A milestone at Yale: Soap in dorm bathrooms
NEW HAVEN, Conn. --It took a decade of student lobbying, but Yale University appears poised to break with tradition and supply soap for dormitory bathrooms on one of the oldest campuses in America.
At a university where students have won financial aid reform and divestment from oppressive countries and have fought for union rights, a call for liquid hand soap might seem immaterial. But for years, demands for soap dispensers have gone unanswered.
Even after Yale agreed to stock two-ply toilet paper in the mid-1990s, administrators wouldn't budge on the soap issue. Cost estimates top $100,000 a year, said Steven Engler, a junior on Yale's College Council.
"It seems like a lot of money, but the school has a $12.6 billion endowment," said Engler, the head of the student government soap committee. "Soap is just a basic necessity. All the other Ivies provide soap." (Yale's endowment has actually increased to about $15.7 billion.)
This month, the university agreed to a pilot program that brought hand soap to three of the school's 12 residential colleges. Assuming the trial is affordable, Yale Facilities Director Eric Uscinski expects the university will offer soap campuswide next year.
The news spread quickly among alumni who campaigned for soap while at Yale.
"Victory at last!" Ted Wittenstein, a 2004 graduate who went on to analyze weapons of mass destruction intelligence for Congress, wrote in an e-mail to his friend, Andrew Klaber.
"We both knew that Yale would eventually come around!" Klaber, who is studying at Oxford, replied.
Getting there proved difficult. University officials worried about the cost of keeping the dispensers stocked. According to reports in the student-run Yale Daily News, some worried the dispensers would damage historic architecture in the bathrooms.
"At the time, it was a complete head-scratcher. It seemed completely obvious," said James Ponsoldt, a 2001 graduate and soap proponent who spoke this week from the Sundance Film Festival, where a movie he directed premiered. "It's pretty gross to not have soap in the bathrooms."
Tradition also was a factor. Generations of Yale undergraduates, including current and former Presidents Bush, lived without university-supplied soap.
"I think the main reason there aren't soap dispensers is because there never have been soap dispensers," Dean of Administrative Affairs John Meeske told the campus newspaper in 1997.
Students coped by pitching in to buy soap. Parents contributed. Soap became a communal responsibility.
"I put a little dispenser of liquid soap out and now it's gone and I hope somebody else will put one out," Engler said.
In 1997, student leaders appealed to a higher power. John Pepper, then a member of Yale's corporation, was also the chairman of Cincinnati-based
"We never could make it work," Pepper said in a telephone interview this week. "I think it's great that people have soap. I'm a big supporter of soap."
Year after year, the issue resurfaced, to the dismay of students who thought the College Council should focus on something else.
"I was always confused why people wanted to spend that much time doing it," said Andrew Cedar, a senior who was cautioned against tackling the soap issue when he joined the council as an underclassmen. "That was the legend, that soap in bathrooms was the issue to stay away from because it's never going to happen."
Klaber remembers hearing that when he was on the council.
"We got that all the time," he said. "But clearly, based on the longevity of this struggle, this has mattered."
