I just returned from the Furman student center, where I enjoyed a delicious sushi lunch. Sushi? Yes, college food has come a long way in recent years.

During my student days, the Furman dining hall was managed by a former Army mess sergeant who seemed to delight in serving flavorless meals featuring bread rolls harder than hockey pucks, limp French fries or greasy Tater Tots, greenish beans, gluey macaroni and cheese, and mystery meat topped off by a Jell-O square so gelatinous that it required a knife to penetrate.

Today Furman students have access to an array of culinary delights designed to satisfy the most discerning palate. The weekly menu, for example, includes sushi, Florentine pizza and teriyaki chicken. There are also salad and baked potato bars, pizza, pasta and ice cream stations.

Fresh bread and pastries are baked on site. Students can make their own Belgian waffles and stir-fry dishes or order sub sandwiches and wraps made to their liking. In addition, the food court in the student center features a Starbucks cafe, Chick-Fil-A sandwiches and Bene Pizzas. And each month the Dining Hall offers themed meals such as Thanksgiving in May, Chinese New Year and Mardi Gras.

Furmans diverse cuisine is by no means unique; most colleges offer similar amenities. Last summer, the University of South Carolina completed extensive renovations to its student union dining area, adding Einstein Bagel, Cinnabon, Jazzman's Cafe, Mein Bowl and a Burger King Express to the schools already wide-ranging food court.

Students expect such variety and quality  at all hours of the day and night. They want more choices, more convenience, more freshness. Compared to their parents or grandparents, they have grown up with an unprecedented array of goods and services at their fingertips. They bring to campus higher expectations and more sophisticated tastes, and they prefer food that is made to order and prepared in front of them. More and more of them ask for vegetarian, organic and ethnic dishes.

Susan Presto, the food service director at Furman, is a 24-year veteran who has worked at eight colleges in eight states. She explains that students began to grow increasing finicky about their food in the early 1990s, and the trend has accelerated in this new century. At Clemson 20 years ago, most students drank milk. Today, water is the preferred beverage. Those who drink milk now choose reduced-fat or skim milk. Despite the abundance and variety of the dining options and a greater awareness of what good nutrition entails, students still gravitate to the old standbys: pizza, chicken tenders and hamburgers. They also occasionally complain about the food. In fact, they are encouraged to do so. Suggestion boxes, focus groups and formal committees provide convenient conduits between students and the food services director. Susan Presto aims to please.

Such seamless communication about food between students and staffers has not always been the case. In 1961, soon after Furman opened its new campus, students felt compelled to organize a formal boycott of the dining hall.

The late Marshall Frady, Furman graduate and biographer of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and George Wallace, participated in the boycott. He recollected that the dining hall fare during his student years was generally drab and suspicious. We suspected that it was often recycled and reconstituted from previous meals.

Frady explained that the quality of food had been a festering discomfort for some time. In early October, a particularly bad meal upset the students, and talk of boycotting the dining hall raced through the dorms. Frady was recruited to write the placards for the hastily planned boycott. For all of its earnestness, however, the boycott was short-lived. Only minutes after the breakfast demonstration began on Oct. 13, Dean Francis W. Bonner gathered up the two dozen protesting students  including one current Furman trustee  took their names and later summoned them individually to his office. We were isolated and interrogated in an affair that would have done the North Koreans proud. Our innocent little caper turned into a hair-raising apocalypse.

Yet the busted boycott was not for naught. It just took a while for the university to recognize that better food fosters better scholarship. Tofu, anyone?