Understaffed Dorm Crew Tries to Adjust

Benjamin R. Myers '02 hasn't had his bathroom cleaned in weeks.

"It smells," Myers says, surveying the room. "There's mildew on the floor. The trash can is overflowing, and the sinks are dirty. There's all kinds of garbage by the toilet."

His room in the Leverett House towers has only had one visit from Dorm Crew this year.

"We're in terrible trouble," says Myers' roommate, Steven R. Piraino '02. "We e-mailed the people from Dorm Crew, and there are exactly two people working on the entire Leverett complex."

The problem isn't limited to Leverett. Across campus, Dorm Crew is facing an unprecedented shortage of student workers, the downside of a generous new financial aid package and a booming economy.

Dorm Crew leaders and administrators are looking for solutions; in the meantime, they say they're doing the best they can. But don't expect the problem to be fixed anytime soon.

"Nobody feels like it's hard to find a job any more," says Jason J. Sunderson '01, one of Dorm Crew's two head captains. "Faced with three or four choices for how to raise money, cleaning bathrooms is probably not your first choice."

Down in the Dumps

Sunderson says Dorm Crew is only operating at 60 to 80 percent of its capacity of two years ago--which was not 100 percent to begin with.

And absenteeism compounds the problem. Dorm Crew leaders say they have no way of guaranteeing students actually work the hours they sign up for.

"There's not much we can do," says head captain Emily O. Matthews '01. "We get in contact with them and see if we can bend it around their schedule."

Coverage is uneven across Houses and other dorms. Students typically ask to work in the Houses they live in.

In Lowell House, where Matthews is the team leader, there are eight students working. Lowell residents say their bathrooms are cleaned more or less regularly.

But other Houses are far more neglected.

Many students in Adams, Mather and several Quad Houses say their rooms have only been visited once or twice this year. Residents of overflow housing like DeWolfe and Claverly Hall suffer as well.

"Eliot, some of the Quad Houses and Leverett are down around 50, maybe even 40 [percent capacity]," Sunderson says.

Wesley T. W. Shih '01, who lives in Cabot House, says his roommates have resorted to cleaning on their own.

"We just do it every couple weeks, he says. "We generally don't wash the shower, but we scrub the sinks."

Students say their complaints have been honored courteously and promptly.

"I was impressed by their responsiveness," says Marvin B. Tagaban '00, a Pforzheimer resident who e-mailed a complaint. "Within a couple of days a guy came and cleaned it up."

But that responsiveness intensifies the problem, diverting workers from their normal routes.

"You could argue it's not actually fair, because people who don't call don't get [their rooms] cleaned as quickly, but we want to take care of the biggest problems," Sunderson says.

Money Matters

The biggest culprit in the decline in workers is the College's new financial aid program.

The head captains say the program has significantly cut into their worker

base.

"I'm really happy the University gave more financial aid--it benefits me--but it does make it more difficult for us to run the organization," Matthews says.

Last September, Harvard boosted its commitment to undergraduate financial aid. Students received an extra $2,000 to reduce their loans or their required job commitments.

More than a third of students chose to reduce their job requirements, says

William R. Fitzsimmons '67, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid.

"We anticipated the possibility [of a decline in workers], and people in University Hall anticipated it as well," Fitzsimmons says.

But Fitzsimmons says that decline is the downside of giving undergraduates more flexibility.

"As a former Dorm Crew member myself, I found it a valuable experience," Fitzsimmons says. "But as much as I enjoyed Dorm Crew, the primary purpose of my being at Harvard was in other areas. Our first priority is academics."

Administrators don't know if students are actually working less.

Fitzsimmons notes that overall student earnings were virtually identical last year and the year before, although many students may have already lined up jobs when the program was announced.

But it does mean students don't have to get jobs if they choose not to, especially those just coming to Harvard who do not have established ties to campus jobs.

"Our sense is that fewer of the incoming freshmen felt the need to work," says Martha H. Homer, director of student employment.

Faced with an increasing variety of well-paid on-campus jobs, students aren't choosing Dorm Crew like they used to.

Dorm Crew has always paid more generously than many student jobs, a trend that has continued. The current base salary is $9 per hour, 15 cents higher than last year.

But the gap has narrowed as other employers upped wages. Sunderson says University Dining Services and the University Library, two of the biggest competitors for workers, now pay their workers about as well as Dorm Crew does.

And there's no competing against summer jobs in computers and technology, which are plentiful in today's surging economy.

Now that more students can find lucrative work during the summer, Homer says, they are less likely to choose manual labor when they return to Harvard.

Saving the System

The problem is more extensive than simply dirty bathrooms, Homer says.

She fears that without younger students joining Dorm Crew, the agency may be permanently crippled.

"If the economy turns around and students really do need more high-paying jobs, it's going to be hard to beef up again," Homer says. "A lot of the positive force in Dorm Crew comes from students working on it freshmen year and becoming managers in subsequent years...That's what keeps it going."

Sunderson says Dorm Crew is discussing solutions with Facilities Maintenance Operations (FMO), the administrative division responsible for upkeep of housing.

"Changes are coming, and they're coming soon, in the next two or three weeks," he says.

But Dorm Crew leaders themselves may have little role in most of the major choices.

"It's out of our hands--it's not up to us at all to make those sort of decisions," Matthews says.

FMO official Robert F. Wolfreys would not speculate on a precise timetable for changes. But he cautions that students should not expect a quick fix.

"What we've been telling people all along is that we're going to get to their bathroom as quickly as possible," Wolfreys says. "That still stands."

A program to recruit student organizations has met with limited success.

Wolfreys says two or three organizations have accepted Dorm Crew's offer of using group members as workers, a more predictable means of fundraising than planning dances or screening movies.

But even if more groups were participating, the program would still be a stopgap.

Among the long-term remedies being considered are a wage hike and even an increase in professional cleaning staff, a solution that would have to be approved by the Faculty, Sunderson says.

In Kirkland House, he notes, about half of the House is cleaned by custodians.

"We may do that in a few other places," Sunderson says.

Homer would like to see Dorm Crew's early fall clean-up receive as much publicity as the Freshman Arts Program or the Freshman Outdoors Program.

"The best way to attract people is to get a group of people out there saying, 'This is not bad work," Homer says.

Dorm Crew needs to sell itself not just as way to earn money, but as a pleasant job and even a resume enhancer, she says.

"There is good management career potential there," Homer says. "If you can get your classmates to clean bathrooms, when you graduate you can probably get anybody to do just about anything."

--Carol J. Garvan contributed to the reporting of this article.