[844] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
on a conversation with Chancellor Clay
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robin H Ivester)
Wed Oct 3 11:22:13 2001
Message-ID: <200110030602.CAA09312@dionysus.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 02:02:22 -0400
Reply-To: "Documentation at http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html"
<MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU>, Robin H Ivester <robin@MIT.EDU>
From: Robin H Ivester <robin@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
these seem like the appropriate lists.
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To: senior-haus@MIT.EDU, ec-discuss@MIT.EDU, dormcon@MIT.EDU
cc: larryben@MIT.EDU, gpardo@MIT.EDU, tgray@MIT.EDU
Subject: on a conversation with Chancellor Clay
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 01:51:56 -0400
From: Robin H Ivester <robin@MIT.EDU>
*Please feel free to forward this to appropriate people or lists.*
a little bit of news on this dining thing.
oh, and a cautionary note - this is my personal take on things.
This afternoon, I and 4 other students met with Dean Larry Benedict and
Chancellor Clay to talk about this whole dining mess.
We tried to focus on the larger issues - the failure in communication,
the problems with how decisions concerning student life are made (namely,
that they tend to be developed without significant student input), that
sort of thing, rather than arguing about details having to do with the
specific meal plan.
We tried to emphasize that, in our opinion, the best way for the admins
(the Chancellor, Dean Benedict, Phil Walsh, & Rich Berlin, as they seem
to be the ones chiefly involved in this plan) to deal with the situation
would be for them to drop the current proposal (including the idea that
a "minimum participation" or mandatory plan of any sort was the right way
to do things) and START OVER. AND DO IT RIGHT THIS TIME.
The process should probably include a total reconsidering of what a
"dining system" means, and what purposes it should serve to the MIT community.
The details of the process might be, for example: lots of surveys and
information gathering on how students (& community) use the current
dining system (including kitchens, etc) and WHY, what the students
(& community) want to see in their dining system, and what their values and
priorities are with respect to the dining system. The numbers and other
relevant information concerning the current system and the costs of possible
changes should be made PUBLICLY AVAILABLE. THEN, the entire
Campus Dining Board (with the help of the UA, Dormcon, the GSC, etc)
would draw up a proposal, soliciting suggestions from the entire community,
that includes many different alternative solutions, some of which might
include minimum participation and some of which should not.
Then they solicit broad feedback on these solutions. Repeat until something
vaguely resembling consensus (or at least support) is reached.
Because the conversation kept turning back to minimum participation and
mandatory plans as something that was from one side totally unacceptable
and from the other side (apparently) the only economically feasible way
to do things, we (being the students) also made the usual points about
why a mandatory/minimum participation plan is bad.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that we got through to the Chancellor. His
first response to my first description of what the process should look
like and where it went wrong was to say that he should have written
his column in the Tech 2 weeks earlier and provided more context.
At that point I was really about to start banging my head on the table,
but I _think_ that the message maybe might have gotten through a little
bit more by the end of the meeting. Maybe.
The Chancellor said at one point that he had been persuaded that a
mandatory/minimum participation plan was the Right Thing To Do, and as far
as I can tell he still believes that. He also said that he was willing
to consider the mandatory plan thing "in abeyance"...but it's not my
belief that he means that in the serious, look-at-things-objectively,
start-over-again-from-the-beginning way that I think he should be.
I think it's similar to them saying that they want our feedback on the options
we've been offered. But then, (not uncommon for an MIT student) I don't
have much trust for the administration.
So that's my take on things. I'm not going to the town hall meeting tonight
as I have a class that runs until 8:30pm, but give 'em hell and all that
good stuff.
- -robin ivester
ps. by the way, what do people know about an upcoming "freshmen squatting
decision" that i just heard about this evening? from what i hear,
it might mean that freshmen (who are assigned temp rooms before arriving
at MIT, obviously) would be able to squat their assigned temp room (not
just the dorm, but the room). this sounds to me like it would screw with
the room assignment process, as that's done differently in each dorm and
is sometimes a very complicated process.
but i just heard about it off-handedly this evening.
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