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.
#FIND HIDDEN WATER IN THE DORM 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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