Last week, I commented on Michael Tuohey, an airline ticket agent in Maine. Mr. Touhey stated in an interview that he often feels some guilt for not being more suspicious of two of the September 11 hijackers who passed through his check-in on that terrible morning. I believed that his actions were an unintentional result of political correctness in our culture, an attitude that directs us to “play nice” with everyone, even when we believe something isn’t right or fair. Or even if there might be an imminent danger.
This attitude popped up again, this time at someplace you would expect such silliness to occur. A student at Harvard, Michael Kopko, empowered by the entrepreneurial spirit, started a campus dorm cleaning service which he hires out to his fellow students. According to Kopko, he plans to eventually expand the service to other schools and hopes to make $200,000 per year.
Who could possibly criticize this ambitious young man? Well, the politically-correct moonbats at the Harvard Crimson, that’s who. In a recent editorial, the editors decried the university’s approval of Kopko’s service, Dormaid, because it created another economic rift between the more-affluent and less-affluent students. Their convoluted reasoning extends from the idea that dorm life should be one of “unity” among Harvard students, and allowing some to be able to pay for a cleaning service diminishes that unity for those who can’t.
Here’s how the blowhards at the Crimson see it:
Dorm life is one of the few common experiences left that all students, regardless of class or background, have to endure with a measure of equality. The egalitarian nature of dorm life helps to foster a sense of collegiate camaraderie, an unadulterated respect for peers; it generates a level playing field that encourages learning between people of all upbringings. A service like Dormaid can bring many levels of awkwardness into this picture. For example, do two people sharing a double split the cost? What if one wants the service and the other does not? What if one cannot afford it? Hiring someone to clean dorm rooms is a convenience, but it is also an obvious display of wealth that would establish a perceived, if unspoken, barrier between students of different economic means.
So, according to these geniuses, all students should be willing to live in (or endure, as they put it) their own self-created squalor because it isn’t fair that some are willing to pay to have their mess cleaned up and others are not. Why don’t we extend this argument a bit further: if one resident has a crummy, 14-inch television, and another has a 42-inch plasma screen with progressive-scan DVD, satellite and HD, does the latter have to send all that gear home because it wouldn’t be fair to the cheap kid with the crappy TV? We can even extend this “dorm fairness doctrine” to what cellphone a kid has, or what clothes he wears. Why stop at just wanting things to be clean?
I seem to recall that a very long time ago, keeping one’s room clean at school was probably a requirement, even at a high-end university like Harvard. I’ll bet, at one time, the school even had inspections, where adult dorm supervisors regularly examined the rooms for cleanliness. Since that’s now ancient history, it’s every student for him or herself. If some kid decides to spend a few bucks to have someone come in and clean the room, more power to them. I have more admiration for someone willing to pay to live in a clean environment than I do for a bunch of sniveling editors at the college paper who believe living like a slob is a unifying feature of the “egalitarian nature of dorm life.”
Perhaps the Crimson ought to be looking into the problems of students that are such slobs that there’s even a need for a service like Kopko’s in the first place. Perhaps that Utopian idea of “an unadulterated respect for peers” goes out the window when you wind up with Felix and Oscar in the same dorm suite. If Felix is too busy getting an education and wants to pay Dormaid to clean the place up, that’s his business.
The Harvard Crimson should then just shut up about it.
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