Editorial: Saying Goodbye to Valentine Dining Hall

It’s fall 2026. You’ve just come out of your first class of the semester. You head to Valentine Dining Hall — or, as we affectionately call it “Val” — only to find it empty. Then it hits you: Val, as we know it, is gone.

With the new Student Center and Dining Commons set for completion next semester, The Student’s Editorial Board is excited for the new era but wants to nostalgically reflect on what this familiar dining hall has meant for the Amherst community and what we risk forgetting once we all adapt to the new Student Center.

There’s a certain character to Val. There’s something special about walking in the early afternoon, saying “hi” to Agnes Ting or to campus celebrity Renee Alvarez, and scanning the Weiler Room (the room with the printer) for a seat, or perhaps rushing to the ever-crowded Russ Wing — informally known as the “athlete section.”

You sit there for hours — known as Val-sitting. Maybe you’ve grabbed a salad, or a banana, and at least two cups of tea. Eventually, your laptop dies, and you’re forced to migrate to one of the roughly four outlets in the entire building. The sun is setting, light streams through the windows, and the seats fill up as dinner gets closer. You forgot to check the Mammoth Mobile app, so you’re hoping the main dinner option is decent, because as we all know, sometimes it really isn’t. 

Your friends drift over and join you. They probably skipped the line. You’re laughing about something a professor said in class. You spot other friends and classmates, who stop by to chat for a bit. Eventually, you and your friends pack up to go study again. On your way out, you linger in the lobby, scanning the posters of events layered across the walls. The next morning, you wander back downstairs and grab a Tandem bagel — only on Saturdays. And then the cycle begins again.

No matter what, Val is there for you.

Val is the center of our community. It is the social infrastructure of our entire campus — a place that sustains Amherst in so many ways that are perhaps hard to notice until the thought of losing it. The bumping into each other in the cramped spaces forced us to say hi, ask how each other’s day was, and made sitting down for a meal turn into staying for a few hours. 

While many of us are excited for new spaces — better food and more room to gather — there is also a lingering anxiety that the college will smooth over Val’s history to promote the new building. New amenities are being offered as consolation for the loss of something perhaps less polished, but deeply familiar and an integral part of Amherst.

Valentine Hall opened on October 29, 1941, funded through a bequest associated with Samuel H. Valentine, Class of 1866. Since then, an immeasurable number of people have eaten there. President Michael Elliott ate in Val. So did generations of alumni, professors, staff members, and students whose names we’ll never know. Val has absorbed nearly a century of ordinary days. Saying goodbye to all of this feels strange precisely because we rarely see Val as historic in retrospect.

There are also details that can’t be simply recreated. Val holds the name plaques and the practice shell from Amherst’s 1872 championship rowing crew, which still hangs inside Russ Wing. You catch sight of your friends through Val’s windows as you walk by. Val sits along familiar pathways, pulling people together even when they don’t intend to meet. In the new building, pathways will change. The new dining hall won’t sit in the same place or function the same. Thoughtful change is still change — and change is hard.

We will have to make that legacy for the new Student Center ourselves now. Val became meaningful by repetition and proximity and this will happen for the Student Center at some point. But it will take a bit. 

This transition also creates a generational rift. Alumni remember spaces we never experienced — social dorms, fraternities, and corners of campus that no longer exist. But all living alumni remember Val. As older generations return to a campus whose landmarks have shifted, younger students will inherit stories about places they can’t quite access anymore. Val was one of the last spaces that belonged to everyone.

A new building is a blank slate, and that is part of its appeal. It’s exciting to imagine how we’ll implant ourselves into a space that hasn’t yet been lived in.  What are we even going to call it? The official name may come in the fall, but we all know a nickname will take hold before then. New terms and traditions will emerge sooner than we expect. But it’s also unsettling, because it means the old place — the vessel that holds so many memories — is gone. This moment feels especially strange because we are between eras, asking questions whose answers will only come after the space has been lived in for a while.

What we owe Val is remembrance. We can look forward to what’s coming without pretending that what came before doesn’t matter. The new place will be beautiful and will work better in many ways. And still, we’ll miss the flaws — the awkward outlets, the crowded moments, the strange social rules, the perhaps sometimes subpar food, the lingering afternoons that turned into evenings. We owe it to her.