While Brown has been doing an excellent job of renovating the campus by remodeling the Blue Room and beginning construction on the Metcalf Lab, it needs to seriously consider refurbishing certain older dorms around campus. Not everyone enjoys waking up to scratched, dirty walls or viciously beaten up desks and drawers.
Moving into dorms at the beginning of each school year can be an unpleasant surprise for some. Looking forward to a single this semester, Julia Metzger '13 had high hopes for her new residence in the Graduate Center. However, she was disappointed when she entered her room to find shabby furniture, peeling walls, and musty curtains. Her suitemates were also in for a big surprise when they encountered a bloodstained mattress, splotches of unknown substances on the bathroom door and a pair of dirty underwear in the drawers.
Metzger also stated that her mother, Brown alum Wendy Pollard '81, noted that the dorms look "exactly the same as they did twenty years ago." Not to be misunderstood as an admirable thing, this observation is actually somewhat alarming; I'm sure none of the students would be ecstatic to discover they use decades-old furniture on a daily basis.
Keeping up with the tradition of ancient, rustic buildings may seem like the right thing to do in order to maintain Brown's status as a well established Ivy League institution. However, tradition isn't always a good thing, especially when it comes to living conditions for students. Brown is aware of this to some degree as shown by its work on the Metcalf Lab, but its priorities need to be rearranged slightly. Students deserve respectable housing conditions and should be able to feel relaxed in their own rooms, not alarmed by the decrepit states of the buildings.
Metzger "(loves) having a single, but the walls are peeling off and the furniture is extremely beat up." She realizes that the Grad Center is one of the older dorms and recognizes the superior quality of the newer dorms. Machado House, for example, is a building in mint condition and even has air conditioning; this is a colossal step ahead of older buildings like Keeney Quad, which has ancient furniture and heating systems that leave the rooms too hot or too cold and never in between.
Alex Forney '13 recalls his personal experience of living in an unusually cold room his freshman year in Keeney. His old room, a converted lounge, unfortunately had multiple doors, one of them connecting straight to the outdoors. This door caused an immense temperature decrease in the room during cold weather, which is all too frequent on the East Coast. The main problem with this situation was the fact that no extra measures were taken to make sure the room was well insulated; the only adjustment made was to block off the door from the outside. Forney shared, "My room was so poorly insulated that I could seriously see my breath in my room. People would come into my room and then leave because it was so freezing."
Allowing the students to put up with such circumstances is not something I would have thought Brown would do. It is understandable that the University can't remodel every altered building or spend the time and money to renovate the entire campus, but the fact that the Office of Residential Life doesn't even periodically check the dorm rooms for habitability is astonishing. As Forney pointed out, "how hard would it have been to put cement or drywall there?"
According to Metzger, "there's even a huge disparity between New Dorm and Grad Center," which comes as a surprise considering the buildings are across the street from each other. Brown doesn't necessarily have to reconstruct the older buildings, of course, but the least it could do is replace the chipped, molding furniture or even repaint the stained walls.
I feel that on the whole, students would work better and be more productive if they resided in places where they feel comfortable and at home rather than distracted by their less than ideal surroundings. And, as this is a university with a primary goal of promoting academic excellence, it should be Brown's duty to at least make an effort to refurbish its dorms. As Metzger aptly put it, "for so much money we live in such run-down living conditions."
I appreciate Brown's solid attempt to renovate the campus. The Blue Room and Metcalf Lab were both in dire need of a fixing up. However, I also feel that the University should allocate some time and money to improving student dorms first. After all, "home is where the heart is."
Deniz Ilgen '13 is a civil engineering concentrator from Los Gatos, California. She can be reached at deniz_ilgen(at)brown.edu
