Reduced BiHall vivarium staff disrupts animal research, classroom instruction this fall

While many students and faculty in the humanities, and maybe even some in the science departments, have never interacted with the vivarium in BiHall, its existence is critical to the study of live animals at Middlebury. But the vivarium – an enclosure that houses living organisms, including plants and animals – has been operating with reduced staff since before the start of the fall semester, forcing the shutdown of the majority of animal research, impacting classes and hindering faculty and student work. 

Former Vivarium Manager Megan Warner-Hough and Animal Care Technician Nina Houser left the vivarium on Aug. 9 and Sept. 5, respectively, for positions at other institutions, reducing the staff to only two people. Their decisions to leave Middlebury were in response to persistent undercompensation, despite ongoing efforts by college staff, supervisors and faculty to raise vivarium staff wages to competitive market standards. 

Warner-Hough, who is now working as the vivarium manager at Wellesley College, told The Campus she has seen repeated turnover and understaffing during her time at Middlebury.  

“This is not the first time we’ve had staffing shortages in the vivarium,” Warner-Hough said. “The last time it happened, I was an assistant animal care technician, and there were two other full-time people and a part-time person, and the two other full-time people left.”

In Warner-Hough’s absence, the vivarium now lacks experienced staff, placing more of a burden on the remaining workers to shoulder additional responsibilities without compensation.

Even before becoming vivarium manager, Warner-Hough had a similar experience of having to take on additional responsibilities and make personal sacrifices for her job.

“My longest work stretch was 37 days straight. I took a day off, then worked 21 days straight. Which, in my mind, is kind of unacceptable. [It’s] not the way things should be run, but I sucked it up at the time, and then they promoted me to manager,” Warner-Hough said.

In 2021, Warner-Hough presented 2017 data from the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science compensation survey to her staff council representative and supervisor. By summarizing the 2017 survey and compensation data across the animal care industry, Warner-Hough described that she would need a 30% raise for her wage to meet market standards. Instead, when the college-wide staff compensation switch to the skill matrix system took place in July 2022, including for all vivarium staff, she was granted a raise of approximately half that 30% amount for the 2022-23 academic year. None of the wages of the other vivarium technicians were raised to market level. 

In July 2022, Warner-Hough reached out to the Human Resources Office to have a personal conversation about the Association for Laboratory Animal Science survey data. She followed up in late fall 2022 and early 2023 after learning that Middlebury had contributed to the compensation survey by providing data for the updated 2023 version. Despite the college’s participation in the survey, Warner-Hough was told that the data would not be considered as part of her compensation evaluation.

“For obvious reasons, I was not super pleased about that, because it meant a whole year in which I was not getting a raise which they had determined I was owed, essentially, based on the market,” Warner-Hough said.

Warner-Hough’s current position at Wellesley pays 60% more than her former job at Middlebury paid. Accounting for the higher cost of living in Wellesley than Middlebury, she is earning 30% more than what she would have at Middlebury if the college were meeting market standards, according to Warner-Hough.  

Vivarium employees have also struggled to achieve fair compensation for their part-time staff, many of whom share the same qualifications as the full-time staff, a source with knowledge of the vivarium who wished to remain anonymous told The Campus. 

“Just because you yourself are getting compensated, if you know your coworkers aren’t getting compensated fairly, it just really degrades morale and trust in the company,” one anonymous source said.

An anonymous source stated that the wages of vivarium staff members often do not reflect the level of specialized knowledge required to hold their jobs. According to a posting on the college’s job application webpage, the Animal Technician position requires a Bachelor’s degree and an American Association for Laboratory Animal Science certification, and has a hiring pay range between $18.63 and $22.82 per hour. Another posting for the position of Vivarium Manager describes the job as an hourly position with a hiring range of $62,920 to $78,666 annually and a Bachelor’s degree required, post-graduate study preferred. 

Warner-Hough added that she found the many tiers of communication between her supervisor, Associate Director for Research Compliance Jake Pirkkanen, and the Human Resources Office, difficult in pursuing her goals of fair compensation. 

“They use this waterfall method, is what they call it, the trickle down effect of information. If you have people above you who forget to pass it along, or purposely choose not to pass it along, you end up feeling really in the dark a lot,” Warner-Hough said. 

Pirkkanen declined The Campus’ request for an interview due to the ongoing nature of the staffing and compensation situation in the vivarium. Pirkkanen did, however, write in an email to The Campus, "I'm particularly focused on trying to do everything I can to resolve these issues currently."

The college implemented a new skill matrix system for staff compensation in July 2022, aimed at giving supervisors more influence over their employees’ salaries through a pool of discretionary funds.

“We trust our supervisors. We believe they know their team well to think about how that really comes to life in their different areas,” Caitlin Goss, vice president for human resources and chief people officer, told The Campus in an interview about the skill matrix system in September 2022. 

Warner-Hough stated that she believes her departure from the position of Vivarium Manager contributed to the decisions of other vivarium employees to seek employment elsewhere rather than continue to face undercompensation and risk the uncertainty of a new manager.

“I think I tried to be a good manager, which is why my techs stayed as long as they did,” Warner-Hough said.

Warner-Hough added that not all vivarium staff have the privilege of being able to leave Middlebury in search of other positions. She cited how being a homeowner, having children enrolled in the local schools, or a lack of knowledge about market data might prevent staff from seeking work elsewhere.

An anonymous source told The Campus that they believe the undercompensation of staff in both the Sciences Technical Support Services — the department that oversees the vivarium — and across college staff positions more broadly has resulted in frequent employee turnover. 

In addition to the implementation of the skill matrix system, the college has made other changes to staff compensation in recent years, including raising its across-the-board minimum wage to $17 per hour in July 2022, and using a Mercer consulting firm study to base its pay grades on a market of what it considers peer institutions, such as Roger Williams University and Suffolk University.

A number of faculty and staff have criticized the colleges’ recent adjustments to compensation, questioning the schools it classifies as peer institutions, and calling for the college to better prioritize its specialized workers, many of whom have been in their positions for a long time. 

“If they don’t value [an employee’s] experience enough to pay to keep her, rather than pay more to get someone with less experience, that’s very frustrating,” an anonymous source said. 

When new staff are hired, the burden continues for current staff to train them and adapt to new interpersonal dynamics. With high staff turnover in the vivarium, specifically, a lot of detailed institutional knowledge is lost, such as where expensive equipment should be stored, knowledge of surgical procedures and other processes that require frequent demonstration, an anonymous source told The Campus. 

An anonymous source described cages that have been sitting in a trailer behind BiHall for at least 15 years because that information was not passed down due to employee turnover. “There’s a ton of institutional knowledge lost, and a ton of money wasted. Those cages are worth a lot of money, and they’re just sitting there,” the source added. 

In addition to the long-term negative impacts on the vivarium and its staff, the staffing shortage forced the vivarium to reduce its operations this fall, limiting faculty and student research. 

With only two staff members, the vivarium cannot currently meet federal animal care industry regulations put forth by the Department of Agriculture. This led the college to decide at the start of the semester to shut down most of the vivarium’s research due to concerns that it might not pass impending inspections if the limited vivarium staff could not guarantee proper care for the animals, an anonymous source told The Campus. 

The decision to close the vivarium research facility was abrupt, leaving little time for faculty to adapt, Professor of Biology Mark Spritzer told The Campus. As a result, Spritzer was forced to quickly rewrite the syllabus and replace lab exercises for his Biology course Animal Behavior. 

Over 100 people, including students working in labs for pay or course credit, volunteers, students enrolled in specific Biology and Neuroscience courses, and students conducting research were impacted by the partial vivarium shut-down, an anonymous Neuroscience faculty member told The Campus. Without the ability to collect data and participate in labs involving animal research, students are unable to receive the same training and hands-on experience they normally would, or may run out of time to complete a thesis project. 

While there are currently still organisms such as crayfish and cockroaches in the vivarium, vertebrates and mammals required for Biology and Neuroscience research were not ordered for the vivarium this semester. 

In the case of research projects and labs that use species such as fruit flies, crayfish or zebrafish, it has become the responsibility of the faculty, sometimes with the help of students, to keep the animals alive and care for them, the neuroscience faculty member said. The vivarium staff would typically be responsible for these tasks, which include water changes, pH monitoring and making food. Biology and Neuroscience faculty have been forced to take on these tasks in place of the vivarium staff this semester without additional compensation.  

“It’s hours a day that all of a sudden have been put on them, on top of all of their other obligations,” the faculty member said.

Students seeking specific lab experience, such as pre-medical students, have been unable to learn and practice surgical procedures. The inability to conduct research may also have implications for untenured professors’ ability to retain their jobs. 

“It’s been a severe negative impact on research and scholarship. My research relies on animal models and we weren’t able to do that, and that had a ripple effect on students who want to do thesis work, or volunteer, or work in paid positions in my lab, not being able to do the sort of experiential learning that Middlebury prides itself on,” Spritzer said.

Since Warner-Hough and Houser left the vivarium staff, the college has been seeking a new Vivarium Manager and Animal Technician at the same wages Warner-Hough and Houser were paid. The college recently hired a replacement animal technician but decided to increase the wage scale for the manager position after not receiving many applications, an anonymous source told The Campus. 

The anonymous faculty member added that it was frustrating to see the college initially post the applications for the manager and technician jobs at the same rate. “We’ve been working so hard to serve our students because we love this, and our research is important to us. Trying to make everything work, just to have them post at the same salary is like a kick in the mouth,” they said.

Editor’s Note: Editor in Chief Maggie Reynolds contributed reporting.

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