A majority of students indicated that overcrowding in on-campus housing — specifically the accommodation of students in kitchens and lounges — has affected their residential experience, according to last month's Herald poll. Eleven percent of respondents said overcrowding has affected them very much, while 43 percent said it has affected them somewhat. Forty-six percent said they have not been affected by the loss of common spaces.
Fifty-five percent of first-years, 59 percent of sophomores, 60 percent of juniors and 42 percent of seniors — many of whom live off-campus — said they have been affected by the overcrowding.
Seventeen percent of sophomores said they have been affected "very much" by overcrowding, compared to 7 percent of seniors, 11 percent of juniors and 8 percent of first-years.
This mirrors another trend: When asked in the poll what the University's highest priority should be, 14 percent of sophomores favored building new on-campus dorms, compared to 11 percent of juniors and 8 percent of both first-years and seniors.
Though students living in temporary housing often have varying opinions of their living situations — as The Herald has reported in the past — students living near converted kitchens and lounges also feel the effects of lost common spaces.
‘No options'
"Last semester, our second-floor kitchen was converted into a triple," said Ellen Shadburn '12, a second-floor resident of Vartan Gregorian Quad A, which houses about 170 students. Some students chose to live on the second floor because of its kitchen, Shadburn said, but were given no warning it would be taken away.
"A lot of us wanted to reduce our meal plans, but decided not to because the only kitchen was so far away." She said the situation was "extremely inconvenient" for a suitemate who enjoys cooking. This semester, the kitchen has been reopened.
Some students living in Wriston Quadrangle dormitories as independents — residents not affiliated with program or Greek houses — have no access to kitchens or lounges in their buildings.
"We are independents, and we have no kitchen or lounge," said Jordan Place '13, a Marcy House resident who is not on a meal plan.
The Office of Residential Life gave him card access to Sears House to use its independent kitchen, he said. "We rarely do anything with a stove, because we just don't want to walk," Place said. "We microwave a lot of things in our room."
Hope College has two lounges — one in the basement and Appleget Lounge on the first floor. But Appleget Lounge is currently being used to house students, leaving Hope residents with only the basement lounge.
"I have never seen Appleget Lounge," Hope resident Margaret Tennis '14 said. The basement lounge is cold and uncomfortable, she said. "I know that everyone in Hope is pretty peeved about the situation."
She said that if she wants to talk on the phone, but her roommate is in the room, she has nowhere to go. There are "no options if you want to respect your roommate's rights and still have your privacy," she said. Tennis also said there is nowhere to go for students who want to study in the dorm. "We have people doing work in the kitchens every night, which I don't think is ideal."
Looking for a lounge
ResLife's website currently contains inaccurate information about common spaces. For example, it says North Wayland House 101 is a lounge, but in reality, it is being used to house students.
Excluding Arnold Lounge, ResLife's website lists five lounges in Keeney Quadrangle, but a visit to one of the locations — Bronson House 109 — reveals otherwise, leaving only four lounges for Keeney Quad's roughly 600 residents. Three of these lounges are on the top floor. Keeney Quad also has only three kitchens, though one listed on ResLife's website, again Bronson 109, does not exist, while another kitchen — Bronson 421 — is not listed on the site.
The Residential Council's website information on dormitories — last updated in 2008 — lists eight kitchens in Keeney Quad.
ResLife does not update information on its website each year to reflect temporary changes, and the guarantee that all dorms will have kitchens should not be taken literally, Richard Bova, senior associate dean of residential and dining services, said in an Oct. 28, 2010 Herald article. "Everybody does have access to kitchens, but it's all up for interpretation," he said.
"I think there's always an impact on students when there's not as much communal space," Bova said in the article.
Leigh Carroll '12, a Women's Peer Counselor and Herald contributing writer, lives next to a converted lounge and kitchen in Keeney Quad. "There's definitely a lack of common space," she said.
Keeney Quad's top-floor lounges are "definitely too far for people to go just to hang out," Carroll said. Her residents tend to hang out in hallways and individual rooms, and with no kitchen in her unit, cooking can be difficult.
The Herald poll was conducted March 14-16 and has a 2.9 percent margin of error with 95 percent confidence. The margin of error was 5.6 percent for the subset of first-years, 5.6 percent for sophomores, 5.9 percent for juniors and 6.1 percent for seniors. A total of 972 students completed the poll, which The Herald distributed as a written questionnaire in J. Walter Wilson and the Stephen Robert '62 Campus Center during the day and in the Sciences Library at night.
