The recent Miscellany News article “Campus dining reports record number of thefts” (12.03.09) has spawned, for the most part, fervid opinions from students and staff alike. These opinions, which are strongly professed on the newspaper’s web site and around campus, seem to counter the apparent truism, “stealing makes you a thief.” Campus dining should temper their indignation by attempting to understand the reasoning behind students who decide to indulge in, as the editors describe, “nabbing a Nilda’s.”
Before moving on, however, note the difference between “reasoning” and acceptable justification. The former is the students’ rationale behind their thievery. The latter will by no means be agreed upon, because Dining Services will never invite students to take food from them without paying, no matter how sound students think their reasoning is; this thought process is understandable as well, but isn’t the focus of this article.
The core argument offered by those who, I dare say, support food theft can be explained best through a commonly cited analogy making the rounds on campus. Assume you were to go to Babycakes and order a cup of soup. The price of the soup is $4.50 and you make the payment by placing a 10-dollar bill in the hands of the cashier. You would expect $5.50 back. Now assume that Babycakes refuses to give you the change. Wait, that would never happen—it’s illegal. Some Vassar students say that this is the exact shortchanging they experience while eating at the All Campus Dining Center (ACDC).
The main reason for this is the policy that meal points don’t carry over to coming semesters. So, although students would have paid for 151 meals (Standard meal plan), they may just end up using 100 meal points for a semester. It is easy to understand why students feel that the balance 51 meals are owed to them the next semester, while, in reality and in accordance with policy, they have lapsed. So students think that by entering the ACDC without swiping their Vassar College ID Card, they are, in their own way, redeeming what they feel is owed to them.
Personally, I would err on the side of the students. This isn’t to say I support taking meals away from dining without paying for them; rather, I support my fellow students in their frustration and helplessness. It seems to me that stealing is simply a symptom of a larger problem. That campus dining is publicizing students’ stealing, and not the cause thereof, is unfair. Just because students have been stealing food does not delegitimize other concerns that they might harbor. Yes, in terms of black-and-white or “right or wrong,” there is no way that anyone can say that those who steal are in the right, but that doesn’t mean that the entire blame for this state of affairs should lie with the students. Dining services should, now that their point has been well made, determine the causal factors and fix them so as to thwart this stealing in the years to come.
A proposed solution to this problem of theft was to make it compulsory for the students from Senior Housing to subscribe to a meal plan. In the face of the strong opposition, the College may find it hard to implement such a policy. The cost of dining in Senior Housing is significantly lower than that of eating at on campus dining facilities, and so it follows that when presented with the option, students tend to choose to be off the meal plan.
Additionally, the ACDC is located such that it is inconvenient While proposing a solution to this impasse, Dean of the College Christopher Roellke commented that it would be beneficial to “be able to find a middle ground in which all students benefit.” A possible “middle ground” solution may be to go back to the ACDC Points system for seniors, thus giving them the option to choose between on- and off-campus dining without the fear of their benefits lapsing. Another solution may be to introduce the rolling over of “meals” from one semester to the next, and to allow seniors to utilized unused meals from the spring semester of their junior year.
No, stealing isn’t ethical. But if the goal of Dining Services and other administrative bodies is to stop these thefts from occurring in the future, just admonishing students for their actions is not the proper way to proceed. Getting to, and fixing, the reasoning behind these thefts is the primary concern.
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