Although Covid-19 pandemic restrictions on campus ended over two years ago, the college’s staffing has not climbed back to pre-pandemic levels, and several departments, including Custodial Services, the Davis Family Library, Catering and Dining are struggling with unmanageable workloads and burnout. According to staff, much of this struggle has been caused by the college’s poor human resource policies.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, the college has lost over 30 custodians, and several positions have been eliminated, custodial staff said. The remaining staff have been cross-trained to multitask and take on the workloads of those who left.
The custodians that spoke with The Campus for this story did so under the condition of anonymity due to fear of facing retaliation from supervisors.
While Covid-19 restrictions were in place, the college provided custodians with an additional $120 every two weeks — $1.15 extra hourly — to help compensate for their increased workloads after 30 staff members left. They were told this benefit would last until 80% of positions were filled, but ended it after hiring 10 custodians and eliminating the 20 remaining positions. This forced custodians to take on more work than they did before the pandemic.
“From where it was before Covid, we’re down to probably 30, 40 custodians,” a custodian Team Liaison, a position that helps organize the custodial staff teams, said.
The Team Liaison shared that the college hired five custodians from a third party organization during the summer for 10 weeks, and did not choose to maintain those positions during regular semesters.
“[The college] cross-trained everybody, so everybody can basically do any job on campus,” another custodian said. “As they lose a person, they just divide [the work] up or just add it to somebody else’s work.”
As part of the budget cuts announced in the spring, faculty and staff retirement match rates were reduced from 15% to 11%. Custodians also expressed concern over the potential reduction of Combined Time Off (CTO). CTO functions like paid vacation time that accumulates automatically: Every two weeks, custodial staff earn some hours of paid leave, which is deposited into their CTO “bank.” If an employee takes one or two weeks off, they will still return with additional hours of CTO accrued.
Custodians said the benefits Middlebury has offered in the past are part of the reason they have stayed at the college as long as they have. With some of these benefits having been reduced, they are wondering if more are at risk and finding less compelling incentives to stay.
“We’re not sure what’s going to happen,” the custodian said. “But [the college is] looking at cuts in every direction, and it seems like we’re the ones suffering.”
“Last year, they didn’t even give us anything for Christmas,” the custodian said. “I’m not really looking for anything, but every employer usually does something. That was the first time in my life an employer didn’t give anything for Christmas.”
The understaffing not only impacts the morale, but also forces custodians to lower the high standard of cleaning they used to follow. One custodian pointed to the example of dust just above a doorframe that they previously had time to wipe off.
“Now we just don’t have the time to do dusting like we used to,” they said. “They put so much on us, that you just don’t have the time to do it all.”
Their jobs are further complicated by the transition from the Language Schools on campus in the summer to the regular fall semester. At the end of each summer, different language programs have different departure dates, and the move-out process often coincides with some regular students arriving early. This makes cleaning one building at a time difficult, obliging custodians to return to buildings multiple times to accommodate them.
“The changeover between language school and regular school coming in is quick, and we don’t do full cleans,” the custodian said. “We don’t have the time to do that, because it’s just there’s so much to do.”
“Some of the houses we have to stop at three, four times and clean one room this day, another this day next week,” the Team Liaison added.
Staffing in the Davis Family Library has also not bounced back from its pre-Covid-19 levels. The library has seen significant turnover in recent years after several librarians left, citing what they saw as flaws in the “skill matrix” pay system implemented in 2022. The system determines pay based on market data from the previous fiscal year at other “peer” institutions outside of Vermont and places hard caps on their salaries.
During the pandemic, the college permanently cut one librarian position, and earlier this year it froze several research librarian hiring processes as part of its budget-saving measures. According to Terry Simpkins, director of discovery and access services, the library has managed to hire for some vacant positions, though staffing levels are still not what they were before.
“We had approval to hire two more librarians that were frozen and then one of them was unfrozen,” he said. “And now our dean retired early, so we’re down three staff members from [Covid-19].”
Former Dean of the Library Mike Roy took the early retirement incentive offered to staff in the spring to cut costs. Staff members of at least 55 years of age who have worked at the college for at least 10 years qualified, leading 53 employees to take the incentive and leave their jobs.
For non-research librarian roles, the library has been able to improve capacity through the internal promotion of non-librarian staff members.
“Now we have had some internal promotions of staff members to librarians, so the number of librarians has increased,” Simpkins said.
The closure of Armstrong Library, the upcoming relocation of the Language Schools at Bennington College in 2027 and the impending closure of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) have and will continue to increase the workload for an already strained library staff.
“There’s going to be a lot of work to do with the library materials that we have at those places,” he said. “I doubt very much that we will bring those materials here, because at this point with bringing in the Armstrong materials, [Davis is] now full again. But we will have to make decisions about what we have in those libraries at some point.”
Anticipating the closure of MIIS, the administration has begun reducing Monterey-based staff, which means library staff in Vermont will likely have to provide additional support in addition to their own workloads.
“Two members at Monterey have been laid off as of January 2026, so they’re going to be downstaffing and their library is going to be closing,” he said. “We’ll have to help with that, so it’s really that kind of thing that is impacting us as much as the staffing.”
Faculty and staff publicly protested the budget cuts last May and called for the closure of MIIS. While the college administration announced in late August that they would sell the Institute, it has not publicly discussed reversing the cuts.
Hugo Zhang '28 (he/him) is a News Editor.
Hugo previously served as an Online Editor. He intends to major in Economics and Geography. He enjoys cartography, traveling, and history. Last summer, he studied at Sciences Po Paris and traveled across Europe. He has also conducted research on ethnic minority policies, economic transformation, and urban planning in Northeastern China, also known as Manchuria.
