ESU
Since lectures have been back to being fully in person, we noticed numerous problems in the management of spaces in the University. To make matters worse, the number of new enrolments and international students have been increasing during the pandemic.
To this day, students find themselves dealing with overcrowded rooms, impossible-to-find accommodation, rent prices skyrocketing and a canteen system that simply cannot provide for all students.
In the last few years ESU, the regional institution for scholarships and student benefits, has not invested enough resources to face an easily predictable situation. To solve this situation, both the Region and the University should intervene: on the one hand the Region should guarantee sufficient funds to take care of the obvious shortcomings, on the other hand the University should put in place new solutions, first temporary and then permanent, to ensure that the whole student community has a decent place to eat.
It is inadmissible that UniPd takes great pride publicly in the increase of new enrolments, especially by international students, when these new students find no place to live or they cannot fully take advantage of their scholarships because there is no canteen close to their Department or because the queue is just too long.
ESU CANTEENS AND TAKE-AWAY SERVICE
We will ask ESU to open new canteens, especially in highly frequented areas that are still without this basic service. The first examples to come to mind are the Beato Pellegrino complex, where thousands of students attend lectures and study at the library but have no University canteen closeby, and the new Caserma Piave campus, where the Departments of Economics and Political Sciences will be moved in the next years.
Although in the latter case the project for this newly built complex includes a cafeteria, we are convinced that this will not be enough to cater to the needs of all students and, more importantly, it will not guarantee the free meal that all students with a regional scholarship are entitled to and that must be provided by ESU.
We want to reinstate the take awayservice, extremely useful for all those students (especially with a scholarship) that simply do not have the time to eat a full meal in a canteen, due to having a short lunch break or to being able to have the time to eat outside the opening hours of canteens.
At the moment, the only food available for take-away is pizza and sandwiches, which are not always guaranteed, but we believe it would be best to give the possibility to have the same food served in the canteen as take-away.
