Christmas came early this year for headline writers at some conservative news sites.
“Sarah Lawrence Students Demand Free Fabric Softener to Combat Racism,” read a Daily Caller headline. “Liberal NY College Students Demand Administrators Deal With ‘Racist White Professors,’ Provide Free Detergent,” Fox News added. “Tide Pods for The People! Sarah Lawrence College Protesters Demand Free Detergent (And a Kangaroo Court for a Conservative Professor),” wrote the political blog Hot Air.
This week, student activists at Sarah Lawrence College — one of the priciest colleges in the nation — began a sit-in to push for a sprawling list of demands that include better resources for students of color and a more diverse faculty. Calling itself the Diaspora Coalition, the group behind the protest occupied a campus building and released a 3,500-word manifesto. Many conservative media zeroed in on 21 of those words: “All campus laundry rooms are to supply laundry detergent and softener on a consistent basis for all students, faculty, and staff.”
The line was ripe for ridicule. Here you have entitled, presumably well-off activists at an expensive private liberal-arts college wanting others to pay for their laundry. As the Hot Air story put it, “I guess fabric softener can now be added to the list of things that are human rights?” To many, it felt unreasonable. Is it?
Sharon, a junior history major who is part of the Diaspora Coalition, does not fit the trope of a well-to-do Sarah Lawrence student. (She requested that her last name not be used for fear of an online backlash.) Her mother, who died when Sharon was 16, was a maid and a Kmart employee. Her father is a construction worker. She could not have attended Sarah Lawrence, a college she was attracted to because of its small class sizes, if she hadn’t pieced together several scholarships and grants.
More Sarah Lawrence students fit that description than some might realize. Seventeen percent of students at the college receive Pell Grants, according to U.S. Education Department data. Sarah Lawrence’s share of students from families in the bottom 20 percent of earners is 7.5 percent, the fourth-highest among highly selective private colleges, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the Equality of Opportunity Project, a group of academics who track inequality in America.
For those students, one load of laundry per week adds up, Sharon said. A washing cycle at Sarah Lawrence costs $1.50, a drying cycle another $1.50. That’s on top of detergent. The price tag could be more than $800 over a four-year stay, a burden heavier on low-income students who already struggle to finance their educations. Lost in the avalanche of ridicule for the demand are legitimate questions about what responsibility colleges have to assist with the basic living needs of their students.
“What you’re hearing in the laundry conversation is that every dollar counts,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a Temple University sociologist who studies socioeconomic and racial inequities. “They’re not saying they expect others to pay for everything. They’re saying the amount they’re being asked to pay is too high. It’s not coming from a sense of entitlement. It frankly reflects a sense of desperation.”
The social-media backlash to the laundry demand represents “a longstanding story of blaming people for not having the money for covering their basic needs,” Goldrick-Rab said, “and characterizing them as lazy and needy. We’ve done the same thing to welfare recipients and Pell Grant recipients. Now we’re doing it to the middle class.”
There’s a large struggling middle class that is neither wealthy nor eligible for Pell Grants, Goldrick-Rab said. While Sarah Lawrence offers tuition discounts, cost-of-living expenses could still be a major financial hit for a middle-class family.
Sarah Lawrence is figuring out how to respond to the demands. Sharon said administrators had met with the activists and are ironing out a time to discuss the demands, but have not committed to meeting any of them. A message left for the administration at Sarah Lawrence was not returned on Friday.
A New Emphasis on Income
The protest at Sarah Lawrence follows a wave of student activism that crested more than three years ago at colleges across the country, including the University at Missouri at Columbia, where students raised concerns about their campuses’ racial climates and pressed for more resources for underrepresented students and greater faculty diversity. But the Sarah Lawrence protest is placing a stronger emphasis on housing and food insecurity, pushing the college to rethink what it means to support low-income students.
Read The Chronicle's coverage of how the tensions have played out, and how administrators have tried to resolve them, on campuses around the United States.
At the top of the list are demands to provide winter-break housing for students, who now have to find a place to stay off campus. That places students without family support in a bind. The list also includes a request that the college provide free meals for students when on-campus dining options are closed, “including vegetarian, gluten-free, vegan, halal, and kosher options.”
Over the past five years, college administrators have started paying far more attention to supporting low-income students, said Kevin Kruger, president of Naspa-Student Affairs Professionals in Higher Education. This, he said, is the product of a variety of factors, including better data about the “shocking prevalence of food and housing insecurity,” bigger gaps between Pell Grant assistance and the actual cost of an education, and the recognition that completion rates of low-income students continue to lag at a time when more such students are going to college.
“There’s an acknowledgment that financial aid is not enough sometimes,” Kruger said. “Some of the barriers to completion for low-income students go well beyond tuition, and they often go to basic needs. There’s a recognition that a small financial crisis of between $200 to $400 may be enough to derail a student’s enrollment.”
The challenge at Sarah Lawrence over the laundry debate, Kruger said, is that for some students, free detergent and softener simply means more economic privilege. How can the college distinguish between students who really need it and those who don’t? He also wonders whether free laundry products for college students sends the right message to the public.
“Laundry is a true financial need for some students, but the optics are really bad,” he said. “At a time when the public is very skeptical about lazy rivers and all the privileges that college students have, free laundry has a negative connotation to it.”
The college is in a tough spot. Though expensive to attend, it is not wealthy, with an endowment of $112 million and a heavy dependence on tuition for its operating expenses. Though it received a big chunk of attention, the detergent-and-softener demand might be one of the easiest for the college to meet. Others, such as providing housing for students during winter break and hiring new employees to focus on equity issues, would have a higher price tag.
Goldrick-Rab said Sarah Lawrence may have to make tough decisions in the near future, the kind that many small private liberal-arts colleges are grappling with. Perhaps tiny class sizes, a high cost, and economic diversity aren’t all possible, she said.
“If class sizes get bigger, can they do more things?” she said. “Or is that sacrilege? Would students be willing to have slightly larger class sizes in order to have more of their basic needs met? These are important questions. They’re going to have to balance their books somehow.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education, the travails of professors, and how college facilitates social mobility. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
