A Recurring Nightmare Febs Overtake Social Spaces

Author: Michael Stahler

On Wednesday night, I had a nightmare involving Hepburn Hall, in which I'm a Residential Advisor (RA). It began with a voicemail from my commons residential advisor saying, "they have closed our lounges." It also included the sight of one of my residents trying to get into the lounge to watch the TV and finding a locked door.

Two out of three public lounges in Hepburn have been closed to make rooms for incoming Febs.

All this was done without advanced notice and contradicts the promise that Provost Tim Spears and then-Housing Coordinator Hikaru Kozuma made to the Hepburn Community in 2001. After some calls, we learned that the Planning and Enrollment Committee made the decision. I hope that its members are reading this piece.

My nightmare continued. After eating lunch at LaForce, I passed the fireplace lounge, almost always locked, a fitness room, and several lounges as well as some other empty spaces.

I returned to Hepburn and opened my e-mail to find messages from my residents saying how "egregious" this was, "how bad Brainerd housing" will be without the lounges, and how "this is an important [and the only] meeting place for me and my friends."

Here people cook or watched TV--important since "students don't have access to cable" in their rooms.

The whole sight made me nauseous. I have faith in our commons system, that's why I chose to be an RA.

I really enjoy living with the people in my community, that's why I stayed in Brainerd.

We have been working hard to create community, but is seems that the college advertises a phenomenal quality of life on the one hand while eroding ours on the other.

A granite fireplace and a fitness room are great for Ross, but we would just like to have a TV lounge that is clean, accessible, and safe.

We want the Administration to deliver its promise not to remove our lounges or compromise our community standards. A perceived housing inequity already exists on campus and if this is implemented, it will lead to more inequity and a more divided college community.

Other Halls are losing their lounges. Hepburn, by losing two out of three lounges, is impacted disproportionately.

Hadley and Gifford are each losing five, but each had roughly ten originally.

Hepburn cannot lose our public space. The loss will compromise our quality of life. 167 residents of the hall are now left with one public lounge with a single TV.

This basement space is often dirty, vandalized, and where janitors have found strangers sleeping. Without the second floor lounge, residents who want to cook are left to one old kitchen with a single refrigerator.

If the Residential Life staff opts to have a hall event, we will have to compete with student organizations to use our own first floor lounge that is so busy that our residents feel shamed just entering to use the vending machines let alone sit in the comfy chairs.

It is also important to consider the Febs who will be led to their rooms to hear, "This was the TV lounge."

As a member of the Feb class, I know the difficulty of coming here in the spring, but I can't imagine how I would feel knowing that I might have taken this space from my neighbors. Is this burden fair to incoming students?

Taken as a whole, is this what we as a Residential Life staff want to deliver for a quality of life? Is this what we as a College value?

I want to conclude with an open hand, not a closed fist. We don't want to return to the past--we need to look forward.

Again we made an offer, this time to Dean of Enrollment Planning Michael Schoenfeld, Residential Systems Coordinator Mariah McKechnie, and other interested administrators to come over and visit with us.

On Tuesday, Dean Schoenfeld came and got a sense of how difficult this is on our community here in Hepburn.

The residents of this dorm play many roles in the Middlebury community.

Even though Hepburn may not be as structurally as suave as other residence halls, the people who live here are as sophisticated as Middlebury College students can be.

For like everyone else, we contribute to the College and should have housing that is at least comparable.

This is what the system is supposed to guarantee.

It was mentioned at the President's Open Forum that there was a priority list of which lounges should be returned and I hope that I have effectively made the case why Hepburn should be at the top of that list.

This shouldn't be a nightmare.

In fact, the dream of having interesting people in small, friendly, cooperative communities learning from one another was reality and once again can be something that Hepburn residents wake up to find.

After all, isn't this in essence what the commons system and indeed, Middlebury College, is all about?

Michael Stahler is a political science major from Lyndonville, Vt. He is an RA in Hepburn Hall.