Life, Laundry, and the Pursuit of Cleanliness

When I returned to Harvard from spring break, laundry was the last thing on my mind. My flights had been delayed by almost eight hours, causing me to arrive in my dorm at 1 a.m. on Monday morning, with class in eight hours. Unsurprisingly, I hadn’t started any of the work that I had promised myself I would do over the break. And I was still covered in sand from playing touch rugby on the beach in Bermuda the day before.

Yet as I unpacked, the smell of a week’s worth of dirty clothes soon forced laundry to the front of my priorities. So with my dirties in one hand and Tide pods in the other, off to the machines in the middle of the night I went. Again.

But as I rounded the corner into the Weld Hall laundry room, I was greeted by those four letters that put all college students into a state of pure ecstasy: F-R-E-E.

Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, or maybe I really do hate paying for laundry that much. But those four letters sent me over the moon. Unburdened by cost, I separated my laundry into three loads instead of shoving it all into one machine and pouring a detergent libation to the laundry gods. I even stripped my bed and washed my sheets just because it was free. As far as I was concerned, this was a new era. Harvard had reinvented itself while I was gone. Paying for laundry was a thing of the past.

How disappointed I was when I came back a week later, also past midnight, and found that laundry was once again $3 — $1.50 to wash, $1.50 to dry. There I was, saying another prayer to the Tide pod gods, hoping that one machine could fit all of my dirty clothes.

Throughout this veritable roller coaster of emotions, I was left with one burning question: Why does Harvard, one of the richest universities on the planet, charge its students $3 for a load of laundry?

Assuming that there are 16 weeks in a full semester, and all 7,103 current Harvard College students do two loads of laundry totalling $6 a week, Harvard is only raking in $681,888 of revenue per semester. And while the word “only” used next to a six-figure number might seem a little absurd, that yearly figure is only about 0.17 percent of the University’s total $406 million budget surplus last fiscal year.

It’s not that I expect Harvard to cover every possible expense that it can afford, but the real absurdity to me is Harvard’s hesitancy to offer free laundry when doing so would bring tangible, significant benefits to every single student.

With free laundry, students would be less likely to overfill the machines, which is good for both them and Harvard. When students do all of their laundry in one load, clothes are not totally clean, negatively impacting the student and their clothes. And unsurprisingly, overfilling of machines is a leading cause of damage to washing machines. By switching to free laundry, Harvard is actually likely to save money on machine repair.

Free laundry would also keep us healthier. Dirty clothes, bedding, and towels are all huge vectors for disease, and removing cost gives students no reason to delay washing their dirty sheets and towels until they can put together one large load. Free laundry would encourage students to wash as frequently as they need, preventing the spread of more germs on campus.

Granting students free laundry would also remove a legitimate — and regressive — financial burden. While tuition, housing, and food can all be covered with financial aid, laundry is funded by Crimson Cash — a fully out-of-pocket payment account for students — or quarters. And the larger the financial constraint that laundry has on students, the more likely they are to overfill machines and delay washing altogether, perpetuating the above problems.

Harvard is behind the pack when it comes to free laundry. Half of the Ivy League — Princeton, Penn, Columbia, and Brown — currently offer this basic amenity to their students, and students are calling for free or more affordable laundry at Yale and Dartmouth, too. Harvard should lead among its peers — or at least join them.

Clean clothes are a basic necessity, yet Harvard does not see them as such. When students are discouraged from doing their laundry by unnecessary financial barriers, washing machines wear out faster, students get sicker, and campus becomes less pleasant overall. As it showed the week after spring break, Harvard has the ability to make our laundry free. So why doesn’t it?

Mac M. Mertens ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Weld Hall.