On Nov. 7, Housing and Dining announced a change to its long-standing rule forbidding students from taking any bags into the FFC. The change was prompted by a series of thefts of student property, wherein students property was stolen from the cubby area just outside the cafeteria.
This board commends Dining on finally fixing what has long been a glaring security concern for everyone frequenting the FFC. In the past, thousands of students were forced to leave their bags behind while they went into the FFC to eat. The cubby spaces provided for storing bags were clearly inadequate on many levels. First, they were too small to accommodate a reasonably high level of student traffic. This meant that students were often forced to leave their bags in overflow piles on the ground, where they were at greater risk of being stolen, crushed or damaged.
Second, the cubby area was not secured. Access to the FFC's entryway are is open to the public. Inside the cubbies are watched by whoever happens to be manning the front desk of the cafeteria itself, but their primary job is watching who comes in from the cubbies, not who goes to them. It was always unreasonable to expect these one or two employees to monitor the belongings of the thousands who go into and out of the FFC every day. Moreover, it is impossible to see the cubbies from inside the cafeteria, meaning that once students left their bags outside, there was no way to make sure their items were safe.
All this could have been acceptable — or at least less worrying — if these bags weren't filled with expensive items. Laptops, headphones, textbooks and notes all had to remain in an unprotected and unrestricted space until the recent policy change.
To be fair, the policy was originally in place to protect the FFC from what it saw as the threat of student theft. By prohibiting students from bringing bags into the FFC, it was hoped, they would be prevented from sneaking out food or cutlery (individuals can judge the efficacy of this "loss-prevention" policy for themselves). The News-Letter is not unsympathetic to this concern, but it was unreasonable to force students to sacrifice the safety of their property to deal with this threat. We therefore applaud Dining for its decision to finally permit students to take their personal belongings into the cafeteria.
We note with concern, however, Dining's announcement that they reserve the right to revert back to the old policy. This page hopes and trusts that Hopkins students will use the new system responsibly, and to the entire community's benefit. In fact, even if students respond perfectly to the rule change, there is still the threat that bringing in that many bags may make navigating the cafeteria too unwieldy or even unsafe. Either way, if in the future Aramark judges the new policy to be unsustainable, it would be a mistake simply to revert to the old policy. If it turns out that the FFC simply cannot operate properly while students are permitted to bring their bags inside, then it will be incumbent upon Dining to provide some sort of reasonably secure accommodation for belongings. The cubbies could with little trouble be replaced with lockers, for example, following the model in many science labs and gyms.
