Upstairs, Downstairs at the University of Chicago

because the University of Chicago has had a policy of forbidding workers from using the elevators in this building … during daytime hours

SERIOUSLY? Wow. Explains their economics, anyway.

I agree, that sounds pretty stupid. How are they moving cleaning equipment between floors, for example? Are they dragging it up the stairs every day, or do they only clean at night?

In any case, it sounds like some overly officious idiot in the Facilities Department not realizing that it would be better just to make an exception to the rule. Hell, escort them up in the elevator if you’re that worried about what they might get up to in there.

“In any case, it sounds like some overly officious idiot in the Facilities Department not realizing that it would be better just to make an exception to the rule. ”

Places with stupid rules are often strict in the enforcement of these rules. Any bending of a stupid rule is rightly seen as challenge to the stupid rule. Because, the rule is stupid.

what must it take for workers around the country, in small factories and far-off hamlets, to secure their basic rights and privileges?

Anywhere less rotten with class privilege (which is more or less everywhere else), it would never have occurred to a locksmith to ask permission to use the lift.

Aside from aesthetics,stupid rules can be a powerful means of maintaining control over others for underlings. One more tool in the bag for “reviews” and “evaluations” that often have nothing to do with merit or quality.

Corey, there’s just one?

How familiar are you, Corey? Have you worked for an extended period of time outside of Academia?

“The last bastions of feudalism in the United States are the military and academia.”

To the extent this is true, I think it’s one of the selling points of both institutions: insulation from market forces. My naval neighbors have free daycare, subsidized housing, etc. I know higher ed work appeals to me in part because I don’t want to work 9-5 (one works hard alright, but at all sorts of unpredictable and flexible hours), report to a supervisor (one is mostly held accountable by one’s colleagues), compete for promotions (once you get tenure), get ‘evaluated’ in terms of ‘the bottom line’ or as a ‘value proposition,’ etc. Of course there are dysfunctional and coercive versions of this sort of ‘feudalism’, but it can be nice work if you can get it.

Sorry, that was a stupid comment. I retract it, particularly since I hate that line of criticism when I see it used elsewhere.

The segue from locksmiths to unionized graduate students is interesting because it draws out distinctly the class line running through a campus: were graduate students also forbidden to ride the elevator? It’s certainly possible they were forbidden (which would be interesting,) but it is more likely that they were permitted. Do locksmiths and grad students have class solidarity?

Having been a unionized grad student, a departmental steward, and a staff member at the local, I will say that imagining them as a member of the proletariat laboring in the academic salt mines truly misunderstands the role of graduate students at a research university. They really do fit nicely into the category of “management trainee,” regardless of their union cards. Simply put: graduate student employment is markedly temporary and every grad student proceeds with the ambition to graduate into a role of authority (with accompanying bourgeois lifestyle) either in academia or business. The “solidarity” between the academic unions and the trade unions on a university campus is tenuous indeed, and for professorial unions mostly absent. Take away the class ambitions of the grad student, and you take away much of the graduate student body. Take away the temporary and aspirational nature of grad student employment and you take away that student body.

But it also illustrates the grand confusion amongst the academic left about where their place is vis a vis “class warfare.”

Never having attended an elite university, only the University of Washington and University of New Mexico, I’ve never run into such snobbery. The earlier posters are certainly correct that the rules are there to keep the working stiffs (what with their work clothes and work-worn hands) out of sight. I mean, what if you ended up sharing an elevator with a locksmith, what would you say? “Good afternoon, how are you? would occur to me but, as I said, I have no experience with the elite.

I remember taking a service elevator at an upscale hotel with my father who was visiting me, by accident. There was an African-American janitor in the elavator, and a snooty rich white woman got on, also by accident, and made a face and asked whether this was the service elevator in a kind of nasty way. The custodian was gracious throughout our descent, but in a very ironic way, in that he kept saying that everything was ok, implying that he didn’t mind her (and us) sharing his service elevator. It was pretty funny.

(gated links are fine if need be)

Who’s more wary of grad student unions on college campuses, the professors or the administrators? Even if it’s more of the former than one might assume, I have to believe there are enough professors sympathetic to unions that they’d give them support.

@Niall: It’s still like that in Australia except we don’t have any tapirs. We use sugar gliders.

@Dr Hilarius
Never having attended an elite university, only the University of Washington and University of New Mexico, I’ve never run into such snobbery.

I’m speculating, of course, but the snobbery here may well have been a result more of the personal snobbery of certain administrators than of the institution. (I have no first-hand knowledge of U. of Chicago.)

A kind of reverse snobbery, at least in small things, used to characterize certain ‘elite’ institutions. E.g. in forms of address: professors were “Mr. so-and-so” (when most of the professoriate was male), not “professor so-and-so” and certainly not “doctor so-and-so” (unless one was a medical doctor or a certain foreign-policy advisor/official to Nixon). This particular example is dated, but the impulse may survive in other forms, though I’m not sure in what forms exactly.

I think Stanford counts as an elite university. When I worked for the facilities (blue shirts) department at the Medical Center, I became a good friend of the manager of the shops. One of the things I once talked to him about was how the professionals treated his staff (and him, for that matter). He told me that the medical students, the residents, and the senior physicians had always been fine, but that the young doctors who were full of themselves were almost always snippy or worse with his workers. The nurses who actually did nursing were almost always OK as long as the guys (sorry, almost no women) were polite — not an unreasonable expectation, but not always met — while some of the management nurses were capable of being quite petty and hostile.

One of my interesting experiences in this position was convincing the leaders of the crafts, particularly in HVAC and some electricians, that had anything of value to offer to them. Eventually succeeded, which was more than I could say for some of the engineers.

Corey@34:

Thanks for the links. I read your article, though not the books. ;-)

My personal experience, which includes light industry factory work, has not included any such limitations on restroom use. I’ve also done plaintiff-side wage and hour litigation in California, and found most of the complaints relate to overtime and abuse of lunch break requirements; I haven’t encountered any complaints about actual denial of restroom use. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, of course, but at least in California it is absolutely not rife.

“The last bastions of feudalism in the United States are the military and academia.”

To the extent this is true, I think it’s one of the selling points of both institutions: insulation from market forces. My naval neighbors have free daycare, subsidized housing, etc.

It is indeed a sweet deal for the liege. Fewer and fewer of them around these days tho (tenured profs, I mean, and relative to the other employment categories).

The division between “management” and worker is highly artificial.

Not surprising, this unspoken class discrimination pervades the University of Chicago. The University has fought for over a century to keep Hyde Park relatively white and wealthy despite the surrounding neighborhoods (and when the levy temporarily breached in the mid-twentieth century, the University spearheaded a campaign to drive the minority population out of the neighborhood). It is a bastion of regressive economics yet if you go a few blocks west you hit one of the most blighted neighborhoods in the entire country.

I imagine this sort of upstairs/downstairs charade goes on at most elite universities, but I think the specific context of the University of Chicago makes it particularly interesting.

I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes there’s a downside to the managerial track.

“The last bastions of feudalism in the United States are the military and academia.”
To the extent this is true, I think it’s one of the selling points of both institutions: insulation from market forces. My naval neighbors have free daycare, subsidized housing, etc.

I am reminded of (I think) Wesley Clark’s anecdote of being amazed – after a life spent as a service brat and serviceman – that civilians didn’t get routine medical checks annually as a matter of course. The armed forces, he said, were “a little piece of Sweden in a nation that is rapidly turning into Brazil”.

The only vaguely comparable thing I can think of was actually in our still-nationalised-until-whenever-the-deal-closes post office – when I worked in a major distribution centre as an agency employee, it was always impossible to get into the canteen before the posties had eaten all the food. In practice this functioned as a colour-bar.

When I was in school (public university in the Midwest US), I worked at the main campus library. Library staff were NOT allowed to use the public elevators. Student staff got an exception if we were moving book trucks between floors. Otherwise, we were required to use the stairwells. Regular staff had keys to the freight elevator and were expected to use that or the stairwells. It was made clear to us, in our job training, that we would be written up if we were caught using the public elevators.

So, this doesn’t surprise me even one little bit.

Have you ever spent any time with any of the old school, upper faculty at the esteemed University of Chicago?? Or, even the “new school”. Like, sitting next to one of them at dinner? Some of them are fairly starched and ignorant of reality and not wanting to rub shoulders with said reality..it’s pretty scary. Doesn’t surprise me one bit thart this policy has existed..Some people need a knock upside the head.

@52
Since you’re being pedantic, that is correct at the University of Chicago, but in much of the world the ground floor is essentially floor zero and the 4th floor is in fact four flights of stairs up.

Which, when you think about it, makes a lot more sense from a numbering standpoint.

In the World Bank HQ in DC, only permanent employees are allowed to use the showers or car park. The many white-collar contractors who do much of the work – and without sick pay, holidays, health insurance, etc. – are forbidden. I asked why and was told it was because of too-high demand, and not ‘apartheid’. Why, then, I asked didn’t they manage demand with a waiting list or lottery that didn’t discriminate one class of employee from the others? No answer.

I got my PhD at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, in The Bronx.
iirc, all of the students and faculty were white, asian, and a small number indian; the skilled staff (secretarys, plumbers, etc) were ethnic white – jewish, italian
The people who cleaned the floors were all black and hispanic

more or less the same at all the other major research institutions on the east coast that I am familiar with

And certainly at most office parks in boston that cater to the biotech/medical device/pharma industry, almost all the blacks are janitors…

iirc, about 4 years ago, the N Y Times ran the most amazing story about the multistory Bronx Country Courthouse – surely an epicenter of human misery and low incomes.
The elevators were not working, and it could take *several hours* to get up to the courtrooms
and judges were fining people for missing appointments
at the end of the story, it was noted that the judges and employees had a separate set of elevators, in the back of the building…and this had been going on for some time, and no one had the sense or the balls or the deceny to open even one of these employee elevators to the (largely black, hispanic) populace seeking justice…or at least, a way out of a bad marriage, or a bad arrest, or a bad landlord.

This is a case wherein the original source of the policy may not be quite so class-based as it appears on its face.

Freight elevators typically don’t look like personnel elevators for a reason. The floors are typically spill-resistant, the walls are unadorned, and generally the idea is “move stuff from one floor to another where that stuff may caustic, sharp, long, unwieldy, etc.” Personnel elevators have cosmetic protrusions, carpeting, all sorts of much-more-difficult-to-maintain-than-their-freight-counterpart features.

It would surprise me not at all if, sometime in the distant past, somebody spilled bleach on an elevator somewhere on campus and some supervisor got yelled at by some privileged faculty… and instead of politely asking said faculty to calm down, the supervisor instituted a policy of “all workers stay out of the elevators that faculty use, because I don’t like getting yelled at.”

The end result is the creation of a class structure taken to absurdities in this case, because of the lack of discretion. But the problem is likely the lack of discretion on the part of the workers’ supervisor (who rightly should have said, in the first place, “Go ahead and use the elevator and if anybody gives you crap about it, send them to me.”) more than it is the general policy – which, to be clear, is grounded in a reasonable principle (please take care of the nice elevators, because fixing them is expensive).

This is probably more symptomatic of an inability of organizations to have decent middle management than it is a case of the upper crust gone crazy.

@William #4- You speak as if career military officer and intellectual aspirant were mutually exclusive. This is not true of the best officers. You also did not say when this statement was made. The modern military, to the best of my knowledge, considers itself a corporation. The statement might be true of academia which has held onto all sorts of ancient beliefs if for no other reason than to preserve them as esoteric niches for research ,study , and teaching.

This reminds me of the bit in Chuck Jones’ memoir where he talks about what a horrible person Leon Schlesinger was (racist, ignorant, abusive). Schlesinger’s office upstairs had a very fancy restroom which no one else was allowed to use. Given the times, this went double for anyone who wasn’t white. But nearly every night, the janitor, an aging black man, would calmly go upstairs and spend a long time in the sacred john..Jones speculated that he was napping there…before finishing up his duties and going home. No one ever told on him; all delighted in the idea of Schlesinger not knowing who else had been sitting on his forbidden throne.

ajay@49: Thanks for the Clark quote. I grew up as an air force dependent. I’ve made Clark’s point, that the US military functions like a socialist country, to many current and retired military given to rants about Obamacare, deadbeats, and our nation’s fall into communism. Most of them refuse to acknowledge the similarity and accuse me of various mental deficiencies. I’ll bring up Clark in the future.

Make that …pretensions to a corporate management style adopted by modern… (Note to self: If you MUST change the front part of a sentence, do remember to change the back half to match.)

How silly, everyone knows that it’s the undergraduates that you keep out of the good bathrooms/elevators, not the staff.

Zamfir in #64: the best status perk I ever heard of was the solid gold pass issued to the directors of Indian Railways under the Raj. It entitled them to unlimited free first-class travel, for life, across the entire 28,000-mile network.

At my northeastern U.S. college (pretty “elite”, I guess), it’s inconceivable to me that different people would use different elevators (in the few buildings that have elevators). I think this has to do with our size (small college in a small town). Class distinctions and other hierarchies have many ways of insisting themselves, of course. But not on elevators.

Or in bathrooms. At least, as far as I know. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen my building’s head janitor or custodian (I can’t remember the most recent euphemism for J’s job) in the women’s bathroom on my floor. But then, her office is in the basement, so she probably uses the bathroom there, along with the faculty on that floor. (Which faculty got stuck there? Ah, there’s a hornet’s nest. Though I should say the “basement” is not exactly underground–sloping terrain, still windows and such.)

Which (bathrooms) reminds me how strange it is to women (I think I speak for pretty much all of us) that men pee pretty much in front of one another in public bathrooms, however well designed the urinals and well practiced the men in their unzip and zip-up routines of discretion, when they are so much more “exposed” than we females are while peeing. (Do men have rituals of chatting while actually sitting on the john and of passing toilet paper — I know they wouldn’t be passing tampons — underneath the “wall”? How do those female, very un-charged exchanges compare to men’s as they pee holding their pee-ers? Is it okay to raise such questions here?)

Side note. “J” in my building is pretty clearly a very “butch” lesbian. She is also quite beloved of the entirely male facilities staff who gather on breaks outside her office. I have no idea what that’s all about (except that J is a really likable person, everybody knows that), though I chat with all of them when I happen to pass by. I do suspect that it is J who has added to a graph a faculty member put up near the elevator at the basement level, which shows administrators’ salaries mounting hugely in comparison to faculty’s over x years: say, 2 inches for administrators, 1 inch or faculty. To this print out, someone has added by hand maybe a tenth of an inch for “staff.”

Life at a small New England college in a small NE town, curiously like NYC in the 1930’s or something. I love it.

“(Do men have rituals of chatting while actually sitting on the john and of passing toilet paper — I know they wouldn’t be passing tampons — underneath the “wall”? How do those female, very un-charged exchanges compare to men’s as they pee holding their pee-ers? Is it okay to raise such questions here?)”

The unwritten, but almost universally adhered to, “guy code” is to choose urinals as far as humanly possible from any others that are in use. Use one directly adjacent to one currently in use only if absolutely necessary, sometimes going so far as to use a stall instead. Conversations are generally not had at all unless they were already ongoing before either man entered the restroom, and when they do take place, all usual rules regarding eye contact are temporarily suspended. I have never heard of anything being passed under the stall walls unless it was part of a drug deal or something. Last but most importantly, under no circumstances do you look in the direction of anyone’s crotch.

Jeff H

I’m sorry, but they must be cultural (US?) specific. Ive never heard of any of those rules.
I always have a chat at the urinals, as does everyone I know.

As far as humanly possible is stretching it.

I defy anyone to read that comment without sniggering.

Thanks for the Clark quote…

My pleasure – but I should warn you that the sourcing in this case is only my increasingly unreliable memory, and if you’re going to treat it as a load-bearing structure you should probably verify it somewhere slightly more reliable.

Free inquiry is — or should be — the distinguishing characteristic of the intellectual. Despite the pretensions to a corporate management style aped by modern chiefs of staff, there’s no such thing in the military.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you’ve never actually been in an orders group in your life.

ajay @ 83

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you’ve never actually been in an orders group in your life.

Don’t bother turning around, ajay. The sound you hear behind you is a chainsaw.

The sound you hear behind you is a chainsaw.

I tell you, I am never using this gents’ again.

Working in a variety of US private-sector office places, I can say I have never seen an office where maintenance workers were expected to use the stairs. I have seen many places where they were expected to use a freight elevator, along with all equipment moves, deliveries, etc. I have seen places where there were VIP elevators, separate from the normal elevators that everyone else uses, and I have seen places with VIP bathrooms. I have delivered equipment to retail establishments that wanted everyone in and out by 10:00am, and worked with offices with strict loading dock hours. But I can’t think of anyplace that would make a locksmith walk up four flights of stairs.

Chaz, #6, said:

“If he were to make an exception he risks the tradesman being in the elevator at the same time as the masters. As soon as the master saw the servant in his presence he would be enraged and blame the manager.”

and originally:

“Clarke was unable to perform the work”

So … this offends my sensibilities in both directions. First of all, the idea that there is a class of grown men that can’t even be next to a “tradesman” is disgusting to me. A well-rounded individual should be able to BOTH perform his professorial duties AND competently wield a chainsaw. Anyone worth his salt should pick up his doctoral thesis with hands that are at least *a bit* callused.

But … being unable to climb three flights of stairs ? That’s quite a commentary on sickness (both physical and mental) and health in America. Being of working (under 65ish) age and unable to climb three flights of stairs represents a long, sustained series of extremely childish and short-sighted choices.

So yeah, to hell with the lot of them over there.

Who instituted the rule? Did someone institute a rule that no uniformed workers or contractors be in the building during the work day? Did someone have the rule that no one can be in the elevator with them? Did someone required staff to close their office doors when said person walks to their office? Did someone have staff do an early morning trash sweep of the university walkways to their building?

If the executive restroom is neat, clean, in repair, and the worker’s restroom is dingy, dirty, and has puddles on the floor, get out of that stock.

I’ve worked as a cleaner, and I’m currently an academic, and it strikes me as really unusual to have a rule prohibiting support staff from using the elevators. The case in point is even worse, as it concerns partially disabled employees, with no alternative elevator for access being provided — I suspect that this might even be illegal in the UK under regs for disabled access. (I’ve not checked the fine print of the regulations to be sure, but do know that aderquate provision for disabled employees is taken pretty seriously).

In my current institution, offices are cleaned in the evenings, but that’s only because it’s easier to clean offices when there are fewer people in them (although anyone familar with the work habits of computer programmers etc. might have chosen mornings, rather than evenings, as the time when few people are likely to be around…) If maintenance staff need to get in the building during the daytime (e..g to fix something that broke), no problem at all with them using the same elevators as everyone else.

===

The main example of this sort of thing that I can think of is that when I was at school, the kids weren’t allowed to go in through the main entrance door.

Being of working (under 65ish) age and unable to climb three flights of stairs represents a long, sustained series of extremely childish and short-sighted choices.

Take that, Stephen Hawking.

Juno, if you think that is something “finally dawning on” Corey Robin, you’re not familiar with his writing.

In what world do you live in where the U Chicago administration is “liberal?”* Or did I blink and is Milton Friedman now a leftist in contemporary US politics?

Well, kinda, a wee bit:
” I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, which is a key point, here you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You’ve just got to let it cure itself. You can’t do anything about it. You will only make it worse. You have Rothbard saying it was a great mistake not to let the whole banking system collapse. I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and in the United States, they did harm.” – Milton Friedman

“…the bigger issue, I’d argue, is that modern conservatives can’t accept the things Friedman was right about. Take, in particular, his essay on flexible exchange rates, in which he argued that a country that finds its wages and prices out of line should devalue its currency rather than rely on unemployment to push wages down, “until the deflation has run its sorry course.” Contrast this with Ryan’s declaration that “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency.”

“The point is that Friedman was, when all is said and done, a pragmatist; he leaned right ideologically, but was willing to make room for awkward realities. And these days reality has a well-known liberal bias. Hence, Friedman has become an unperson.” – Paul Krugman