Out of 2,650 responses, 43 percent of students advocated a full breakfast in every House, 40 percent indicated preference for the limited breakfast plan, and 17 percent said they “really don’t care.” Student representatives pointed to fiscal constraints as a motivating factor in student opinion.
“Had there been longer hours in the hot breakfast Houses, too, I think the vote for hot breakfast would have carried a lot better,” William T. Prewitt ’79, the CHUL student representative from North House—now Pforzheimer House—told The Crimson in January 1978.
Later in the month, CHUL voted to have all the Houses serve hot breakfasts, despite a potential increase of $13 in board fees. Fox indicated that the University would follow the committee’s recommendation and full breakfasts would be reinstated in all the Houses the following fall.
But by May, Weissbecker announced that Food Services had actually netted a surplus. By the end of the 1977 fall semester, they had gained $100,000. After paying off debt and placing some of the funds in a reserve account to purchase new equipment, Weissbecker told The Crimson in May 1978 that the final balance of the Food Services annual budget was $47,000.
At the end of the hot breakfast debacle, Fox told The Crimson he was happy that the problem was finally resolved.
“I was beginning to find the breakfast topic spectacularly tiresome,” he said in May 1978.
Today, Fox says he still remembers how irritated he was about the matter.
“I was very annoyed that Mr. Weissbecker had landed us in that mess,” Fox says in reflection. “In another frame of mind, I would have said, ‘Why the hell did you do this to us,’ but given he had abandoned his position [on the issue], it seemed best simply to say: ‘how fortunate.’”
Despite the breakfast debacle, Weissbecker continued to work for Food Services for four to five years after the hot breakfast plan controversy, according to Fox. He chalked up the incident to Weissbecker’s traditional philosophy on food preparation, describing him as a “pots of potatoes”-minded dining manager.
“He ran dining services well, we thought,” says Fox. “What was a shock was when his successor introduced what [current students] now enjoy and still balanced the books. So we then began to wonder.”
—Staff writer Nalina Sombuntham can be reached at sombunth@fas.harvard.edu.