Students who dine on campus are in for a rude awakening: The very university agency designed to enforce health laws continues to operate with impunity, doing more to protect food vendors than consumers.

A year ago, the Guardian exposed widespread violations by campus eateries of a state law requiring vendors to have the facilities’ health inspection reports on hand and to alert customers of their right to review the reports.

To this day, these wholesale violations continue, and the university’s Environment, Health and Safety Department serves as a knowing accomplice.

In most localities, law enforcement and restaurant inspections are conducted by a neutral county agency.

This, however, is not true of the university. Instead, the fox is guarding the chicken coop: On one hand, the university leases facilities to vendors, but on the other, it also bears the responsibility of inspecting them.

The consequence of this conflict of interest became clear this fall, when the department chose to suppress from the public the low scores of campus eateries under an updated inspection method, despite state law defining the reports as public records.

According to the department’s specialist Bruce Bowers, his agency would wait until vendors raised their scores to publicly release their grades.

Consumers should not be forced to rely on a student paper using the California Public Records Act to gain access to records originally designed for their use. The job of a health agency is to enforce health codes and provide information to the public; in both cases, the Environment, Health and Safety Department has failed.