The Lives of Campus Custodians

“Magolda combines more than a year of participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and literature review to give us a valuable glimpse into what daily life is like for custodians on two different college campuses. I especially enjoyed the many tell-it-like-it-is quotes from custodians that Magolda includes.

The book is also eye-opening about ‘community engagement,’ and offers new ways to think about it. I teach a service-learning class every spring and have helped lead the faculty advisory group for our Office for Community Engagement. Yet until reading The Lives of Campus Custodians, I had never thought about having our students engage with an important but largely invisible community: the low-wage staff working at our university.

Toward the end of the book, Magolda offers a series of concrete suggestions for how to improve matters for both custodians and the university, directed at administrators, supervisors, students, faculty, and custodians themselves.”

Reflective Teaching

"In The Lives of Campus Custodians: Insights Into Corporatization and Civic Disengagement in the Academy, Peter Magolda presents the stories of custodians on two college campuses in order to shed light on campus custodians, frequently marginalized collegiate subculture, and to present an alternative way for readers to think both about the corporatization of higher education and knowledge production.

The Lives of Campus Custodians presents an alternative way of thinking about the ways higher education has become corporatized. Traditional literature on this topic addresses corporatization from the viewpoint of faculty, campus administrators, and others outside of higher education. This is the first text to examine this topic from the viewpoint of a campus subculture that experiences marginalization as a result of this corporate managerialism.

Although not specifically mentioned, this book would be a useful resource for graduate students, particularly doctoral students who are in the process of writing their dissertation proposal or seeking approval through their institutional review board. Magolda's discussion of his methodology appears in the appendixes and provides valuable insight into such topics as gaining access to research sites, the ethics of doing qualitative research, and goodness criteria. Graduate students who have only explored these topics in more traditional research textbooks would be well-served by reading this exemplar.

The greatest contribution this book makes is that it sensitizes readers to a subculture that remains disregarded, but one that contributes to student learning. Although higher education administrators at best view campus custodians as the 'cleaning people,' or at worst, barely human, custodians view themselves as educators and valuable contributors to the communities they serve."

The Review of Higher Education

"In this insightful volume, Magolda enters into the worlds of work of custodians who keep the spaces of learning and living clean, safe and welcoming for students, faculty and staff. Magolda’s work is the first full-scale study of custodial work from the ground work that I am aware of. His bottom up documentation of custodians’ realities and day-to-day experiences fills a very significance gap in the literature on higher education work. The organization of the book into three major themes -- fear, fatalism and family -- make much of what he learns applicable across other fields of work. Scholars and students of labor will find themselves in these pages, particularly in Magolda’s insightful work on the “family” of the workplace. His concluding section allows for a re-interpretation of the consequences of corporate managerialism on civility and community in higher education. Finally, Magolda is generous in sharing his methodological decisions and approaches in appendixes that deepen the utility of the book for courses on labor, sociology, occupations, and higher education."

Karla A. Erickson, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of the College

Grinnell College

"Magolda’s goal was to create an 'interesting, accessible, credible, provocative, moderately disorienting, and educational' story. His ethnographic study of custodians at two higher education institutions has achieved that and more. In living their culture he came to appreciate the impact of the changing university on the 'least' of its members. Magolda uses this study of a university subculture to critique the trend toward corporatization in higher education. A critical read for everyone in the academy."

Gretchen Metzelaars, PhD, Senior Associate Vice President, Office of Student Life

The Ohio State University

"Magolda’s work promises to be one of the most important studies of our time for higher education scholars have virtually ignored the lived experiences and contributions of members from the campus invisible custodial caste. Through the use of casual conversation, storytelling and case studies Magolda’s writing is compelling, honest and personal. His research stands as witness that the academy espouses inclusivity but does not enact it. This book is a must read, a moral imperative, rooted in social justice."

Patty Perillo, PhD, Vice President for Student Affairs and Assistant Professor of Higher Education

Virginia Tech