What this school, Johns Hopkins University, needs is some sort of system to address student grievances. All the time, we are left out of the loop. They think they are addressing are our needs, but as the bathroom locks show, they are clueless. They didn’t even inform us about the bathroom locks. We should’ve received an e-mail about it beforehand.

Terrace food court (cafeteria) at least attempts this. They have a Comment Board. You write comments, stick it on the board, and they reply. Unfortunately, if we want to leave any other type of complaint, it’s impossibly complicated. I think we have to call security if we want something cleaned in the wee hours of the night. Even then, you’re lucky if it gets cleaned. And if it doesn’t get cleaned, who can you complain to?

I guess you can complain to RAB, the Resident Advisory Board, but that’s very inefficient. RAB meets only once a week. RAB ain’t exactly a very transparent institution, either. They tell us, “We’re working on it,” but I tend to distrust them. They didn’t fix the shower curtains. They kept talking and talking, and then when I finally put out my news-letter, and got some attention, then some stuff got done.

What we need is something transparent and easy to use. Something that’s available 24 hours. What we don’t need is another giant level of bureaucracy. Luckily, in these modern times, we have just the tool to implement such a system of addressing student grievances: the Internet. They could design one site for the purpose of addressing student grievances, and easily aggregate all the services, so students know what to do. So we don’t have to go through layers and layers, our RA, RAB, etc, etc. Because if Johns Hopkins really cared about the students, they’d let the students speak. They’d let us directly address our grievances.

How else am I going to tell MegaBytes that I can order “no tomato” on their specialty menu? This way, we can know if a problem is being looked at. We can know if anyone has raised this issue before. We can get an estimated date for resolution. It’s transparent and holds people accountable.

Of course, I doubt even this simple solution can be implemented when it takes them 3 weeks to even replace disgusting shower curtains. Fuck you, Johns Hopkins.