those two measures were endorsed by Rice’s Faculty Senate, but the accommodation policy was omitted.
An editorial in The Rice Thresher, Rice’s student newspaper, criticized the Faculty Senate’s decision and argued that explicit policies would “reduce the stigma around students asking for accommodations.”
Qiu said she believes including policies in the syllabus would hold instructors accountable. Lipson agrees.
“There’s also a lot of evidence that if a policy isn’t made explicit to students –– like how to request an extension or what the protocols are for accommodations –– there’s systematically certain students who do not feel comfortable asking those questions,” Lipson said.
Alexandra Kieffer, an associate professor of musicology and speaker of Rice’s Faculty Senate, said faculty care about their students’ mental health. But they’re concerned, Kieffer said, that requiring mental-health-accommodation policies in syllabi would put instructors in a position where they’d need to make their own assessments about students’ mental health.
“That would have required the instructor of a course to essentially make a determination in a particular case as to whether or not the student met some kind of criteria for the mental-health accommodation, as opposed to some kind of other blanket attendance policy or extension policy,” Kieffer said in an interview.
Kieffer wrote in a follow-up email that if students experience mental-health challenges, the Faculty Senate encourages them to seek resources at Rice’s counseling center and to request formal academic accommodations through the disability-resource center.
Qiu said she’ll continue to advocate for accommodation policies. “My goal is to continue to communicate with the Faculty Senate about either passing the third requirement or modifying it in a way that makes the most sense for both faculty and students,” Qiu said.
Lipson said that although most instructors aren’t trained mental-health professionals, they have a responsibility to understand campus protocols and resources and how they can best support students.
The University of California at Irvine hired someone last year to help faculty do just that.
‘Flexibility With Guardrails’
Called a pedagogical wellness specialist, the UC-Irvine position involves training instructors to incorporate wellness into their classroom policies and procedures. Theresa Duong, who was hired for the role, said her responsibilities include creating workshops, consulting with professors, and doing research.
“My job involves supporting faculty wellness through pedagogy, but also supporting students’ wellness through the practice of pedagogy,” Duong said. “So that means training the faculty to think about wellness in their courses and to integrate well-being strategies into their course design.”
Duong said she encourages instructors to apply a mind-set she calls “flexibility with guardrails.” Duong created a digital guide that includes advice on rethinking high-stakes exams, assessing workloads, clarifying deadlines, and providing assignment choices, among other things.
During her workshops, Duong has instructors brainstorm how their class could be a barrier or facilitator to their students’ wellness and then create an action plan.
Angela Jenks, an associate professor of teaching in anthropology at UC-Irvine and the vice associate dean of faculty development and diversity in the School of Social Sciences, works with Duong to help professors revamp their courses. In her own classes, Jenks said she has created “menus” that allow students to choose assignments, with a reduced emphasis on traditional-grading practices.
“By traditional grading, I think about an approach to grading that really focuses on sorting and ranking students,” Jenks said. “This type of approach tends to both produce enormous amounts of stress and anxiety for students.”
Instead of high-stakes assignments that receive letter grades, Jenks focuses on feedback, self-reflection, and opportunities to resubmit. “In my everyday job,” Jenks said, “nobody grades me.”
A picture of Melanie Edwards shows her with her hair pulled back and wearing a black polo shirt, her uniform as a dining-facilities supervisor at the College of William & Mary. Zoom out from Edwards and she is surrounded by 119 other portraits of workers on a flier — the college’s recently unionized dining staff.
They range from student workers to full-time employees, from cooks to servers, some of whom, like Edwards, have been working on campus for two or three decades. Some are dressed in the college’s signature hunter green or white bib aprons; others wear black baseball caps or stout chef skull hats. Some are smiling, like Edwards. Others are pictured with a straight face. One worker faces the camera with his nose upturned and a frown.
On the flier, there’s a message in green letters: “We want our voices to be heard.”
William & Mary’s dining staff members unionized for the first time in the hopes of raising their wages, adding pensions, and making health insurance more affordable. They’re also calling for changes to ease persistent worker shortages. Edwards said the conditions she and her colleagues faced during the pandemic have made them feel disrespected by Sodexo, the dining service contracted by William & Mary since 2014.
“We’re understaffed, underpaid, overworked. It’s a lot to endure,” Edwards said. “It just feels like my work performance doesn’t match my wage.”
Unite Here Local 23
A flier promotes a new union for dining-hall workers at William & Mary.
With union drives this year also at Pitzer College and Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, and fights for better contracts elsewhere, campus dining staffs across the country are seizing the opportunity in a tight hiring market to pressure colleges and contractors for better working conditions. Last week at Pomona College, dining workers went on strike to demand that the institution increase their pay. At Pomona and elsewhere, student activists are throwing support behind them.
Colleges have struggled mightily to staff their dining halls over the past two years, leading to complaints from students about subpar service and widely mocked calls for faculty members to volunteer for dining shifts. In recent months, the pinch has gotten even worse. Forty-two percent of college leaders surveyed recently by The Chronicle said hiring dining-service workers in July, August, and September was a serious problem, compared with the rest of 2022.
Higher ed has long relied on low-paid dining workers, many of whom are people of color, to help keep campuses running. But those workers have picked an advantageous moment to force their institutions to reckon with the principles many of them espouse: among them, fairness and a commitment to the social good.
When successful, such efforts could deliver drastic improvements to workers’ lives — and send a message to other colleges. As one union leader put it, “Nobody should have a poverty-level job in higher education.”
The Tipping Point
Throughout the last decade, Luis Navarro has watched two generations in his family fight for better union contracts at Northeastern University’s dining services.
Navarro’s mother, aunt, and grandmother, all employees with Northeastern dining, have been organizing since 2012, when their staff joined the Unite Here Local 26 union. He remembers going to his aunt’s house as a teenager and listening in on union meetings.
Navarro, now a 25-year-old barista at Northeastern, was brought on during a time when college dining staffs were stretched thin across the country. Suddenly, the family conversations he had overheard about poor working conditions — the burnout, the unlivable wages — became his reality.
Navarro was not only responsible for his hired role as a barista but was also asked to work as a “floater,” he said — a sort of jack-of-all-trades employee who could assist the dining staff wherever they were short-handed.
“I was being pulled back and forth,” Navarro said.
Those understaffed conditions led many employees to feel overworked and disrespected, said Carlos Aramayo, president of Unite Here Local 26. Throughout the pandemic, when a worker would call in sick or miss work, Aramayo said, managers “were not replacing or not even really making an effort, frankly, to replace those folks who had called out.”
“Folks weren’t able to take breaks to go to the bathroom,” Aramayo said. “It was really an insane situation.”
Unite Here Local 26
Dining-hall workers rally at Northeastern U.
But even before the pandemic, the Northeastern dining workers had grown increasingly frustrated with their contractor, Chartwells Higher Education Dining Services. For many, workweeks were capped at 37.5 hours. Health insurance wasn’t affordable, and their hourly pay was nearly $10 short of what dining staff were making at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Some employees were clinging to two jobs.
“A full-time job is 40 hours a week; everybody knows that,” Aramayo said. “Not only does that mean you make less money, but a lot of folks saw that as a real respect issue and sort of nickel-and-diming.”
Navarro has taken up the fight for change in his first year on the job. For Edwards, on the other hand, change has been a long time coming.
During her 20 years at William & Mary, she has been saving up to buy her own place and move out of her parents’ home. On top of her dining job, she balances two other part-time positions.
Then in late 2020, Edwards and the rest of the William & Mary dining staff were furloughed for two months without pay. To sustain them through the holiday months, Sodexo, which employs dining workers at more than 850 colleges across the U.S. and Canada, gave each of the workers $150 toward health insurance, Edwards said.
But it wasn’t enough. She and other workers scrambled to file for unemployment. Edwards resorted to opening up credit cards, which she is now trying to pay off.
That experience was the tipping point for Edwards and her colleagues. “The pandemic really spoke volumes” to her, she said. She questioned what her employer was doing to help, and concluded “they weren’t doing anything.”
William & Mary’s dining staff first tried to unionize in 2013, and the momentum fizzled out. But this time felt different, Edwards said. Support swelled to include over 120 dining workers, with Unite Here Local 23 as their representative.
Edwards said she currently makes just above the minimum wage of $15.50. Negotiating for a pension, she said, is especially important to her and coworkers who have also dedicated years of their lives to the institution.
Edwards enjoys her work. That’s why she’s stuck it out for so long.
“I like what I do,” Edwards said, “and I also love the children. I love the students.”
But that isn’t enough for her to continue settling for low wages and no pension.
“I’ve been here 20 years,” Edwards said. “So just the thought of me walking away and leaving with nothing. It doesn’t sit well with me.”
A Fairer Contract
Although many campus workers have joined unions and renegotiated contracts this year, unionization efforts were picking up before the pandemic.
In a 2020 report on union activities in higher education, researchers found that there had been “remarkable” growth in organizing efforts among faculty and students. Between 2013 and 2019, 118 new faculty unions formed — 65 of them at private colleges, an 81.3-percent increase since 2012. Graduate students formed 16 new unions in that time period.
As more such efforts have emerged in higher education over the last decade, colleges and contractors have been forced to pay attention. And with the demand for workers still at a high, they could have the upper hand in negotiations, Scott Schneider, a Texas-based lawyer who works with colleges, said. If contractors refuse employee demands, they risk workers’ going on strike and participating in walkouts.
“At this point, given where we are in the economy, that threat of a potential strike or walkout creates more leverage,” Schneider said. “We’re sort of at that point. We’ve been at that point now for probably a couple of years.”
William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, agrees that the pressure to meet employee demands is mounting. “There is certainly a much stronger pressure on wage demands and benefits that institutions and subcontract companies have to be responsive to,” Herbert said.
On October 18, Sodexo recognized William & Mary’s dining-staff union. The union is now preparing for negotiations.
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson from Sodexo said: “Sodexo respects the rights of our employees to unionize or not to unionize, proven by the hundreds of [collective bargaining agreements] we have in good standing with unions across the country.”
A spokesperson at William & Mary referred The Chronicle to Sodexo, and said the dining staff are valued and critical to the university. “Our expectations with all our contracted vendors is that they treat their employees fairly and respectfully,” the statement read.
Many colleges contract with dining vendors for a variety of reasons: They have expertise in food services and agreements with food providers, and they help to minimize costs. This puts pressure on the contractors and workers to engage in negotiations, rather than on the university. Universities usually don’t interfere with their contractor’s management, Schneider said.
“Typically, in those contracts, the university takes the position of ‘we’re super hands-off about how you manage your employees,’” Schneider said.
Other colleges manage their own dining staffs and must negotiate with unions directly. At Pomona the union has been bargaining with the college since summer. Pomona officials released a statement in the wake of last week’s strike that said, “The union’s strike activities are designed to apply pressure on the College to agree to its demand for a one-year contract with an immediate 45-percent wage increase, which is not a realistic or sustainable path.”
Even though colleges may not hold much influence over negotiations between unions and contractors, they are often the target of student activists. Students often put pressure on their colleges to respond to unionization efforts, Schneider said. In response, the institutions can communicate a set of expectations to their contractors, he said, like stating that they expect the employees to be paid a certain wage.
This year, Northeastern workers collaborated with Local 26 on a proposed contract with five key demands. Their concerns were familiar ones: They wanted wages to increase and staffing shortages to be dealt with.
After learning about the union’s demands, Northeastern students rallied behind the workers. Many students saw the working conditions firsthand while they stood in long dining-hall lines as staff struggled to provide prompt service.
At William & Mary, a few days after workers announced their union, students organized a rally and called for action.
Student Activism
“What do we need?” a 22-year-old student shouted to a crowd of a hundred people in a video of a rally at William & Mary. “Respect!” the students, surrounded by trees and brick academic buildings, called back.
“When do we want it?” the chant leader responded, punctuating each word with her fist. “Now!” the crowd shouted.
That student was Salimata Sanfo, a senior studying government and pre-law and one of the organizers for the September rally. She said her chant echoed the complaints she had heard from dining workers, which were largely about the disrespect they felt in their jobs.
For Sanfo, who is Black, supporting the dining workers at William & Mary is personal. She is friends with many of them. While the student body is mostly white, the dining halls are run by a majority Black staff that “is being underpaid, overworked, and exploited,” Sanfo said.
This was the first rally that students at William & Mary held in support of their dining workers. But before that, students started a GoFundMe campaign in April 2020 that raised over $26,000, helping 117 dining workers. Another in late 2020, during the furloughs, raised over $23,000.
“The students did more for the employees than our employer,” Edwards said.
At Northeastern, meanwhile, a series of student-led rallies throughout 2022 helped to pressure the university.
“Northeastern doesn’t want a reputation as a university that doesn’t treat their workers well,” said Claire Wang, 21, a fourth-year computer-science and math major, and president of the Northeastern Progressive Student Alliance.
At a meeting held this year by Northeastern Mutual Aid, a club that confronts food insecurity on campus, Alex Madaras, a third-year history, culture, and law student, heard firsthand from dining workers about their experiences working at the university. She heard stories about food insecurity, expensive health care, and mental-health concerns.
“It didn’t seem right to me that there were workers who were struggling to feed their families with a full-time job on campus.” Madaras, 20, said.
Her club joined the student coalition Huskies Organizing With Labor, known as HOWL, which sought to mobilize student support for the union’s new contract. Sixty-eight campus clubs became part of the coalition. Rallies and marches drew hundreds of students, and the HOWL social media presence received thousands of likes and views.
This past June, following a student-led rally, Madaras and Navarro, the Northeastern barista, sat down for a summer cookout of grilled hot dogs and coleslaw. They were surrounded by other dining workers, student activists, and union organizers. After months of hard work, they felt like they were getting closer to securing a new contract.
Right before classes were set to start this fall, most of the dining employees were in agreement: If their demands weren’t met, 92 percent of a staff of more than 400 was prepared to go on strike.
“We’re all part of the same campus community,” Madaras said. “It’s not like students and workers are separate. We rely on each other.”
‘A Reckoning’
In September, Huskies Organizing With Labor posted an Instagram video of a Northeastern dining worker in front of cheering and clapping co-workers. After over 12 hours of negotiations that pushed to 3:30 a.m., the worker made an announcement: Northeastern’s dining union had won all five of its contract demands.
A decade ago, Northeastern dining workers were paid $9 an hour. Under their union’s recently ratified contract, they’ll be paid a minimum of $20 an hour this year. By 2026, they’ll be making at least $30 an hour.
Full-time workweeks would be extended to 40 hours. Health-care costs for workers were reduced. Pensions were raised. Finally, managers would have to guarantee that staff members who called out would be replaced. Understaffing was no longer an option.
A Northeastern University spokesperson referred The Chronicle to Chartwells. A representative wrote in a statement that the contractor, a division of Compass Group North America, was pleased to have reached an agreement with the dining workers’ Unite Here chapter that provides increased wages and benefits.
“This new contract affirms our ongoing commitment to the overall well-being of our talented team members,” the statement continued. “We are grateful for our workers and their contributions to serving the Northeastern campus.”
Aramayo, of Unite Here Local 26, said the new contract will transform these jobs, which 10 years ago were poverty-level jobs, into positions that allow workers to support their families.
“The higher-education industry should look at what we’ve accomplished here, and realize that any university could make the folks who feed the students have quality jobs that support their families,” Aramayo said.
Beludchy Pierre Louis, 33, a cook at Northeastern and a staff organizer for the union, was at the contract negotiations from 3 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. In a few years, Louis, who has spent the last year juggling his Northeastern position with another at Boston College, said he could consider cutting down to one job.
“Everybody deserves to have better health insurance, better pay, pensions, sick time, 40 hours a week,” Louis said, “the respect and dignity that we deserve.”
“A lot of other colleges are probably going to want the same things,” he said.
Across Massachusetts, other colleges’ dining staff members have been reaching out to Unite Here. Since Northeastern workers won their contract in September, Aramayo said dining workers at six other colleges — including Simmons University, Tufts University, Brandeis University, Emerson College, and the Colleges at Fenway, which includes the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences — have contacted the union.
“There is a bit of a reckoning in the hospitality industry,” Aramayo said. “There’s a reckoning about what kind of jobs are these going to be? Are these going to be jobs where people make a good living, have medical care, and work-life balance?”
“If they aren’t able to become those kinds of jobs,” Aramayo said, then people are “just not even going to apply to these places.”
After having recently won union recognition, Edwards and the rest of the William & Mary dining staff are preparing for negotiations. Wages, pensions, and understaffing will be their main matters of concern.
For Edwards, after 20 years in the job, a new contract could mean savings and pensions. She imagines moving out of her parents’ home and buying a place of her own.
