Letters to the Editor | Cooperative living arrangements can help build character and community

My high school didn’t have a custodian. With 40-odd students, Lake Champlain Waldorf didn’t have a lot of things—bathrooms with stalls, a gym, a principal—but the lack of a custodian was deliberate and perfectly logical: why pay someone to clean when every afternoon you could wring 20 minutes of child slave labor from your tuition-paying students? Plus, the teachers maintained, cleaning our own school built character.

Having lived for four years under this regime, I am duly impressed by sanitation at Vassar, where boot tracks evaporate and wadded paper towels levitate off the floor while I sleep. For my 40-plus grand a year, the buildings in which I study, live, and eat are not only cleaned by someone else, but by someone who works in the wee hours, so I never have to see the dirty work being done.

On the rare occasions when I’ve been in the College Center at 2 or 3 a.m., I feel as if I’ve blundered into a parallel Vassar, where red-eye cleaning details replace students, wheeled mop buckets rattle over expanses of tile, and terse exchanges, turning on the union and the contract, echo in the deserted halls.

The visibility or invisibility of labor is a theme that clearly concerns the College. This concern is built into the structure of All Campus Dining Center, where open cooking windows let you monitor your omelet-maker while the conveyor belt conveys the impression that no human hand is involved in the transmutation of dirty dishes into clean ones. (In high school, dish duty was a chance to chat with friends and with the single cook, who also taught gardening classes.)

It is clear to me now that cleaning the spaces one uses is less about building character than about building community. There’s something bizarre and unnerving about living in a community that is bifurcated into those who maintain the infrastructure and those who use it. Some odd behaviors result from this bifurcation. Vassar students are, for the most part, a considerate and social lot, yet most feel free to toss their used paper towels on the floor when the bin fills up, because there is effectively no social contract between the students and the person who will pack the used towels into the bag and carry them away at three o’clock in the morning. This lack of a social relationship is probably felt by the nighttime trash haulers, who know the people they serve only by what those people discard.

A night shift may be the only practical way to clean public buildings that are crowded most of the day and evening, and transforming Vassar’s dorms into student-cleaned co-ops, like those that house and feed 25 percent of Oberlin students, would present a number of problems, from violating union contracts to lousy sanitation. Still, I can’t help but wish that more of us could spend at least a semester or two before our senior year taking care of the spaces we use, through some sort of cooperative living arrangement. We’d come to know the places we live, and the people we live with, in a whole new way.

—Robbie McKay ’09