Liberty’s newest facility reaches completion after two years

Stationed just in front of the cluster of Commons dorms and decorated in red brick, large glass windows and a touch of grey siding sits the new Reber-Thomas Dining Center. Available for students as soon as the semester began, it houses many new amenities that the previous dining hall did not. 

Liberty University’s newest facility and longest construction project to date, spanning over the course of two years, provides students with more food options, a wider variety of seating options and far less lines to wait in, among other details. According to Dan Deter, vice president of Major Construction, the project was a “much needed” addition to campus and needed extensive planning details. 

“The existing Reber-Thomas Dining Hall was built many years ago,” Deter said, speaking about the reasoning behind building the new dining facility. “When they built it, they didn’t do a very good geotechnical analysis. So, although the building was structurally sound, it wasn’t perfect.” 

Deter went on to note that issues like new cracks forming in the bricks, the roof reaching end-of-life durability and a handful of the primary equipment pieces reaching the point of needing to be repaired or replaced within the previous dining hall were all primary reasons for building the new facility.

“The problem with the old dining hall was that we only had a short window,” Deter said. “We had pretty much from May until August to do all of these repairs, and we looked at the fact that we didn’t have enough time to close the dining hall and divert students elsewhere, so administration basically put their heads together to create this new dining center.”

Repairs weren’t the only reasoning behind beginning such a lengthy construction project, though, as many other details came into play. Students often waited in lines after Convocation or during CFAW.  

The limited amount of transaction stations and insufficient seating caused students to struggle as more students enrolled each semester. Mixing these concerns with the repair issues ultimately led to the beginning of what would be Liberty’s newest facility. 

“We built this dining center to be able to handle both the Convocation and CFAW surges as well as the increase in enrollment numbers,” Deter said. “We do have a lot more actual (food) stations than last year as well, but I think the biggest thing was trying to decrease the time for throughput. Students no longer need to wait in lengthy lines before coming in and immediately trying to find seating; they can go and find their food first with the assurance that there’s going to be plenty of tables.”

Once inside the glass doors, students are able to immediately scan their Flames Passes in the newly built transaction machines, with the new dining center having more machines than the previous dining hall. They are then greeted by both new and returning food stations. The newer options include things like a station with fresh baked goods, a new soft serve ice cream machine and even an area where freshly squeezed orange juice is readily available. 

Students then have the choice between a wide variety of seating options: from booths and high tops on the main floor, to longer dining tables on the bottom level, to outdoor seating around the front, sides and back of the facility — each spot offering unique views of campus from the various angles. 

“We made some different areas. We’ve built the lower floor, which we consider our ‘quiet zone,’ as we envisioned it, with a bigger mix of seating choices. We also very purposefully included more transaction stations so that our flow could be much smoother for students to get in,” Deter said.

Junior Jenna Mcloughlin finds the dining center to be a positive experience.

“It’s great,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be so big, but I’m definitely not disappointed. I love that there’s so much more space inside now.”

Hess is the news editor for the Liberty Champion. Follow her on X