If you were to ask Batesies why they chose Bates, a lot of them will say the same thing: community. Bates prides itself on its diversity and close knit community, yet people want to remove it, with some students wanting Bates to have an athlete-only dining hall. I think that doing so would be a grave mistake.
Approximately 40% of Bates students are competing as varsity athletes (Bates College, 2017), with even more students participating in club or intramural sports. Most student athletes do everything with their teams; they work out together, they practice together, they party together and they sit together at Commons. Student athletes are virtually sequestered from the ‘NARPS’ (Non-Athletic Regular Persons), or simply put, the other 60% of the student body.
Commons is an important part of the Bates experience. If you were to go on a tour of Bates, a talking point you would hear is that Commons is the only dining hall on campus. Meaning everyone eats there; faculty, the debate team, the sailing team, the radio and yes, even the athletes. This is not done by accident, it’s done to help foster the community that exists naturally because of Bates’ size.
Now, putting aside how I might feel about a separate dining hall socially, let’s think about it rationally. A separate dining hall would be costly and environmentally damaging.
Food waste is one of the worst problems contributing to environmental degradation. Bates hit carbon neutrality in 2019, with the Commons dining program being a contributing factor to that sustainability with a waste diversion rate of over 80%. While this could still be achieved with a second dining hall, it would be much harder.
Building and sustaining another dining hall would also be extremely expensive. Building Commons in 2008 cost Bates College $24 million to build (PUPN, 2015). Adjusted for inflation, that would be approximately $35,090,565.39 in 2024.
Bates Dining Services also employees about 90 people, a number that would have to double to sustain another dining hall. Aside from double the amount of people to pay, there is also double the amount of food to buy to fill both dining halls.
An athlete-only dining hall could be summed up in one word: ineffective. Commons is cost effective, environmentally effective and socially effective. Commons helps promote the Bates “community-minded ethos,” according to Christine Schwartz, assistant vice president of dining, conferences and campus events at Bates when she spoke to Private University Products and News in 2015. Why would we spend so much money, help in the destruction of our planet and lose a big part of Bates for a select group of 700 students?
