I live on campus, and I’m definitely not the only one. 2,450 first-year students are on campus this semester, and there’s no doubt that hundreds and hundreds of upperclassmen live here as well. 

All those people are bound to make a mess, whether or not it’s intentional. Consider the waste conveyor belt in Holly Point, around which I hold my breath because it’s like a warm cave of food waste. 

But that conveyor belt has to be there, and students have to use it. The scent is just a side effect of its existence near a humid kitchen. It’s unreasonable to hold this against the staff.

The food-waste conveyor belt is just the tip of a custodial iceberg. Across campus, facilities face neglect at the hands of a short-staffed workforce.

In my own residence hall, for example, custodial staff put a checklist on the door of the bathroom, with two boxes per day: stock bathroom/throw trash, and full bathroom clean. I’ve watched week after week as the second box is only checked once or twice a week.

Then, on days when the entire bathroom is cleaned, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of difference between the floors before and after. That’s because I’m fairly certain that even after a “full” clean, the bathrooms are not being mopped.

I’ve had to request a toilet paper refill on a restock day because despite checking the box, no one actually refilled the toilet paper. 

It seems like cleaning our bathroom is just checking a box sometimes, even though for me it’s the difference between whether or not I’m comfortable and clean in my own living environment. 

I went ahead and did some digging because surely there’s a standard the custodial staff is supposed to be adhering to, and I was right.

Rowan Facilities has published a Custodial Services Operations Task Frequencies document which lists both how frequently cleaning should be undertaken as well as criteria for levels of cleanliness.

Firstly, all bathrooms should definitely be cleaned fully every day, with steps including checking and restocking supplies as needed, cleaning and sanitizing fixtures, and sweeping and wet mopping the floors. This is listed under daily cleaning, and yet my own bathroom has physical proof that they are not doing this cleaning daily (and not just the dirty floors and missing TP).

There are steps and tasks listed for all common areas that the custodial team is in charge of cleaning, steps I can see proof of neglect of almost everywhere I go on campus, not just my residence hall. Walking into Bunce Hall today, there was trash and grime littering the floor. In Wilson, practice rooms have graffiti all over the walls and trash and crumbs on the floors. I can remember a practice room by the trash that will reliably be there tomorrow.

Using the criteria laid out in the document, Rowan is striving to exceed “Level 3–Casual Inattention” and achieve “Level 2–Ordinary Tidiness.” The aims of the category are for floors to shine, other surfaces only to have visible dust, smudges, or fingerprints upon close inspection, for bathroom fixtures to gleam, and to only have daily waste in trash cans. 

I would argue that most facilities around campus fail to meet these criteria, and that failure is having a dramatic effect on the moods of students and staff. I personally don’t want to spend time in the practice room, or in communal areas, or in the shower. I don’t want to think too hard about the environments my food is prepared in or how this will contribute to the spread of illness.

I’m not sure how Rowan can resolve this current crisis of cleanliness except to work towards enforcing standards. I understand that cleaning facilities used by thousands of college students is not glamorous, but it is important.

Maybe the current lack of cleanliness is due to a lack of oversight, wherein upper-level custodians are not aware of parts of buildings that need more attention than others, or due to understaffing of custodians as a whole. Either way, I implore Rowan to look into resolving this issue, for the health and wellbeing of students and staff, especially those who live on campus.

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