Bobcat Buzz: Appreciating new meal point options

Riley Millette, Sports Editor

I know it’s a community activity to blast the decisions of Quinnipiac University officials. Trust me, I do it too. But the school deserves credit where it’s due.

Since students have been sent home multiple times since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve built up an abundance of meal points. I remember thinking last spring that I wouldn’t be able to use the over $2,000 worth of meal points that I had stored away. But the school has made a considerable effort to see to it that this doesn’t happen.

Illustration by Connor Lawless

Food trucks have made an appearance almost every day for the past couple weeks, which now accepts meal points instead of QCash — a separate debit account from students’ meal plan. Tons of non-food items have been strewn across the cafeteria, also available to purchase via meal points.

The school made it clear more than once that leftover meal points at the end of the spring semester would not be refunded. I worried that all the money that we spent on food during the last three semesters would be up in smoke.

And while the school can’t refund the money, it’s going out of its way to give students a creative way to use their meal points and also be able to use them on things other than food. A recent email sent by the Dining Advisory Board mentioned that house plants would be for sale in exchange for meal points.

Quinnipiac could just as easily let us continue to buy cases of Gatorade over and over until our money ran out. But it saw a need for its students and fulfilled that need, not to mention helping local businesses by inviting their food trucks to campus.

I reiterate that the school has plenty to be criticized for, but if we rip it apart for every bad thing it does, we should praise it for its good deeds.

Bobcat Buzz is a new column covering Quinnipiac’s smaller but important topics.