But unlike a city, no one at MSU is required to fix their own toilet, shovel their own sidewalk or fix the leak in their sink they just can’t get to stop dripping.

That’s where the Physical Plant and several other campus entities come together, with hundreds of employees behind the scenes to fulfill their mission of keeping MSU up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year.

“When everybody’s here — all the students and the faculty — we’re the 25th largest city in Michigan,” said Ron Flinn, Physical Plant assistant vice president.

“The major difference is that we have our arms around everything in all the buildings.”

A few good people
Most other Big Ten universities the size of MSU have physical plants with a staff of between 1,000 – 1,400 full-time employees, Flinn said.

“We have 660 — a few good people, just like the Marine Corps,” he said.

The name comes from the department’s job to create and maintain the physical environment for the education, research and public service the university carries out on a daily basis, Flinn said.

Sometimes that means unexpected job assignments.

Gus Gosselin, director of the Physical Plant’s building services, said the No. 1 reason his department is called is to deal with heating and cooling issues on campus — joking, “You break it, we fix it.”

In one instance, that meant a sticky situation in a building that got a little cooler than expected.

“A professor had been raising bugs for 20 years, and if we couldn’t fix (the cooling), he (was) going to lose 20 years of research,” he said.

Although rescuing bugs from a cold front might seem like an obscure task, it’s another way the Physical Plant team works to support the educational mission of MSU — and doing their work efficiently is something the Physical Plant employees say they constantly have to keep in mind.

“We nearly do the impossible with what we have,” Gosselin said.

Powering it on
Walk into the MSU Power Plant at any time of the day — whether it’s 3 a.m. or 3 p.m. — and at least five operators will be in the control room manning the machinery, five being the minimum amount of people that work in the plant at all times, said Gary Mell, performance engineer for Physical Plant Power and Water.

The plant burns coal to produce about 1.2 million pounds of steam daily for both heating and electricity — known as a cogeneration process, Mell said. Utility plants that use steam solely to produce electricity are about 30 percent efficient as far as getting the energy out of the fuel they burn, he said.

“A cogeneration process like we use is about 60 percent efficient,” Mell said.

The department also is responsible for supplying the water supply for the majority of campus, distributed from a network of wells on the south part of campus, he said.

But for Eric Long, a comparative cultures and politics senior who has lived on campus for four years, the water quality is lacking, he said.

“It’s drinkable in terms of health, but it doesn’t taste good,” he said.

Although many people on campus would prefer to have softened water, the plant has reasons for avoiding it, Flinn said.

“(Researchers) prefer to have water with very low treatment,” he said.

“When you go into a large softening operation, there’s a lot more chemicals that wind up being added to it, which the researchers find is unacceptable.”

Technicians monitor the equipment in the Power Plant to ensure that when campus starts “waking up,” the steam and electricity production picks up at the same rate to power all of the lights being turned on, heat the water for the showers being taken and warm the buildings for students trooping into their 8 a.m. classes.

Workers man the control room of the Power Plant all day, everyday. Shifts are about 12 hours, Mell said.

Typically, workers are on the same team for years and grow together as a family, he said.

After working at the MSU Power Plant for 29 years, Bob Guernsey, first-class stationary engineer for Physical Plant Power and Water, has developed a close relationship with his coworkers, he said.

“As you work with each other, you become used to each other — you know what you can expect from them,” he said.

“The longer you work with a particular group of people, the more cohesive you become.”

From the ground up
Workers in the Physical Plant Landscape Services take the “go green, go white” of MSU seriously — helping maintain its gardens and grounds during the “go green” season and making sure campus walkways are safe when the weather turns white.

In the winter, landscape services workers are responsible for making MSU accessible, despite the snow and ice.

During some months, there is a crew of workers devoted to clearing “deadly icicles” off the roofs of buildings, and another group keeps the roads clear after any blizzards that roll into East Lansing overnight.

Keeping roads clear to ensure students can wake up in the morning, grab breakfast and focus on their classes without worry, as if the work is done by “magic,” is the department’s philosophy, said Gerry Dobbs, landscape services manager of Physical Plant Landscape Services.

“Our people really have a lot of pride in the work that they do, and they go the extra mile to make sure the campus stays open,” he said.

Workers also attend to odd jobs, such as cleaning up after vandalism on campus, Dobbs said.

“There are three things that … if people saw pictures of them worldwide, they would associate them with MSU: the lanterns, Sparty and Beaumont (Tower),” Dobbs said. “If one of those areas
get attacked, it’s something we really have to address ASAP.”

The team plans months in advance for every season. Although there’s still some snow on the ground, landscape services staff are getting the mowing equipment ready and doing training refreshers on some of the seasonal tasks, he said.

“It’s like going to Meijer and seeing the swimsuits out already,” Dobbs said. “We have to get our equipment ready, so if there’s any problems, we can correct it right then and there.”

Living and learning on campus
About 30,000 meals are served daily on campus, said Bruce Haskell, associate director of Residential Dining. About 350 full-time staff and 3,000 – 4,000 students work together to feed campus.

Brody Square alone serves an average of about 4,000 to 5,000 students daily, said Joe Murphy, a sous chef in Brody Neighborhood Culinary Services.

At about 6 a.m., workers begin chopping, mixing and preparing the next day’s meals. Feeding so many students takes planning and efficiency, Murphy said.

Equipment, such as a pasta machine that can make about 150 pounds of pasta per hour, is necessary to operate Brody Square, Haskell said.

Murphy is a part of most meals at Brody Square from beginning to end — whipping up entrees, such as Tuscan pear salad with chicken and Guinness lamb stew. Last summer, he helped plan each meal for the upcoming year from original recipes. He oversees employees’ work from serving meals to cleaning and closing shop at about midnight.

Servicing students in a restaurant style is one of the ways Murphy works to maintain quality while serving thousands of students, he said.

“We’ve changed the way food service is going to be done,” Murphy said. “Everything’s fresh, everything’s made to order or it’s made in batches.”

And some students are taking notice.

The sushi, vegetarian options, selection and “better food products overall” make those cafeterias stand out, Long said.

But other than Brody Square and The Gallery at Snyder and Phillips halls, food at MSU has room for improvement, he added.

Many of the students going to the cafeterias are the same ones that stay in the MSU residence halls.

With 24 residence halls currently open, about 14,500 residents live on campus in the fall and spring semesters, said Paul Goldblatt, director of Residence Life.

“I believe … to this day, we’re still the largest single campus housing system in the country,” he said.

With a residence hall system that large, one of the challenges is making each student feel like more than just a number, Goldblatt said. Hubbard Hall, one of the largest residence halls on campus, houses about 1,200 students at a time, so it’s important for students to connect with their floor or their wing of the building, he said.

A residence hall staff of 333 resident mentors and 44 assistant hall directors help make that happen — living and sleeping in the residence halls where they work.

“At some schools, that might be the size of their whole program,” Goldblatt said.

“Sometimes with the size, our challenge becomes to try and make it a smaller community for the student.”

No-preference junior Aaron Bradford said, when he lived in the residence halls, his resident mentor helped the students on the floor get to know one another.

“He made us do a lot of things we thought wouldn’t be cool but ended up being a lot of fun,” he said.

Whether they’re comforting an upset resident or making a hot meal for students, the Division of Residential and Hospitality Services plays a daily role in students’ experiences at MSU.

“It’s not just the academic experience that our students get while on campus that’s important,” Haskell said. “It’s the total academic and personal experience, and a lot of that personal development focuses on where they live and what they eat.”

Campus companies
The Physical Plant also encompasses departments that might be seen as “companies” in a regular city.

A telecommunications team runs the equivalent of a full-blown telephone company, with switchboard operators working around the clock, Flinn said. Engineering and architectural services help to construct new facilities and roadways on campus. And the transportation unit is available to rent cars, busses or bicycles for colleges and departments’ needs — supported by a mobile gas station and a mechanic shop.

“It’s all part of the university,” he said.

One of the parts Dobbs likes most about his job is the ability to go above and beyond the call of duty — experimenting with ways to make the equipment better.

“One of the things we teasingly say is our metal shop can take a block of metal and make a Model T out of it,” Dobbs said.

Looking forward
In the future, the biggest challenge the Physical Plant will face is energy conservation, Flinn said.

The plant is working to buy metering equipment to install in each campus building to monitor how much energy they use, and reducing energy across campus overall is a mission of the team, he said.

With the entire university facing budget cuts, promoting turning off computers and lights when they’re not being used is a necessary way for the division to cut back on energy costs, Flinn said.

“We just have to get better at that, but we’re working in that direction,” he said.

And although there occasionally might be a toilet taken out of service if the department has to deal with a smaller staff, campus never will stop running, Flinn said.

“We’ll expect to have the lights on 24/7,” he said.