Middlebury College is the largest employer in Addison County. The role of the college as an employer and lifeline to many workers in the community remains essential to building a stronger campus for staff and students alike. Despite improvements to wages and compensation systems, there remain structural issues facing Middlebury staff that the college has a duty to address. At the same time, students have a responsibility to create a safer and easier environment for college staff.
Staff at the college are currently compensated through a skill matrix system. Placed by their supervisors annually in a four category matrix of “learning,” “growing,” “thriving” or “leading,” staff are indexed at 0%, 25%, 50% and 60% of the market range, respectively. This system grants a disproportionate amount of power to individual supervisors, who have the discretion to dictate staff members’ salaries based on arbitrary — and sometimes reduced — definitions of their roles. Moreover, it places hard caps on staff members’ salaries, which removes the incentive for staff to stay at the college.
We question the criteria of the Mercer Report indexing Middlebury staff wages to non-NESCAC institutions such as Roger Williams University and Suffolk University, which have substantially smaller endowments than Middlebury. Excepting movements up the skill matrix, which can only happen three times in an employee’s Middlebury career, staff wage increases are limited to market raises based on comparison to the questionable peer institutions.
To put it simply: staff are not adequately compensated. The college’s minimum wage for staff is $17.60 per hour, as compared to the livable wage for a single adult with no children in Addison County of $23.33 per hour, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator.
We call for the college to make itself an attractive employer; pay staff a livable wage to give them the respect they deserve and compensation they earned. As witnessed in the library, with one third of library staff recently retiring or moving into other employment, staff are often having to take on roles not initially part of their jobs. Staff should not be asked to pick up extra slack to keep the college afloat and not see this in their compensation packages.
To the college administration, we question how Middlebury’s new funding efforts, including the “For Every Future” campaign, and the recent $40 million unrestricted donation can be spent on improving staff compensation. The multi-year $600 million campaign outlines initiatives to raise money for financial aid programs, academic programs and student life, but makes no mention of staff compensation as a priority. We can’t help but question if new fundraising is focused on the college’s outward image, and may be leaving behind the workers that make our campus run smoothly.
For students, our responsibility lies in respect. We ask for a more deliberate and personal effort by students to ease the pressure on college staff, and create a safe and better environment for them. Students are reminded that seemingly mundane actions — leaving trash in corridors and bathrooms and throwing dining hall dishes in garbage cans — leave our facilities and dining staff with the added responsibility to clean up after our actions. Proctor Dining Hall recently displayed a whiteboard with statistics on missing dishes, and our staff issue reporting this week found that students often are throwing them out for facilities to have to fish out of the garbage. Students should not be so thoughtless in giving staff an extra burden on top of their already strenuous workloads.
We call for wider student conscientiousness on the role our staff play in the running of the campus. Often discussions around the college focus on faculty and student accomplishments. These are undoubtedly central to the success of our academic engagement on campus. Yet, we need a conscious recognition of staff as we go about our daily activities on campus. We have seen firsthand the impact of understaffing in college services. Campus services advertised as fundamental to the Middlebury experience, such as the Grille and Midd Xpress, through fall 2022 and spring 2023 suffered irregular operation hours and last-minute closures as both services experienced understaffing.
We recognize the immense passion many staff have towards their jobs in our campus community, and the dedication they have to helping make our experience as students as smooth as possible. But as Staff Council Representative Terry Simpkins told The Campus, “I have talked to staff who feel as though the college is sort of balancing the books on the backs of staff. And that doesn’t feel great. Especially when you think of the reputation the college wants to pursue, the reputation the college tries to project.”
Beyond just respect, students should fight for staff. There is an existing precedent to students working to improve the staff experience. As recently as 2019, hundreds of students protested in support of paying staff higher wages, contributing to pressure to increase wages. In December 2019, entry level wages were increased from $11 to $14 an hour. Students should maintain this spirit of engagement, even if on a smaller scale, and recognise that no meaningful change on the issues they complain about can be achieved without including the voice of staff.
Staff are integral to how our campus operates on a daily basis. Facilities Services keep our spaces clean and safe. The campus is kept accessible after severe weather thanks to their work. Librarians help us expand our academic accomplishments. Retail workers give us access to food when the town closes for the night. This is an endless list that we cannot fully unpack in this piece, yet it is a list that often goes unnoticed. We call for our culture towards staff to change. Students and faculty may make the college, but it is the staff that make the campus.
