Shots In The Dark

Reuters reports on a small but symbolically telling controversy at Harvard: a new and administration-sanctioned service called Dormaid that allows students to hire a maid to clean their rooms. Yesterday the Crimson editorialized against Dormaid, arguing that the service would introduce another distinction between the haves and the have-nots at Harvard.

I agree. In Harvard Rules, I wrote with some skepticism about the student job of "dorm crew," in which some students clean other students' bathrooms. That creates unhealthy divisions between students who need the money from that job and those who sit back while others clean their toilets.

Some might say that hiring working-class men and women to clean student bathrooms would create similar problems. Maybe. But that's not the only option. How about simply expecting students to clean up after themselves?

This is an easy way for Harvard to teach its students some sense of responsibility, perhaps even that dreaded word "character." Isn't that part of an "education"?

Making every student do work that they might otherwise think of as beneath them is something I have some experience with. I happened to go to a small prep school, Groton, which was well-stocked with the children of affluent lawyers, financiers, and businesspeople. (My own father was a magazine editor, my mother a paralegal.)

Partly to save money and partly to curb the students' sense of entitlement, Groton had long mandated something called "work program." Every student was required to help with manual labor—whether it was cleaning classrooms, mopping bathrooms, or washing dishes in the dining hall. No one was exempt.

Of course, at the time we all thought it was a pain in the ass. And certainly it wasn't as if we were compelled to work on an assembly line or in a coal mine. But looking back, I do think that work program instilled in the students an appreciation for the kinds of tedious and sometimes degrading jobs that some people who weren't born into such fortunate families will never escape—and that the vast majority of us would never have to depend on.

As Harvard extends its efforts to recruit children from lower-income families, the official approval of Dormaid takes the university in exactly the wrong direction. On the other hand, maybe this is the direction a university headed by a free-market economist will inevitably go. The student who founded Dormaid, a sophomore named Michael Kopko, defended his business like this:

<<"In a free economy it's all about choice, and the Crimson is trying to take choice away from people," the student entrepreneur told Reuters. "I think it's a very uneconomic and narrow view. It's essentially against creating wealth for society.">.

How fascinating—and depressing—that Kopko defines Harvard as a "free economy," a values-free university which is essentially nothing more than an economic marketplace. When I talk in Harvard Rules about "the struggle for the soul of the world's most important university," this is exactly what I mean.