There has been a marked increase in vandalism and overall disrespect for campus resources over the past few years. Students, rushing between commitments or simply preferring to eat in the shelter of their rooms rather than a crowded dining hall, are taking dishes home without returning them for extended periods. They languish in dirty piles in dorm kitchens, adopted by student suite kitchenettes, broken and forgotten, or even thrown in the trash. We recently reported that the college spends between $35,000 and $45,000 each year to replace disappearing dishes.
We apologize to the dining and custodial staff — who hunt for, clean and then replace our dishes — for the extra labor and stress we have caused by allowing this issue to continue. Each of us should be more responsible not only for our individual messes but for becoming part of the broader solution.
Middlebury has a culture of toxic anonymity in how we treat our shared spaces and resources, a culture we must work to repair. There is no system to keep track of students who take a dish from the dining hall, nor a way to know if a dish will sit under someone’s bed, discarded and moldy, for months before it makes its way to an already overflowing sink in a dorm’s communal kitchen. Actively barring us from leaving with dishes would be an unreasonable policy to expect dining staff to enforce sustainably. It is on us, not the college, to create a much needed sense of accountability.
Students complain about understaffing problems at Middlebury, but often do not implement simple fixes to make the lives of the staff who work hard to support us better. In a predominantly wealthy student community, we foster an environment of irresponsibility in which it is assumed that someone else will clean up our messes. We can show more respect for our facilities and dining hall staff by being responsible with the dishes and not making unnecessary messes in our living spaces. One dirty bowl left in the sink might not seem like a big deal, but over time, more and more bowls add up. Suddenly, the sink is filled with a sky-high pile of dirty plates and moldy bowls that cover the kitchen counter.
While each of our individual efforts at greater accountability must come first in solving this problem, there are other potential solutions. The dining halls could begin offering compostable paper plates and cups for students to take with them when they need to leave the dining hall with food or drinks. The carabiner-takeaway box system also needs to be publicized more; if more of us stopped at MiddExpress one time for a $5 carabiner to trade in for a reusable box, stacks of dishes would remain where they belong.
We call on Residential Assistants (RAs) to take more initiative in the dorms they oversee to ensure residents are being responsible about returning dishes.
The dining hall dish situation reveals a deeper issue on our campus. It highlights a lack of respect for our dining hall staff and a lack of accountability for one’s actions in communal spaces. Even though nobody's watching, promptly take your dish back to the same dining hall you took it from. When you see a dish lying around in your dorm, return it, even though it isn’t yours.
We also ask that students familiarize themselves with the resources available to them at Middlebury. Every dorm has a supply closet with cleaning supplies students can use if they see a mess in their living space. If you plan to take food from the dining hall often, consider spending $5 of your declining balance to participate in the tupperware system, or bring your own tupperware, collect your food on a plate, and then transfer it into the container. These are extra steps, but well worth the effort to make our community a better, more sustainable place to live.
