Val Changeup Lets Students Serve Themselves

Students arrived in the entrée line at Valentine Dining Hall last week to discover a major change: they could get as large a portion as they desired. Lunch and dinner, previously served by a rotation of Val employees, have become fully self-serve.

According to Director of Dining Services Bill Connor, Val has transitioned to a self-service model for four weeks as a part of a “pilot” program, which will provide Dining Services with data on “service times, portions, and food consumption” to evaluate whether Val will remain self-serve next fall or revert to the traditional “full-service” model.

Regardless of the changes at Val next fall, the new Student Center & Dining Commons, opening in Fall 2026, will “feature almost exclusively self-service stations,” Connor said. Thus, the pilot program this spring is an opportunity for Dining Services to evaluate how a fully self-service model will function.

While the new self-service model gives students more control over their meals, for some, the benefits do not outweigh the costs.

“It just moves so slowly, people turn geriatric when they get to the front of the line,” Daniel Martin ’25 said. “People don’t know what they want and they don’t know how to serve food,” he added. Martin emphasized that he “didn’t have a problem” with the old model and would prefer if the college switched back.

Others, however, expressed appreciation for the control over portions that the self-serve model offers. “I liked that I could now get the portions I want,” Piper Lentz ’26 said. “But when the line is crazy long at lunch, it makes it hard to get on with my day,” she added.

For his part, Connor said that since the new system has begun, Dining Services has “not seen a significant impact to service or line times.” Additionally, he claimed that he had received only one comment card from students complaining about the length of the lines.

“If there were to be a negative impact on the student experience, we would revert to full service at any time,” Connor said.

While a number of Dining Hall staff are no longer in their regular role serving food to students, Connor claimed that the staff will be working just as much as before. “Amherst College Dining staff did not experience a reduction in hours; rather, we shifted the service staff into other roles in Dining on their scheduled shift,” he said.

According to Connor, many more staff members are now working “on the floor,” helping with tasks such as “cleaning the dining room, wiping tables, and attending to other areas of service.” Connor emphasized that Dining Services was closely evaluating student interactions with the new self-serve model in order to determine whether the model will remain in place next fall. While he has “not heard much feedback” from students about the change, he maintained that Dining Services is “monitoring each meal to ensure that students are not impacted in a negative way due to this switch.”