Keeping it ‘within the hedges’ at Rice

Students now will be able to eat on campus on Saturdays, a move to help the financially strapped

R ice University students now can stay within the hedges for Saturday dinners, a break from a university tradition that aimed to encourage students to explore Houston.

The university now will include Saturday dinners in an on-campus meal plan, Rice’s student association said. Two dining halls — North College and Seibel — will serve food during that time period, according to the group. The meal plan’s cost will not change.

Requiring students to eat off campus once a week was “inconvenient or financially straining” to many students, Rice’s student association said in a statement.

The hedges that line Rice’s campus have long been a metaphor for a bubble of campus life at the elite university, separating Rice students from the city beyond.

At President David Leebron’s 2004 inauguration, sprigs of greenery were placed on many tables, symbolizing Rice’s desire to take down these obstacles between the university and the city.

“We cannot allow our hedges to be barriers either for the engagement of our students with Houston or the engagement of Houston with Rice,” he said at his inauguration.

But recent campus conversations at Rice and nationwide have focused on college accessibility and the unexpected costs beyond tuition.

“Saturday dinner is purposefully not there because the idea was that students would go beyond the hedges Saturday night,” Rice’s housing and dining services director David McDonald told the Rice Thresher in September. “But now we are in a different situation. We’re in an age where not everybody has enough capital to be able to go beyond the hedges.”