Abstract
Peter Magolda, a self-described “educational anthropologist,” explores the Lives of Campus Custodians in his final large-scale research project before retiring from a career as a professor of higher education and administrator in student affairs. Magolda gazes into the realities of working at the lowest level of occupational status in an institutional sector driven by norms of prestige, a rhetoric of broad inclusion, and the backdrop of corporate managerialism. Hisstudy of custodial employees is distinctive in the corpus of higher education scholarship—a field whose research is devoted to understanding students, faculty/instructors, administrators, presidents, boards, and often alumni but rarely highlights the experiences of workers who keep the campuses clean and safe, the meals hot, the grounds tidy, or the buses running.
Magolda uses ethnographic methods (participant observation, interviews, analysis of organizational documents/artifacts) to frame custodians’ experiences on two U.S. campuses. The two campuses are structurally quite different. One campus, a rural, public, Midwestern university of 16,000 students, is a place where custodians receive the lowest base wage ($9.60 per hour) compared to that offered at other public universities in the state. The custodial staff at the public university are almost universally white and mostly male, which reminds readers of the fact that it is not only the students and staff that have yet to become compositionally diverse on college campuses; rather, the whole organizational apparatus reflects similar realities.
The second campus is a private university of 12,000 students located in a major metropolis. The custodians from the private institution work in the housing division, where many tend to the rooms of students that can afford the $50,000 annual tuition, a price that is twice the amount of custodians’ annual earnings. Uniquely, the majority (78 percent) of the housing custodians are Bosnian or Serbian immigrants, which texturizes the study and gives Magolda a convenient excuse to foray into discussions of the macro and micro environmental conditions and policies that insect with custodians’ lives.
At both research sites, custodians have access to basic benefits (including healthcare) and tuition waivers. Magolda sketches the fluctuating contexts for custodial work at each institution over the past two decades, noting particular changes in funding for custodial functions, the structure of custodians’ tasks and how they are evaluated, and thevarious departmental layoffs and job retrenchments. On both campuses, custodians’ responses to these organizational/ managerial changes involved some degree of union activity or musings, including strikes and allied student mobilization for campus service workers (amounting to few substantive changes) and, most pointedly, a decline in custodians’ trust in, satisfaction with, and material support from their employers. The research sites portray the university as an employer, which is a welcome addition to the literature, as most studies of universities devote attention to their other social roles.
The detailed and respectful presentation of the custodians’ lives reveals their stories and challenges without sensation, reinforcing the authenticity of the details Magolda describes in his prose. Readers learn about people like Kathyleen, who lost her $22-an-hour IT-administrator job in 2008 only to secure entry-level work as a campus custodian after a prolonged search. Kathyleen is battling cancer, as is Joanne; their stories capture the ways inflexible policies for employees of their occupational status intersect with having to endure the side effects of cancer treatments. Samuel’s story displays the pride he has in performing decades of award-level service, as do similar stories of custodians who take great care in cleaning the spaces that academics and students occupy.
These examples are set against the backdrop of Magolda’s observational data showing patterns of campus community members being ambivalent (and occasionally hostile) to the value that custodians add to their everyday lives, but such observations are countered by descriptions of close bonds forged between students and their residence hall caretakers. Custodians share intimate details of their lives related to family hardship, suffering through war and being a refugee, and navigating racial and social class dynamics in generally homogenous spaces, among others. Magolda skillfully weaves these experiences into the custodians’ work circumstances, which allows student-readers to connect to the text. When I assigned this book, the content provided a validation of some students’ own working-class backgrounds, it acted as a prompt for others to contemplate their privileged identity statuses, and it opened a window for all students to view the organizational conduct of campuses in critical ways.
Magolda’s book provides a trail of insights from custodians who are cultural insiders and have felt the human toll of a neoliberal managerial philosophy in the field of higher education. The text conveys the substantive fears that custodians carry (and campuses perpetuate) with respect to job insecurities, generalized economic vulnerability (in spite of hard and exemplary work), and the pressure of mounting costs of health insurance. These matters pervade the everyday thoughts of campus custodians as they commute to work or interpret the latest dictum handed down from management. Magolda directs attention to custodians’ accrual of feelings of “fatalism,” born out of the paradoxes of their campuses promising merit-based promotion or opportunities for community engagement. In practice, readers discover that the systems in which custodians work operates in such a way that promotion is largely inaccessible and work regulations restrict custodians’ attempts at being involved on campus (including exercising employee tuition benefits).
My primary critique of Magolda’s book is that it could have more robustly laid out the scale of field diffusion of the particular labor practices adopted by the managers on the two campuses he studied. At times, his desire to make “visible” those who have been unseen in academic spaces overshadows the exceptional neoinstitutional story that is also embedded in his research. Moreover, Magolda offers a critical perspective on higher education organizations, but he does so without categorically indicting campuses. I am not suggesting this approach is a shortcoming. Rather, his style seems to be more a reflection of a principled application of his chosen research methodology: he lets the respondents’ words, their descriptions of events, and the context of their experiences produce the critical framing organically.
Finally, one of the finest aspects of this book is Magolda’s fidelity to his chosen methodology. Appropriately, he devotes much of the third chapter to exploring his own positionality, and his appendices are rich with details documenting the minutiae of a human-subjects review process that served to offer nearly as much insight about the corporatization of the university as the study itself. His discussion surrounding how he navigated the legalistic, employment, and human resources dynamics and organizational risk management matters to gain access to respondents stands out as a compendium of advice for researchers who seek to study labor dynamics in relatively closed organizational environments. Further, his openness in how he responded to the challenges with human subjects and the fact that some participants thought that he was possibly a “spy” for “management” highlight the rigor and reflexivity of his methodological choices and processes.