Legibility and MIT's Mandatory Meal Plans

2528 words | ~ 12 min read | Jul 8, 2020 | last modified Aug 22, 2020 | disability MIT

Update 22-Aug-2020: i fuckin' called it

MIT’s policy for allowing students back on campus in the fall is upsetting a lot of students for a lot of reasons. I won’t go into detail about most of these here, since I wanted to focus on one thing: the meal plan is now mandatory for all students who live in dorms, who are no longer permitted to use the kitchens. And if you are an undergraduate not living in the dorms you are not allowed to access campus (yes, even if your apartment with its private kitchenette is a 5-minute walk from campus, and yes, even though the admins hinted strongly that space concerns were the main limitation preventing them from allowing more students back on campus, with the result that a lot of students have already signed leases for off-campus apartments).

(Worth noting at this point: the main way COVID gets transmitted is droplets or airborne viruses, and surfaces are a lot less of a concern. Using a dining hall means you have to: go to a poorly-ventilated place, hand a dining hall employee your ID so they can swipe it at the machine and you can breathe at each other, get in a line with a bunch of other people to get your food, potentially talk to the stir-fry chef if you’re in the stir-fry line, and either sit down at a table in a room with a bunch of other people to eat your food or put it in a takeout box and eat it in your room. There are five dining halls, and probably at least 1000 students will be on campus in the fall; the dining halls can not possibly be configured so that only one student is in there at a time, never mind the dining employees! Meanwhile, if there’s, say, 20 people to a kitchen in a cook-for-yourself dorm, you could reasonably create a sign-up sheet to make sure only two people, who both live on the same floor and use the same bathrooms, can be in the kitchen at a time at any given time. Or only one person, if you’re very paranoid – at 20 people per kitchen, you can give everyone one-hour evening slots a few times a week to cook a few meals' worth of food, or 15-minute slots every morning and night to quickly fry something or use the microwave. Or let people on the floor form pods, and relax social distancing measures within the pod, so that the pod can all be in the kitchen at the same time. I’m a robotics engineer, Jim, not an epidemiologist, but I think it very well might be safer to have everyone in cook-for-yourself dorms use their floor kitchens, under some system where you minimize the number of people in the kitchen simultaneously. But this is somewhat beside the point – I want to discuss the implications of the current rules as they exist.)

Of course, Disability Services will help people who have life-threatening allergies or other dietary restrictions that affect their ability to eat dining hall food. (I don’t know how exemptions for religious dietary restrictions work so I’m going to stick to discussing medical-related ones.) This is already a thing they do on a regular basis. If you have documentation from a medical professional, and if you contact their office and go through their vetting process, they will go to bat for you and help you to the best of their ability. I love MIT Disability Services so much. Most other campus disability services offices are in the business of providing the minimum possible legally mandated amount of help and dragging their feet about it so much that a student may as well just drop out unless they’re very determined and have some amount of legal clout on their side. (MIT Mental Health is also astoundingly good – just look at Stanford! Their mental health department, until they were sued out of doing it, systematically pushed depressed students to take leaves of absence so that when they commit suicide at least it’s not on campus so it doesn’t make Stanford look bad. But that’s another post for another time1.) I will sing the praises of SDS any day of the week. (Did you know that if you have a temporary injury you should also talk to SDS and they’ll help you figure out how to access the stuff you need? Did you know that if you’re e.g. trans and incredibly dysphoric about taking the swim test, SDS can help you get an alternative private swim test? Even if it’s a problem you don’t think SDS can help with, I super recommend sending them an email and setting up a meeting. They know a lot about MIT and they’re doing their best to help.)

Also, when I first met with SDS about my auditory processing disorder as a freshman, I brought a file folder with eight separate things in it including reports from two different audiologists with lists of accommodations they recommended for me. And they still couldn’t provide one of the accommodations I’d requested (it would’ve apparently represented an undue burden on professors to have to provide notes to me in advance of lecture so I could follow along; they do have a well-used mechanism in place for hiring other students to take notes for you and send them after class, but I declined it). I probably didn’t need to provide quite this much documentation, but it’s safer if your disability is so rock-solidly documented there’s no room for them to deny it. I don’t know if abled people, by and large, know how big an uphill fight it is to get the accommodations you need. Even with people like SDS who are on your side and want to do their best for you.

So what if…

If you’re familiar with the concept of legibility, this sounds like another refrain of the same old song. People who have dietary restrictions that are legible to Disability Services can get accommodations2. And the way you make things legible to Disability Services is to go through the medical system, with all its many and varied modes of failure. I believe that the fine people of MIT Disability Services will honestly do their best, under the circumstances, to help people who have undocumented or underdocumented or just plain weird dietary restrictions. But that’s kind of a shaky guarantee!

Now, under normal circumstances, this is already a thing SDS deals with frequently. This is because the current meal plan requires all freshmen in dorms with dining halls to be on the meal plan. Under normal circumstances, if you can’t get this exemption and you want to cook for yourself anyway, you can go live in one of the cook-for-yourself dorms. Right now, if you really need an exemption and can’t get one, you’re completely and totally fucked, because you have to be on the meal plan to live in ANY dorm, and you have to live in a dorm (FSILGs not included) to access campus. If you urgently need physical campus access for your senior capstone project, or an important lab class that will throw off your whole plan to graduate if postponed, or your UROP project that will get you into grad school, well, uh, better figure out a way to cope with MIT Dining poisoning you.

Or get your food from somewhere else – but you’ll still be required to pay for a 14-meal-a-week meal plan (most of the dining halls serve breakfast and dinner). Oh, yes, the meal plan is discounted! The meal plan is discounted, because we care so much about low-income students. It’s discounted by 40%, so you’ll only have to pay 60% of the normal sticker price. For 14 meals a week, assuming 15 weeks a semester, the discounted meal plan costs $9/meal; my friend who meal-preps tells me you can cook-for-yourself for about $2/meal, so already this is going to cause problems for some number of students who don’t even have any of the ~problematic~ dietary restrictions I’m focusing on here. (Theoretically, financial aid, if you get a financial aid package with a dining allowance, will pay for the meal plan plus a little extra so you can buy yourself some lunches on campus.)

So, let’s say you’re a student and you really need campus access and you can’t live with the consequences (figuratively or literally) of eating dining-hall food but you also can’t get an exemption. You will still have to pay for your unused, discounted mealplan, and since you can’t use the kitchens unless you have Special Permission (for example to make a birthday cake! As if the dorm communities that make each other birthday cakes are surviving this intact! So you can get poisoned on a daily basis by dining, but at least you and your friends, assuming any of your friends are on campus, can have a nice little socially distanced birthday party in a kitchen that has been carefully disinfected before and after!) – as I was saying, since you can’t use the kitchens without Special Permission, your actual food source will have to be something like the Chipotle Meal Plan, which gets very expensive very fast. Or perhaps you will illegally keep a microwave and an electric teapot and an Instant Pot in your room and survive on whatever eldritch concoctions you can make that way. Or maybe you’ll pick the lock on the kitchen door so that you can secretly scramble yourself a plate of eggs every morning. While, of course, paying for the food you can’t eat – the stuff that, tauntingly, looks like food and smells like food, but isn’t food to you – from the discounted mealplan.

With the comforting knowledge that the only thing MIT has to say to students like you is: let them eat cake.

See: MIT Fall 2020 FAQ, particularly the section “Will cook-for-yourself undergraduate communities have everyday access to kitchens?”

In case Rafael Reif is actually reading this – whenever you’re making an announcement like this, you need to include as one of the FAQs a detailed description of your appeal process for dealing with exemption requests that aren’t legible to any other part of the system. You need to say explicitly what documentation you want to see, if any, and under what circumstances you would waive the requirement for documentation. Preferably you should also give a few examples of exemptions you would give and exemptions you wouldn’t give. I know you hate this. I know you want to be vague about it so you can do things on a case-by-case basis and exercise your professional judgment3 and maintain as much flexibility as possible. But I need you to understand: for us as students who need to plan, a vague “maybe” is the same as a no. Have enough courage and kindness to tell us where the line is, and enough humility to admit that you can’t lay down any kind of law without someone getting caught in an edge case so you’d better have a good process for dealing with it.

If you haven’t done this because you didn’t realize you’d need a robust appeal process, or you haven’t considered how to design it at all – to me, that’s a fireable, unforgivable offense.

(Hey, look, guys, I finally figured out Markdown footnotes!)

  1. Okay, turns out I’m not quite done. Schools like MIT and Caltech have a reputation for being very difficult and very stressful and having a high suicide rate. While it’s true that MIT is pretty stressful, for undergrads we also have institutions like Student Support Services and Student Disability Services, and mental health from MIT Medical is free. Many students take leaves of absence when necessary and the administration has put in some effort into making sure the process of returning from the leave goes reasonably smoothly. Unfortunately, I think grad students are a bit more hung out to dry – but I’m not [quite] one so I can’t really testify. Also, if your mental health issues are related to being LGBT+, MIT Medical is really quite good on trans healthcare, and many dorms/living communities have high LGBT+ populations. I don’t think mental health in general is super high on anyone’s radar when they’re choosing colleges, but I think it should be – and I think on this axis MIT does really well. If you’d like to talk to me personally about anything related to mental health or disability services at MIT, I’d be delighted to expand more on this over email. ↩︎

  2. Eventually I am going to write a post about invisible disabilities and legibility and the concept of “faking it”. This was going to be that post, but it turns out I had other things to say. ↩︎

  3. This is a joke, referring to every major campus issue that’s happened over the past four years but especially to the way MIT handled exemption requests to the March move of kicking everyone off campus. One of my hallmates had no family outside of China and MIT’s response was to ask her to “get creative” and consider sleeping on a friend’s couch. For the rest of the semester. While still somehow getting enough coursework done to graduate. ↩︎