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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

New 'shame campaign' targets problem of disappearing plates

The Communications Office has launched a new multimedia initiative to address the perennial problem of plates disappearing from the dining halls.  Described as a “shame campaign” by Vice President for Administration Tim Spears, who oversees Dining Services and spearheaded the initiative, it has been publicized using posters with QR codes, table tents, Facebook and Middblog and consists of a series of videos starring a character known as Aunt Des.

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The first video, called “Aunt Des Understands,” was released to YouTube on Oct. 11, with posters and table tents in the dining halls following soon after.  The second installment, “Aunt Des is Fired Up,” was released a week later. Both videos can be found at go/auntdes. In the videos, a mysterious woman with a heavy New Jersey accent vows to do something about students leaving dishes all over campus, a problem that costs Dining Services, according to director Matthew Biette, up to $50,000 to replace annually.
The project originated this summer after Spears asked the department to come up with a creative way to address the plate issue. Under its Community Standards and General Policies section, the Middlebury College Handbook describes how students may incur “a $35 fine and disciplinary proceedings” for removing dishes from the dining halls; however, as Spears explained, taking such a “law-and-order” approach would not only be unfeasible but would not send the message the administration wished to send.
“One of the reasons we decided to take this humor approach and not have a more straightforward, lecturing approach is because we want people to realize on their own that hey, this is wrong, and let’s do something about it,” said Communications Editorial Director Matt Jennings, who played a key role in developing the idea. “What we’re doing is taking a story, and injecting a little humor to get people to pay attention.”
According to Biette, the problem of disappearing dishes is worse now than in years past. In the first two weeks alone, 576 dishes were taken by students and never returned. Furthermore, besides the $50,000 price tag, many dishes that are eventually recovered — often from the Recycling Center, after students have thrown them in the trash — must be soaked in bleach for days to be thoroughly cleaned.
“We need to get people to understand that it’s bad,” said Biette. “Our budgets are finite. Just because you want more dishes doesn’t mean that I can buy more dishes.”
“It’s something that people can readily identify as problematic,” said Spears. “We all understand that in a household, everyone has to pitch in and clean up after themselves. So to see these plates all over the campus it’s like, you’ve got to be kidding me.  You weren’t raised to do this at home.
“I think everybody can relate to this issue,” Spears continued. “It’s not just a student issue, about what students can do in the privacy of their own rooms.  It’s affecting the entire campus — our custodial staff and Dining Services, you know, there’s an invisible component to this.”
After Spears suggested the idea to the Communications team, said Jennings, “we came back to our office, and a bunch of us sat around a table, and we put it on our queue and called it ‘the Plate Project.’”
They knew what types of media they planned to use: posters and table tents with QR codes — encoded symbols that, once a student takes a picture of it with his or her smart phone, links directly to a website, in this case one with a series of videos.
“It was kind of backwards in that we didn’t even know what the campaign was going to be, we didn’t even have the character yet, but we knew how we were going to deliver it,” said Jennings.
The Communications team knew it wanted the videos to star a certain College employee, who Jennings said will “remain unnamed.” The employee is a former stand-up comedian who specializes in impersonations, particularly one of her deceased aunt Despina, or Aunt Des for short. The real-life Aunt Des owned a diner in New Jersey.
“[The employee] had been regaling us with these Aunt Des impersonations for years in staff meetings,” said Jennings.  “We would touch on something in her consciousness that Aunt Des would chime in on, and she would channel Aunt Des for two or three minutes.”
“It’s all based on this person’s experience with her aunt,” said Spears. “She’s channeling something she absorbed as a child.”
After the Communications team decided that the videos should feature one character, “it was a unanimous decision right then,” Jennings said. “We all knew it would be the Aunt Des character.  Everyone said, ‘It’s got to be Aunt Des.’”
After approaching Biette to request his involvement in the videos, which he readily offered, Communications scripted the first two episodes and shot them almost concurrently in the Donald E. Axinn ’51 Center at Starr Library. Responsible for cinematography is the office’s digital media intern Nikhil Ramburn ’10, a Film and Media Culture major. It was Ramburn’s idea to film the videos in black-and-white except for Aunt Des’s red hair and nails.
According to Jennings, the first episode, in which Biette begs Aunt Des for help in dealing with the plate problem, is a “blatant homage” to the opening scene of The Godfather, in which the Godfather is filmed from behind as he hears an underling’s petition. In the second video, Aunt Des sings the Antoine Dodson “Bed Intruder” song as she prepares to attack the problem because the employee who plays her is “fascinated slash obsessed” with the song.
After releasing the first video and the advertising materials in the dining halls, Communications released the video to MiddBlog. A few days later, on Oct. 20, Audrey Tolbert ’13, a MiddBlog writer, posted her parody of the Aunt Des video, in which she impersonates Aunt Des.
“The videos are … just plain weird,” Tolbert wrote in an e-mail. “But what better way to get people to start talking about a boring subject like returning dishes than by making an absurd video campaign for the cause? Half the battle is just getting students to talk about the subject, and Aunt Des has certainly caused this.”
Indeed, on MiddBlog at least, the videos have caused some stir; at press time, “Aunt Des Understands” had 31 comments, more than any other recent MiddBlog post. The conversations occurring in the video comments reflect some of the controversy the Communications campaign has sparked.
Jennings rejected the idea, expressed in some of the comments, that the videos intend to disparage Middlebury students.
“The easiest thing to do when you don’t like the message being delivered is attack the messenger,” he said. “I thought some of those comments were attacking the video, the messenger, instead of saying, ‘Okay, let’s talk about the issue.’ But that’s what’s going to happen. It’s human nature, but I think it’s the exception rather than the norm.”
Jennings expressed enthusiasm for Tolbert’s parody.

“It’s great,” he said. “It was just like, yes.  Here are people who thought it was weird — yeah, we thought it was weird too — but they said, ‘Okay, let’s take it and run with it.’”
Communications plans to release three more Aunt Des episodes; beyond this, students can expect live appearances from Aunt Des in public places, such as Proctor Dining Hall.
“Aunt Des might actually show up at Proctor and do the Borat thing where’s she’s just out there in real life, talking to people, once she’s more well-known,” Jennings said. “She’ll be very funny that way.”
Spears repeatedly emphasized the plate problem’s moral aspect.
“In the ideal world, students will be encouraging one another to take their plates back,” said Spears. “It’s nonsense for administrators to be telling people to take their plates back.”
However, administration members are aware of the real possibility that the Aunt Des campaign may have no impact on student behavior.
“I don’t think we’re going to go from $50,000 to zero,” said Jennings. “I don’t think it’s going to get to a point where we’ll never see plates around.  But if we get to a point where people are more aware, if people are at least talking about this issue, if we’re disrupting the norm — that’s what we’re trying to achieve.”


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