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Vending machines are now the only on-campus food option at Nassau Community College, CBS New York reported.
Students say they awoke one morning to an email from the college saying all dining services—including the cafeteria, campus cafe, a snack bar and even a campus Starbucks location—were closed, effective immediately. That left the nearly 12,000 students at Nassau with only the campus vending machines for food throughout the day.
“We are a commuter school,” student Annick Boyd told CBS. “We don’t have dorms we can just go back to and make food.”
Nassau vice president Jerry Kornblurth said the dining services were shut down because the college’s vendor, Compass Group, was “not able to make ends meet.”
“They wanted to enter into a new agreement with us that would have required us to pick up about $300,000 a year,” he told CBS. He said the college hoped to have a new vendor by the fall, and added that officials were working to bring food trucks to campus for the remainder of the semester.
But students and faculty say Compass Group had been financially insoluble for months, and blame the administration for lack of planning. On Monday, students and faculty gathered to protest what they called the administration’s “incompetency” and demand food services be restored.
