Something strange has been going on in the Dining and Community Commons. There are tablespoons now. Not just teaspoons for your coffee or soup spoons for your soup (which were terrible), but actual tablespoons, sitting in the utensil bin like they always belonged there. Sugar cones are back. The bacon, once a crime against pigs everywhere, is now something you can bite into without it disintegrating into shrapnel. Furthermore, breakfast, in all its glory, now runs until 11 a.m. instead of vanishing at 10 a.m., which matters enormously to anyone whose Tuesday/Thursday schedule was designed by a sadist.
And then there’s the fruit. As for the lack of fresh-cut fruit, there was the fruit fly excuse; dining services would love to serve it, sure, but you know, the flies, they just spawn if we have fruit there uncut for a long period. It was less a policy than a law of nature, like gravity or midterms. And yet: fresh-cut fruit, every day, with apparently no biblical fly infestation to show for it.
None of this happened gradually. It happened because Swarthmore Dining got a new executive director last year, and a lot of things that had apparently been broken for a while were fixed quickly as a result. Menu items that hadn’t changed in three years changed. A station that was supposed to be updated years ago, and never was, got updated. This is, by any reasonable account, a regime change. A successful one, at that.
I’ve wanted to write a piece around this theme for a while and never did, because I know what happens the moment people see the phrase “regime change.” Eyes glaze, minds close, and the piece ends up preaching to no one. But it turns out there’s one hook that beats even the deepest political fatigue: food. So, apologies in advance, but you’re getting this argument through bacon — the American way.
I bring this up not really because I think you need convincing that better bacon is good, actually, but because I’ve noticed that we, as an academic species, do not extend this logic to literally anything else. If a country has a bad government, the “sophisticated” take today is never, “maybe you should replace the government,” but instead, “they need to reform from within,” or “change has to come from the people, organically, not be imposed.” Or, in its most fatalistic form, “that’s just how it is there, and outsiders swapping out the leadership won’t fix a broken [society].” The last part is typically subtextual in leftist discourse but still strongly implied anyway, and right wingers aren’t really shy about saying it.
But nobody said any of this about the dining hall. Nobody stood outside the DCC last spring insisting that the salad bar needed to find its own path to reform, or that real change had to be staff-led and could not simply be handed down from a new hire with a background in dining logistics. If they had, we’d still be waiting for tablespoons.
I say this half-jokingly, because a dining hall is not a country, and I don’t want to be the person who takes a bacon anecdote and builds a foreign policy doctrine out of it (even though “the bacon doctrine” would slap hard). In the dining hall case, nobody was chained to the old regime’s failures, so the moral stakes are close to zero, and swapping leadership carries basically no risk of a violent power vacuum. Those differences matter. When the thing being reformed is a nation instead of a cafeteria, a botched leadership change can have staggering costs, and “just replace the president” has a much worse track record than “just replace the dining director.” Sometimes those costs end up being greater than the continuation of the status quo. I’m not arguing that outside intervention is generally a good idea. It usually isn’t, and the last few decades have given us plenty of reasons to be skeptical.
But I think the skepticism has calcified into something closer to a reflex, and the reflex leads people to assume things that aren’t always true. They assume the people currently in charge are the legitimate, somewhat organic expression of the people they govern, rather than, say, an entrenched leadership that got there by force and stayed there by suppressing anyone who disagreed. They assume “the people on the ground” and “the leadership” are the same constituency with shared goals and merely internal disagreements, when often the workers and the people being led are exactly the ones with the least power to change anything from within. And they assume that bad outcomes are a fact of nature (“dining halls are just always bad”) rather than a fact of management, which is a very convenient thing to believe if you’d rather not do anything and aren’t particularly harmed by the status quo (like college admin).
None of this means changing leadership is easy, or that it goes well by default. The dining hall case worked because someone came in with an actual plan and asked the people who worked there what wasn’t working. That’s the harder and more interesting lesson: not that imposed change is good or bad but that change done carelessly fails, and change done well can succeed. Unfortunately, though, that doesn’t fit a good political slogan for 21st century American wars.
Anyways. Enjoy your cut fruit and eat as much rice as you want with your tablespoons, all without a note telling you to come back later for more. Someone finally proved you could.
