Jeremy Reed studied the daily lives of custodians for his dissertation at the U. of Iowa. Now director of admissions at the U. of Wisconsin at Whitewater, he says that colleges should ask such workers in job interviews about “their potential ability to interact and build mentoring relationships with students.”Courtesy Jeremy Reed
A frequently ignored segment of the campus work force drew the spotlight recently with the controversy over Yale University’s treatment of Corey Menafee, a dining-services worker who had purposely broken a stained-glass window depicting slavery. Rarely has as much attention been focused on the views of the low-wage workers who keep college campuses running.
Jeremy J. Reed knows what it’s like to wear work boots on a campus. As an undergraduate at Loras College, where he was a first-generation student heavily dependent on federal aid, he labored as a painter for the Iowa campus’s maintenance department.
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Jeremy Reed studied the daily lives of custodians for his dissertation at the U. of Iowa. Now director of admissions at the U. of Wisconsin at Whitewater, he says that colleges should ask such workers in job interviews about “their potential ability to interact and build mentoring relationships with students.”Courtesy Jeremy Reed
A frequently ignored segment of the campus work force drew the spotlight recently with the controversy over Yale University’s treatment of Corey Menafee, a dining-services worker who had purposely broken a stained-glass window depicting slavery. Rarely has as much attention been focused on the views of the low-wage workers who keep college campuses running.
Jeremy J. Reed knows what it’s like to wear work boots on a campus. As an undergraduate at Loras College, where he was a first-generation student heavily dependent on federal aid, he labored as a painter for the Iowa campus’s maintenance department.
With fond memories of the support and encouragement he had received from other blue-collar workers on the campus, he later decided to study custodians as a doctoral student in higher education and student affairs at the University of Iowa. For his dissertation, completed last year, he shadowed four long-serving custodians on their rounds at a large Midwestern public university, which his research protocol precludes him from naming.
The Chronicle caught up with Mr. Reed this week at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, where he is now director of admissions, to ask him about his custodian study. Following is an edited and condensed transcript of that interview.
Q. How did you conduct your study?
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A. My adviser and I ended up calling it “modified participant observation.” I wanted to really privilege the voices of my participants. I felt that a qualitative study, that allowed me to get in and spend time with custodians, was going to give me the best opportunity to connect with them and get to know them.
I wasn’t allowed, because of HR concerns, to get in and actually work alongside them. But, as my study indicates, I spent over 70 hours following my participants around, and opening doors for them with a note pad, and pressing elevator buttons and interacting with them.
Q. What types of interactions with students did you observe?
A. I ended up kind of classifying them into two categories. The sort of institutionally endorsed or institutionally assigned duties involved interacting with students in a way that was observing them and keeping an eye out for them in terms of their health — cleaning up after spills and maintaining restrooms, for example.
The other side, that I was more intrigued by, was the employee-assumed duties — those duties that they sort of informally took on for themselves. I saw them interacting in ways that were advising.
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I saw a lot of nurturing interactions, that included questions about how students were feeling.
My favorite interaction was when one of my custodians saw a group of students who were dressed in a shirt and tie, and didn’t know how to tie their tie. He came over and ended up giving them encouraging advice about an interview they were preparing for.
I saw a lot of nurturing interactions, that included questions about how students were feeling, because they remembered a few days earlier a student had not looked well or had indicated they were sick. I saw participating actions as well — custodians sort of wanting a sense that they feel included in the events of the hallways.
Q. Were the custodians given substantial leeway by their supervisors to interact with students, or were their social interactions on the job seen as distractions that made them inefficient?
A. I get a sense that custodians knew their priority, of course, was getting their job done. But they also knew that they were allowed to interact with students. They sort of squeeze in those interactions informally.
Q. Other research on custodians has characterized them as the victims of frequent microaggressions. Did the people you studied often feel treated with disrespect?
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A. I certainly did not witness any sort of interaction that I interpreted as negative. In fact, I heard the custodians speak very highly of students, and have an appreciation for the work that they do. I have to think that if they felt a lot of stigma directly from students, or the majority of students, then they would not speak highly of students and would not seem to enjoy interacting with them.
This special report examines several workplace issues where strong communication is key, including anxiety over “campus carry” laws that allow students in some states to bring guns to class and a growing faculty effort to seek new ways of demonstrating the value of scholarly work. Read more.
Q. The custodians that you examined were recommended by a supervisor as research subjects. Are you at all worried that they are unrepresentative of other custodians on the campus and that focusing on them painted a distorted picture?
A. Sure, that is a possibility. As a qualitative researcher, I am never going to claim generalizability. I wanted folks who would be communicative, who would share their thoughts, who would talk and would interact. My goal was to paint a very detailed picture of who those individuals are.
Q. All of the custodians that you studied were white. Were most of the students on their campus white as well? Might your research have yielded different findings if the populations that you studied had been more racially and ethnically diverse?
A. I picked a public state institution that has a pretty typical representation in terms of majority and nonmajority students. If I had purposely selected a group of custodians of color, then I am guessing they would have communicated potentially different experiences, depending, too, on the population of the students they are interacting with.
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Q. You end up concluding that college administrations should offer custodians training to help them play a bigger part in students’ lives. What role would you envision custodians playing, and what type of training would get them there?
A. I talk about some basic first-response training, anything from first aid to crisis intervention. I describe a custodian who was the first to respond to a student who had been the victim of sexual assault. That particular custodian didn’t have formal training — she did pretty well in supporting and nurturing the student, but could have benefited from formal crisis-intervention training.
Custodians and resident advisers ‘are literally on the front lines with students in a very intimate environment.’
The partnership between student resident advisers and custodians could be enhanced, making sure that the resident advisers know the custodians. Both of those groups are literally on the front lines with students in a very intimate environment.
Maybe a little bit more controversial would actually be considering during interviews — at the hiring process — their potential ability to interact and build mentoring relationships with students.
Q. Some of the custodians you studied had turned down promotions to positions in which they would have managed their co-workers. Do you think they will want to take on the added responsibilities associated with formally playing a bigger role in students’ lives?
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A. It is really going to depend on the custodian, the extent to which they are comfortable and excel at mentoring relationships.
It probably would be most effective in, in particular, a large state institution. Thinking about where the most at-risk students are — looking at your first-year residence halls, for example — and having there your more dynamic and engaging campus custodians, that maybe naturally gravitate to, and are more energized by, nurturing and mentoring interactions.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
Peter Schmidt was a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He covered affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. He is a co-author of The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press, 2020).
