By Isaac Wang

One image that is permanently embedded in my selective memory of Duke’s campus is the pile of barf that missed an overflowing trash can two feet away. It not only looks disgusting and smells putrid, but its rancid presence is there for criminally long periods of neglect.

Hardly a figment of your imagination, the misplaced vomit assaults your senses like a canker sore in your cognizance, because it is the first thing you see (and smell) on Saturday morning and Sunday morning and Monday morning as you are recovering from your own sinful revelry or all-nighter.

The irony of waste management at Duke is that it is not there when you need it most…kind of like an insurance company. Housekeeping staff works diligently to maintain hospitable environments on the weekdays, but is nowhere to be seen on the weekends when their services are in greatest demand. A key component of services in any industry is the timeliness of its service.

Could you imagine if the best TV shows were during the early afternoon, or if bars and clubs were closed after dinner time? Better yet, let’s be more relevant and imagine if Jimmy Johns took nights off and religious services took weekends off. The current scheduling for housekeeping (more specifically waste management) is absurd, because the services at Duke do not cater to the needs of the student population.

Depending on the quad, it’s arguable that Friday night accumulates more trash than the other four weekdays combined. Saturday night’s partying and revelry is often on par with that of Friday, resulting in a sanitation disaster by Sunday. As a result, housekeeping staff undoubtedly have “a case of the Mondays” when they return to find the campus a mess.

My heart goes out to the folks that have to deal with large amounts of trash, the smell of rotting Italian and Chinese food from Friday night, and a welcoming pile of vomit waiting for them.

Whether Duke is aware of the inconvenience of the situation and student backlash against the inefficient management is irrelevant. The campus has other inefficient arrangements and more pressing issues that it continues to neglect. (Think Duke Police, Duke Dining, and Duke Transportation)

What I’m concerned with is not whether Duke is willing to do anything about it, but whether it can do anything about it. Duke likely has entrenched labor agreements that prevent many of its employees from working on the weekends, probably stemming from a “right to weekends” clause.

If not for legal restrictions, an obvious solution would to be to make employees work on different days. The current arrangement has the accumulated trash of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday collected on Monday morning, obviously very inefficient.

Instead of working only weekday mornings, they should work the mornings of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. This still gives employees two days off a week (Monday and Wednesday) while providing students with desperately needed services on the weekends.

There are going to be people who complain about the right to weekends, but it should not hold up given that many services on campus remain active on weekends (dining, law enforcement, library).

But what can Duke students do to help ameliorate the situation? We can not summon the powers of Margaret Thatcher and throw a political coup to rid Duke of labor unions and senseless regulations. We can, however, not depend on the government (sorry, I mean Duke administration) and create our own solutions. Here are three alternative conservative solutions that the student body could easily adopt to remedy this issue:

Solution 1: Volunteer

As champions of community service, Duke students can easily create a student organization that collects garbage on Saturday and Sunday mornings from each quad and put the waste in their respective metal containers for trucks to pick up on Mondays.

This requires no more than 5 people per quad for 20 minutes for each morning. If we have activists saving Africa, promoting democracy in China, and fighting for the rights of transsexuals, I think we can get 5 people per quad to help out on this.

Solution 2: Privatize waste management on the weekends

Duke organizations that have the ability to fund services (ex. Campus Council, DSG) can pay private waste management companies to take out the garbage and clean messes on the weekends for a nominal fee.

The large scale of such operations suggests we can probably get a better deal through an overall agreement for the entire campus than through individual quads making their own arrangements. I believe this is a service that many students on campus would be more than willing to have their quad councils pay for.

Weekly, it shouldn’t cost more than 50 dollars per quad to take out 20-30 bags of trash. Compare that with the other events and ludicrous things that our student services organizations pay for on Duke students’ money.

Solution 3: Self-sufficiency

This is my personal favorite, but the least feasible given that Duke students have a pathological dependency on student services. The self-sufficiency solution simply means that we do it ourselves in arrangements that we can set up with our RAs.

Just as we take turns taking out the garbage at home, students in the same hall can take turns taking out the big bags of garbage and putting them in the large metal waste bin. And just as we have to clean our own bathrooms at home, students in the same hall can also take turns cleaning bathrooms on the weekends by doing simple chores such as picking up paper towels, wiping down toilet seats, and scrubbing table counters. Part of being a responsible citizen and an independent human being is taking care of your own environment and being conscious of your quality of life.

Regardless of what may be hampering Duke’s ability to conduct effective waste management that schedules according to students’ needs, we can take it upon ourselves to solve the problem. As members of a civil society, we can conjure our own reasonable solutions, guided by conservative principles such as “voluntary community”, “privatization”, “personal responsibility”, and “freedom from dependency”.