Largely left out of the public discourse and decisions related to Dorm Crew? The legions of students-past and present-who participated in the program. For the first time in memory, when students return to campus this month, they won’t be greeted by the usual sight of hundreds of welcoming peers sporting “Sanitas” shirts and wielding mops and buckets. The organization, if it wanted to continue to exist, needed to find a new home outside of the facilities and maintenance department. In April of this year, Harvard announced that all Dorm Crew cleaning would stop. In the winter of 2019, the university halted all Dorm Crew bathroom cleaning during the school year, later saying the decision stemmed from the pandemic, even though, in reality, the decision predated it. After all, the optics Dorm Crew’s critics presented were terrible: a form of forced servitude imposed only on the school’s most vulnerable students for the benefit of its most elite.Īfter 70 years of being Harvard’s trusted workhorse, Dorm Crew suddenly had a bull’s-eye on its back, one placed there not by students in Dorm Crew themselves but by onlookers. It didn’t matter the backlash was swift and unsurprising. Students from different socioeconomic backgrounds joined Dorm Crew, enticed by the high hourly wages-the last going rate for bathroom cleaning was $16.25 an hour. What the Tweet got wrong was that students were only required to engage in two hours of weekly cleaning to participate in the program during the school year and that they were not exclusively low-income students who participated. A viral tweet by Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University, followed and intensified these discussions: “Low-income students at HARVARD working 20 hours a week in their first year of college cleaning goddamn dorms?” It didn’t take much to connect it to Dorm Crew. As an example, Jack critiqued a student custodial organization with the fictionalized name “Community Detail” at an unspecified Ivy college for furthering class and racial divisions on campus and shared anonymized student accounts depicting its “disgusting” and “dehumanizing” work.
Still, that legacy came under scrutiny in 2019 when Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at Harvard, published the book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Underprivileged Students, revealing the struggles of less privileged students at top-tier universities.
During much of its existence, roughly one out of five Harvard undergrads worked Dorm Crew in some capacity before graduating. For decades, Dorm Crew provided some of the best-paying jobs on campus: cleaning student bathrooms throughout the fall and spring terms and cleaning dormitories at the beginning and end of the school year. A division of Harvard’s Facilities Maintenance Operations, Dorm Crew had been employing students for custodial work in dormitories since the 1950s. This was Dorm Crew, a student employment and leadership program once cited as the largest-and one of the oldest-student-run fee-for-service organizations in the world. For most of us, it was the first time we’d ever cleaned a toilet. Up to her elbow in its deepest, darkest caverns, she expertly showcased scrubbing techniques perfected over generations. Our “captain,” as she was called, submerged her green-and-yellow sponge into the water below.
#Hidden water dorms series#
She wore a vibrant red T-shirt with what closely resembled the Harvard shield, but instead of the university’s Latin motto “Veritas,” it read “Sanitas.” We hung on her every word as if still trying to impress the latest in a series of admissions gatekeepers. In front of us, a self-assured sophomore with a messy blond bun held a sponge above a filthy toilet and led us in a sacred ritual. I stood in a line of fellow giddy 18-year-olds who, at least on paper, were among the world’s best and brightest. My first taste of the so-called Harvard experience occurred the week before school started. Photo illustration by Benjamen Purvis / Photo via StockSnapper/Getty Images
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