John R. “Jack” Coleman, who died last week at age 95, was that rare academic who ascended the Ivory Tower while keeping his feet firmly planted on the ground.

As president of Haverford College in the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, Coleman was a prominent liberal voice in opposition to the Vietnam War and in favor of co-education on his own campus. But perhaps his most notable endeavors occurred when he went on leave from the college to work, incognito, at a series of blue-collar jobs such as garbage man, cook, ditch digger and farm laborer. The diary he kept became the basis for a well-received 1974 book titled Blue Collar Journal: A College President’s Sabbatical.

In a 1973 interview with The New York Times, Coleman, a labor economist trained at the University of Chicago, explained his project: “I wanted to get away from the world of words and politics and parties — the things a college president does. As a college president you begin to take yourself very seriously and think you have power you don’t. You forget elementary things about people. I wanted to relearn the things I’d forgotten.”

Among the things he learned, or relearned, was “how much isolation there is in all our lives.” While working as a garbage man in College Park, Md., Coleman was frequently ignored or insulted by those whose trash he was picking up. This experience is surely familiar to many blue-collar workers, as is the coda: “All it took to brighten his day was a word of thanks,” according to The Washington Post’s obituary.

What did he conclude from his blue-collar experience? That jobs, whether mental or physical, have “frustrations, joys, pains and dreams in just about the same mixture.”

After leaving Haverford, Coleman plunged into prison reform and other social causes while working at a New York-based foundation, and continued his undercover investigations as, among other things, a prison inmate in three states and a prison guard in Texas. One January, during a severe cold spell, he spent 10 days on the streets of New York City to see what it was like to be homeless, a experience he chronicled in a magazine article. In 1986, he moved to Vermont, where he restored and reopened an inn in Chester and later operated the weekly Black River Tribune. In 2000, as a justice of the peace, Coleman presided over one of the first civil unions in Vermont.

The continuing relevance and importance of what Coleman undertook should be obvious. At a time when inequality of wealth and opportunity have rarely been as great in America as they currently are, political, business, media and academic elites have become increasingly out of touch with the aspirations and experiences of ordinary workers. They fly first class, send their children to elite schools, take luxurious vacations abroad and live in exclusive neighborhoods where the trash man in not merely anonymous, but invisible to them. This situation almost certainly has helped to breed the anger and resentment voters have expressed in this year’s presidential campaign. Leaders in all fields of endeavor could profit by relearning that which they have apparently forgotten: That labor of all sorts has an inherent dignity that must be recognized, honored and rewarded.