This is the first story in a series about University Facilities that invites the Clemson Family to know who these behind-the-scenes employees are, what they do and how they’re making life better for us on campus — in ways seen and unseen.
You no doubt see them on campus every day: cutting the grass on Bowman Field, planting flowers in Gantt Circle, fixing a broken window at Douthit Hills, climbing into one of the manholes on Fort Hill Street, or countless other places. Every few minutes, you might see a car, van or work truck from their fleet of more than 300 vehicles drive past or parked somewhere.
On cold days, maybe you notice clouds of steam rising from two brick smokestacks in the middle of campus and wonder, “What is that?” Or perhaps you pass someone walking out of your office early in the morning, just as you’re walking in.
These workers and the campus buildings, equipment and grounds they maintain, are, like the trees they trim, equipment they service or offices they clean: Present, but perennially in the background of our lives here.
But these quiet professionals are the lifeblood of the University. They are the 430 full-time employees and 80 contracted custodians of Clemson University Facilities. Without them, the huge, complex machine that is Clemson University would come to a grinding halt.
“We provide the University services that allow everything else to occur,” says Chief Facilities Officer Todd Barnette. “There’s been a lot of change at Clemson over the years, but what never changes is our commitment to serve this campus. Our goal is to be the premier service team in the state.”
University Facilities has a hand in every essential piece of University operations and is composed of seven departments:
Planning, design and construction
The workforce in these departments encompasses a surprising spectrum of skilled labor, from painters, electricians and custodians to map-makers, arborists, engineers, and more.
For instance: Utility Services crews maintain more than 3,500 exterior light poles and lamps that everyone working or studying at Clemson walks past daily.
And what about the steam coming out of those two landmark smokestacks in the middle of campus? That is the Central Energy Facility (CEF), also run by the Utility Services department, which houses four huge boilers that turn water into steam that can be released through a system of pipes and tunnels and heat almost every building on campus.
Then there’s the building next to the CEF that holds one of Facilities’ two woodshops, where carpenters work three shifts to be available all day, every day, to fix broken doors, windows, ceiling tiles, plaques, or any number of other things.
“Sometimes we get 15 or 20 work orders a day,” says carpenter Steve Thompson. “Anything from broken cabinet drawers to cracked whiteboards. There’s not anything we don’t do.”
Across the bridge on the opposite shore of Lake Hartwell, in the Facilities’ headquarters building, another crew works in the Facilities call center answering maintenance requests from students, faculty and staff. This service is offered 24/7 thanks to a partnership with the Clemson University Police Department, who take over late nights and weekends. Together they fielded an average of 123 work requests daily in January, a relatively slow month. To put it in perspective, Facilities crews carried out 28,540 corrective work orders and 22,011 preventative maintenance work orders generated through the call center in 2024. These projects can range from fixing malfunctioning air conditioners to catching frogs.
Other examples of the impressive scope of services University Facilities provides include:
- The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) team provides digital mapping of the campus that can be accessed from anywhere.
- The landscaping crews lovingly maintain Memorial Park, a sacred space at Clemson equivalent to Arlington National Cemetery, to the highest standard.
- The Kite Hill Recycling Center team processes 60,000 to 150,000 pounds of recyclables each month.
- A Utilities team operates the University’s water distribution system, which includes the two water towers on either end of campus (holding 1.3 million gallons of water between them), approximately 63 miles of distribution lines, 2,900 hydrants and 375 water meters.
“When I started at Clemson, I had no idea what Facilities was,” says Keith Jones, an information technology consultant with University Facilities Support Services (UFSS). “Then I found a student job in their IT dept. Suddenly, I saw Facilities everywhere. I couldn’t walk five feet without being waved at by a coworker. Many years later, I’ve grown to love working for the organization. If your passion is supporting others at Clemson, it’s the place to be.”
Barnette says Facilities employees don’t hesitate to sacrifice because they genuinely feel ownership of the places they work.
“You can see that in the custodial staff. If we try to move a custodian because we’ve got a need in another place, I usually hear from somebody in the building who says, ‘You can’t move Mary because she’s our custodian and we love her!’”
The official University Facilities mission statement reads, “We serve in developing and maintaining quality learning environments.”
Barnette says that boils down to keeping students and faculty comfortable.
“It’s important for people to be comfortable, to learn,” he says. “So, yeah, our team has a lot of impact. If something’s down, if we have an outage for whatever reason — say, a building is not heating properly — then we take that personally because it’s disrupting the learning environment, and we feel responsible for that.”
Kathy Hobgood, who oversees the University’s housing and dining operations as associate vice president for Auxiliary Enterprises, says the Facilities staff’s indefatigable commitment to the place and people they work for has an impact far beyond clean bathrooms, green grass and properly air-conditioned offices.
“Front-line staff are the heart and soul of the Clemson Family,” Hobgood says. “When Clemson Home does student satisfaction surveys, we always ask for the names of a few community members that have made a difference to that student. While faculty and advisers are well represented, a large percentage of the names shared are those of our custodial, maintenance, and dining staff. As day-to-day members of a student’s community who see them daily, they are often the first to see them, cheer on successes, and notice when someone is struggling. They truly make Clemson home.”
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
It’s that yeoman’s spirit that drives the University Facilities team as a whole, in turn lifting the Clemson experience to one of the very best in the nation for its students from all over the world. It wouldn’t be Tiger Town without them.