When sleek black identification card readers replaced the old paper grids on checkers' desks in September, some house masters were skeptical about the future of relations between staff and students.

They still are.

Now the issue of ever-weakening staff-student relation is popping up on meeting agendas all across campus--from house committees to next weekend's Dining Services management retreat.

"It seems like somebody automated something for automation's sake," said Lowell House Master William H. Bossert. "I'm really upset with the policy."

House masters said the card access system is difficult because it is inflexible. Bossert said it is difficult to add friends of the house--the Lowell House Opera conductor, for example--to the system for meals.

But more importantly, many house masters said the card system has weakened an already shaky sense of house solidarity.

Before the electronic system, checkers were all but forced to learn students' names so that they could check them off a huge chart as the students approached.

"I feel, perhaps incorrectly, that it has deleteriously affected the morale in the dining hall," Bossert said, adding that he has noticed "a very distinct cooling" in the relationship between faculty, staff and students.

The old system "was a point of very intimate contact and communication," Bossert said. "Now it's much more an 'us versus them' situation."

In the course of automation, the dining halls have lost their homey atmosphere. Students no longer have someone there to ask, "Gee, are you okay?" when they don't look well at breakfast, Bossert said.

"I like being greeted that way, rather than being treated as a number, to not be able to eat unless you hold a card out," Bossert said.

For house masters who have to obey the Dining Service's wishes, the options for remedying the situation are limited.

Kirkland House Master Donald Pfister said he asked that the ID reader display the house affiliation of the student, so that checkers would get to know who lived in the house and who didn't.

But this addition to the system has had a limited impact, as compared to the old system which required students to identify themselves to the checker, Pfister said.

Now both the students and the checkers lose the benefits of having more intimate contact.