MiddCard's Future Raises Concerns About Executive Council

Author: Christoher Howard

I have just learned that the Executive Council plans on overhaul the MiddCard system, eliminating the chip and streamlining all transactions to the magnetic strip. This is said to bring Middlebury College into the 21st century, cut costs and keep Middlebury on par with other colleges across the country. When I heard the news, I was mostly apathetic, but I saw how this could improve the college's telematic network.
But there is also a second part of the plan, which is to eliminate the credit system, so that every transaction made with a MiddCard debits a previously filled student account. This, I thought, is going to make a lot of students unhappy.
They will be writing letters 10 a day in protest, and eventually the potentially disastrous idea of a debit system will be thrown out.
But will students ever write these letters? One of the things I have noticed during my time at Middlebury is that the Executive Council is very good at being unilateral and discreet when it wants to be. That is why it strategically made this decision at the end of the year, when people are too busy to debate it.
Has anybody seen mention of this decision in The Middlebury Campus? Has anybody heard any public discussion about it? Did anybody even know that Old Chapel was considering making these changes? There is a reason why the answers to all of these questions is no.
Here is why the new debit system will be so disastrous. First of all, money put in the debit accounts by students is non-refundable. This means that if I put $1,000 in the account at the beginning of the year, and I only use $500 of it, then I have just lost the other $500 to Middlebury College. Tough for me. As a way of avoiding this situation, and a lot of angry phone calls, the College will put a cap on the amount of money students will be allowed to deposit into their accounts. On other college campuses, this cap is set at $100.
This means that when it comes time to buy textbooks, students could be running back and forth from the bank to the Service Building to the Bookshop. Of course, most will avoid this scenario by just paying cash for the books upfront and avoiding the MiddCard entirely.
This is perfectly fine for students with cash, but what about the students who have in the past used the MiddCard as a way of easing the September and February shocks by gradually paying off their pin bills through money earned on campus jobs? Tough for them.
What about phone bills? Students who make a lot of long distance phone calls will either have to set up their own phone accounts and avoid the perfectly good Middlebury phone system, or they will have to make sure that their debit accounts are continuously topped off so that their phone conversations are not cut off when their accounts run out. The first time I am cut off from a long distance call with an employer or relative, Old Chapel will be hearing about it.
What bothers me most about this issue, though, is the lack of public discussion. The Executive Council decided to exclude the SGA from its decision, as well as the student body, even though this is obviously an issue that affects us all. At a private college, it is unacceptable for an Executive Council to behave like this. It is unacceptable for it to disallow public debate when it senses there could be massive disapproval.
It is unacceptable for it to play political games with students and student governments, making decisions in a clandestine manner at the end of the year when nobody is paying attention.
I for one have never felt so powerless on this campus since I came here. I do have one drawing card left however, which happens to be a drawing card held by plenty of other students.
For now is the time of year when parents and alumni are being hounded by college representatives to make philanthropic donations.
I know of one family that will not be making one.

Christopher Howard is an international politics and economics major from West Vancouver, Canada.