This Tuesday’s Student Government Association (SGA) meeting focused on two main issues: reactions to an article about Bon Appétit featured in last week’s issue of The News-Letter and an ongoing debate over whether Hopkins should adopt a Latin honors system.
The Bon Appétit article centered on the grievances of four Fresh Food Café (FFC) employees regarding the replacement of Aramark with Bon Appétit as the University’s new dining provider. According to the four FFC employees, the staff is upset by Bon Appétit’s decisions to cut back workers’ hours as well as let go of workers who have been at Hopkins for many years. Furthermore, the employees also reported substandard workplace conditions among numerous other complaints.
The article quickly sparked the attention of readers and brought Real Food Hopkins member Noah Erwin to the SGA meeting with a request. Real Food Hopkins is a student organization dedicated to bring local, sustainable, humane food to campus.
Erwin, on behalf of the group, asked SGA to issue a statement via email to the student body requesting that students remain respectful of staff workers and not to inquire about their working conditions without having the full context in mind.
While Real Food Hopkins said that it values the dining staff and all they do for the school, the group wished to remind students of the formal process that exists to investigate workplace grievances.
Erwin said that the goal of Real Food Hopkins was to get the student body to calm down. He said that students have been pestering the FFC staff while they were on duty, trying to get information out of them.
“We want people to get the full context and refrain from taking a personal vendetta against the dining staff,” Erwin said.
SGA, however, was hesitant to oblige for fear of inserting itself into a campus-wide debate.
“The last thing I want is for every group who is unhappy about one thing on campus coming to us and using us essentially as a carrier pigeon system,” Executive President Alex Schupper said.
When asked why Real Food Hopkins decided to come to SGA for help rather than send out the message itself or ask The News-Letter to write something regarding the issue, Erwin responded by saying that he thought that SGA would be able to get the message across more extensively and effectively.
When the topic was picked back up at the end of the meeting for open discussion, many members agreed with Schupper that the issue was better left unaddressed by SGA. Much of the concern was regarding the wording of the email that Real Food Hopkins had drafted, which some members of SGA saw as overly strident.
Ultimately, a majority voted to table the motion until next week’s meeting, when they will discuss once again whether this is an issue worth wading into.
“We’re very limited in the number of emails we should be sending. . .I think that being a third party is a good place for us to be right now,” Schupper said.
Among the other issues discussed at Tuesday’s meeting was recent steps taken to institute a Latin honors system at Hopkins. While the only honor students can graduate from Hopkins with currently is “General Honors,” the new system would allow students to graduate cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude.
The Curriculum Committee, which is made up of students appointed by SGA and faculty, held a meeting of its Engineering School members on Wednesday. Beforehand, members from the School of Arts and Sciences recommended moving forward with the change. The issue will likely now move to the Homewood Academic Council, which is debating where to set the cut off percentages determining how many students in each class will earn each honor.
For example, cum laude could encompass anywhere from the top 50 percent to 25 percent of the graduating class with the two higher honors encompassing respectively smaller percentages.
“As you know, Hopkins has a lower GPA than many other academic institutions, [but] Latin honors are more generally recognized by employers,” SGA Academic Affairs Committee Chair Andrew Griswold said.
Some SGA members contend that the proposed changes — which could set the cut-off percentages at higher levels than at similar institutions — would benefit some exceptionally high performing students over others with strong but not stratospheric grade point averages. It is also likely that the number of students graduating with honors will decrease under any new Latin honors system, according to several SGA members.
SGA is still contemplating its next move regarding Latin honors. Some members of the SGA are hoping to postpone making the change until the next academic council is seated and the SGA has the opportunity to poll the student body about the idea on the ballot for SGA elections this spring.
