Learning with a Shovel

The new garbage man was in the midst of emptying a trash can outside a ranch home in Calverton, Md., when a woman in a housecoat and apron appeared at the kitchen door. The garbage man, who had known her several years earlier, ducked behind a gate. "If my cover had been blown there would have been publicity," he reasoned. "People would have recognized me and the whole thing wouldn't have worked."

The "whole thing" was an attempt by John R. Coleman, 51, a former Ford Foundation executive and now president of Haverford College, to break what he calls "the lockstep"--the educational process that leads in a straight line from kindergarten through graduate school, and often onward into the walled-in offices of academia. Coleman is a labor economist (among his books is Labor Problems, 1953), but the idea of actually going out and doing physical labor first occurred to him three years ago when he heard about the clash between hardhat construction workers and antiwar student demonstrators on Wall Street. "That terrified me," Coleman recalls. "I began to see there was tremendous arrogance among higher education professionals. We get a very distorted view of ourselves and become very intolerant of other points of view."

As for himself, he "wanted to get away from the world of words and politics and parties--the things a president does.

As a college president you begin to take yourself very seriously and you think you have power you don't. You forget elementary things about people."

It Was Unreal. In February, Coleman went on a leave, telling his plans to nobody except his oldest son. Neither his trustees nor his secretary knew where he was going. Indeed, he hardly knew himself. He went to Atlanta and landed a job at $2.75 an hour digging ditches for sewers and water lines. It was exhausting work--"How many times," he asked himself, "had I read of men in their fifties dying while shoveling snow?"--but he stuck to it for two weeks. Then he had to quit in order to attend a meeting of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, of which he is chairman. "It was unreal," he recalls.

"I had to keep pinching myself and asking, 'Is this any less role playing than what I've been doing?' " Coleman next moved to Boston and found a job as a dishwasher in a cafeteria. Before the first hour was up, his boss slipped two dollars into his hand and said simply, "You won't do." Coleman asked why but was given no reason. "It was amazingly demoralizing," he says. "I'd never been fired and I'd never been unemployed. For three days I walked the streets. Though I had a bank account and a job waiting for me back at Haverford, I got an inkling of how professionals my age feel when they lose their job and their confidence begins to sink."

He applied for a job as a kitchen helper in an electronics plant. He tried a nursing home and a country club.

When asked about previous experience, he would say, "I used to be in sales."

After a week of job hunting, he checked his horoscope in the Globe, and it said:

"Look for money and luck in the early afternoon." He was hired that afternoon as a sandwich and salad man at the Union Oyster House, where he stayed for almost a month. He was even offered a promotion to assistant chef, but he had to attend another meeting of the reserve bank, and then he moved on to the garbage business in Maryland ($2.50 an hour). As he hauled away, he sometimes called out greetings to the local residents, but most of them ignored him. "There's enormous contempt for garbage men," Coleman remarks.

On April 14, Coleman decided that enough was enough, so he set sail for Europe ("I love art. I love opera"), returning just in time for Haverford's commencement exercises, where he told the students, "There is a need to vary the rhythms in your life." Coleman does not believe that every college president should collect garbage--although he says one of them has expressed envy of his sabbatical, as have two bankers, two reporters and a minister--but he has recommended to the trustees that Haverford students be not just permitted but required to take time out for work before receiving their degrees. "We have to build a more diverse campus," he says. "We've got to get a dialogue going between the construction workers and the students." Reflecting on his experience, Coleman remembers with deep satisfaction a remark made to him by a 22-year-old foreman named Ron:

"You're the first good helper I've had in a long time. Keep it up."

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