Clean Up Your Puke

You’ve just finished a meal at Valentine Dining Hall when you’re hit with that familiar pang of anxiety about how much more work you still have left to finish. After trying to ignore it by Val sitting for the past hour and a half, you finally begin the practiced routine of packing up your belongings and making your way out.

Once you reach the trash cans, the scrutiny of the person behind you breathing down your neck is insurmountable — their mere presence urges you to clear your plate faster, as if they might shove you in that bin along with their leftovers if you’re not quick enough. Of course, the feeling persists as you approach the chute for your used utensils. 

As you throw your knife down, you see the hands of a Val employee pulling out the crate of soiled utensils below, realizing too late what’s about to ensue. Your knife slowly slides down the chute — which is somehow always coated in sriracha mayo — and falls aggressively into the dirty water, dramatically splashing the poor employee. You might feel a flicker of guilt for a moment, but the second you step out of that skinny hallway and into the lobby of the dining hall, it fades. 

Perhaps it’s due to the chute’s barrier, which anonymizes the worker behind it, separating you from the person doing the actual labor; You don’t see a face, only a pair of hands. The chute is a perfect metaphor for the student body’s relationship to the staff who keep the college running: a wall that shields us from the “dirty” yet essential work that our lives here depend on. 

Like any other college or university, Amherst College functions entirely to serve and invest in its students. It’s designed to anticipate our needs, respond to our complaints, and cushion every difficulty so that learning can consistently be at the forefront of our experience. The student body receives incredible opportunities and resources, but such privileges are often taken for granted and come with their own set of consequences. 

When you are put at the center of every process and decision, it becomes easy to assume that the people who work here exist primarily to serve you. Over time, that system of support may collapse into a system of entitlement. Spending four years in a place where staff invisibly and automatically clean up your messes teaches students that their mistakes do not have real consequences because someone will always be hired to fix them. 

If you live in the Triangle, you unfortunately have most definitely experienced the following Sunday-morning horror: You walk into your bathroom and are immediately hit with a putrid stench. If you’re lucky, it’s just the smell. If you’re not, you might find a toilet flooded with last night’s vomit — floors and walls slicked with it, sometimes trash cans filled with it too. For the next few days, you learn to avoid the mess — to inconveniently use another bathroom on a different floor just until the problem gets resolved. You might find yourself irritably asking, “What inconsiderate idiot did this?” But rarely do we ask the more uncomfortable questions. “Who has to clean this? Whose hands have to wipe away the puke that I can’t even stand to smell? Whose labor makes this space livable again?” Rarely do we consider the worker who has to deal with it since the college’s very structure keeps them out of sight, and therefore, out of mind. 

In his book, “Tyranny of Merit,” American political philosopher Michael Sandel mirrors this logic, arguing that America’s modern meritocracy has conditioned society to mistake privileges for earned virtues and to assume that those who earn less do so because of a lack of intelligence or work ethic. The meritocracy Sandel outlines reinforces our campus hierarchy, whispering that since you’re a student at an elite college, you must be better than the custodian who is not. But, Sandel reminds us that “the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility.” 

Martin Luther King Jr. echoed this sentiment in a speech he gave to Memphis sanitation workers in 1968: “One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker … for the person who picks up our garbage is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant.” Similarly, the student body depends on custodians to sustain everyday campus life. Without them, our bathrooms and dorms would be completely unhygienic and totally unlivable. Both King and Sandel insist that all labor has — or should have — dignity, but many Amherst students rarely consider this assertion.

Too often, I have heard the careless and ignorant comment, “Well, it’s their job,” to write off reckless and inconsiderate choices that require an employee to clean it up. Yes, it is a custodian’s job to clean, but it is not their job to absorb your disrespect, and it is not their job to endure the consequences of your entitlement. Their job does not mean you get to treat them however you’d like. 

When you don’t clean up your vomit after missing the toilet, when you don’t return your dishes, when you leave scraps of food on the table because it’s “someone else’s job,” you’re sending a message. You send a message to your community that you don’t care about the people who share these spaces with you. A message to staff that their work does not warrant your respect. And you send a message — whether you intend to or not — that you believe you are above those who clean up after you. It’s no wonder that custodial services were initially removed from Jenkins dormitory at the beginning of the semester. 

The Amherst “bubble” is not only political; it is also social and ethical, informing our external relationships with the outside world. Our current bubble, however, creates the illusion that our lives are somehow entirely independent and above the very forms of labor that maintain everyday life on campus. 

For many Amherst students, college is the most freedom we’ve ever had. But for others, this is nothing new. Being shielded from certain forms of work began long before arriving on campus, shaped by class privilege and the kinds of households we grew up in. Either way, that freedom or ignorance is not a license to act without any regard for others. Our actions still have consequences. It’s just that in college, they are just conveniently cleaned up by someone else.

A liberal arts education should not only teach us how to think critically, but also how to be good people and respectfully interact with our world and peers once we graduate. The jobs we take for granted here exist everywhere, and the people who perform them deserve dignity no matter the setting. Some of us may go on to workplaces that continue to shield this labor, but even if you don’t, the responsibility remains the same: to recognize the humanity of those who make your environment livable and to give them the respect they are owed. 

No longer can we treat vomiting on floors and walls as some kind of collegiate rite of passage. When we brush off this behavior, we are passively contributing to a campus culture that devalues necessary campus work, treating employees like automatic robots rather than living human beings. It’s time to hold ourselves and our peers to a higher standard, and think about the afterlife of our decisions, and consider the people who show up the next morning to clean what we leave behind. 

Doing the small, basic, and unglamorous tasks of simply cleaning up after yourself is not just a matter of etiquette. It is an assertion and recognition that the people who care for this campus are deserving of dignity. It is a commitment to foster a community that is grounded in gratitude, not entitlement, to make our campus stronger, more respectful, and humane. 

So please, clean up your puke.