Do the bare minimum and return your plates
Housing and Dining recently spoke out about an unacceptable number of missing ceramic plates from serveries across campus, prompting several college presidents and coordinators to remind students not to throw these plates away or leave them in shared spaces. The issue has gotten so bad that H&D has stated that they will begin charging colleges each time they find one in the trash.
We should be mortified that the situation has come to this. Seriously, y’all? We’re all smart enough to get into this school, and we’re definitely smart enough to distinguish between paper plates that are able to be disposed of and ceramic plates that most certainly are not. We realize many students are not yet used to the pre-pandemic non-disposable plates. But that is utterly no excuse for students throwing these plates in the trash, leaving them in public spaces or keeping them for their own personal use.
This is just part of a trend we’ve noticed in this post-pandemic era where shared things and spaces are not treated with the respect they deserve. Choosing to be part of this community means treating H&D staff and communal spaces with basic levels of respect.
H&D will be adding bins at the colleges to make it even easier to return your plates. H&D staff does so much work for us already — it is distressing and insulting to make them count the number of plates in the trash in addition to their other duties. As students, we should do the absolute bare minimum of returning our plates so that someone else can wash them. We always ask for the administration to trust us, to treat us like adults. But only a child would throw away a reusable plate or leave it somewhere expecting a real adult to clean up after them.
Editor’s Note: Thresher editorials are collectively written by the members of the Thresher’s editorial board. Current members include Ben Baker-Katz, Morgan Gage, Bonnie Zhao, Hajera Naveed, Nayeli Shad, Riya Misra, Michelle Gachelin, Daniel Schrager, Prayag Gordy and Brandon Chen.
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