SA���ʴ�ý

Every dorm room tells a story—and depending on the temperature, it can be a horror story. Arriving at Chilcott Hall as a first-year from Boston, “I thought I’d landed in hell,” Amy Forest Montgomery ’96 recalls. “Opening those crazy windows only let in more heat.”  After calling her uncle, William Sherinyan ’58, in tears, “He had a massive fan overnighted to me,” she adds. “I kept that fan for at least 15 years.”

While the Hillside Strangler terrorized Los Angeles in the fall of 1977, Elizabeth Sturdevant ’81 says, “My friends in Chilcott slept with their windows locked as they suffered the heat.” (Sturdevant lived in E. Norris, which was built with air conditioning in the common areas.)

Living in a Chilcott triple, Alex Morse ’18 “used a bungee cord to strap my super-strong Vornado fan up on the top bunk with me.” Conditions weren’t much better up the hill: Will Yee ’86 recalls trying to cool down before sleeping with “fans on high, more than one when possible, with doors and windows open—minimal help with the tiny windows” in his Stearns room.

For generations of alumni, there’s a certain bonding experience in coping with the heat and sharing memories of misery. “If you and I are sweating it out, those are some of the stories that you do remember,” says Isaiah Thomas, assistant dean of students and director of Residential Education and Housing Services (REHS) and student conduct. “I think the difference is that over time those stories shifted from ‘Here’s how we bonded’ to ‘Here’s how we suffered.’”

Much to the relief of current and future Tigers, cool change is on the horizon. Last year, the College installed air conditioning in Pauley and Stewart-Cleland halls (as well as Berkus House, a small, close-knit community across from the Mullin Entrance to campus). Now, with the completion of renovations to Chilcott, Haines, and Stearns halls (as well as the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house, which is managed by REHS), every SA���ʴ�ý dormitory will have central air conditioning by move-in day.

It couldn’t come a day too soon. Until last fall, Thomas says, “More than half of the first-year class lived in residence halls that didn’t have air conditioning, and we heard about it. The No. 1 question that prospective families and students have is, ‘Are the rooms air conditioned?’

“As people are comparing SA���ʴ�ý’s amenities to other schools, air conditioning is a factor,” he adds. “Part of this initiative was remaining competitive, but another part was seeing the challenges that our students had to navigate during these heat waves.”

“There are weeks where the heat is high enough that students find it difficult to sleep,” says Dave Caldwell, director of facilities management. (Funding for the project “comes from the endowment or some other institutional reserves,” he told newspaper in March.)  “I’m excited to get this project done and deliver something that we’ve been talking about for a long time.”

The history of residence halls at Occidental is as old as the Eagle Rock campus itself. James Swan Hall—the last of the three original buildings designed by Myron Hunt and partner Elmer Grey—was constructed in 1914 as a men’s dormitory. “In 1925, Occidental realized rather tardily how much a dormitory environment enriched student life and alumni loyalty,” Professor of History Andrew Rolle ’43 wrote in his centennial history of the College—two women’s dormitories were built in quick succession: Orr Hall in 1925, and Erdman Hall in 1927. In the wake of the College’s 50th anniversary in 1937, a pair of new residence halls were announced: Wylie Hall for men, and Haines Hall for women.

In 1953, with enrollment at a record high, Occidental launched a decade-long housing expansion, starting with Stewart-Cleland Hall. As federal loans for college construction became available, the Board of Trustees secured low-interest funding from the National Housing and Home Finance Agency in 1955. These funds aided in the construction of five residence halls: Bell-Young and Newcomb (completed in 1956), Chilcott and Pauley (1959), and Braun (1962).

The last building project initiated during 1920 graduate Arthur G. Coons’ presidency, Eileen Norris Residence Hall was completed in 1966. The dormitory was unique among SA���ʴ�ý structures in its suite set-up, with four double rooms centered around a shared bathroom and air-conditioned common room. “I lived in E. Norris and we had AC in the common areas but definitely kept the rooms cool,” Daren Reifsneider ’02 says. “It was needed after walking up that steep hill.”

Following the completion of E. Norris, the College enrolled its largest first-year class to date, growing from 397 freshmen in 1965 to 471 in 1966. Another 17 years would pass before Stearns Hall was built in 1983. With around 70 percent of students opting to live on campus, Stearns filled a vital need for additional housing—even one without air conditioning.

“The worst heat I experienced in the dorms was the summer of 1984 when so many of us worked for the Olympics and were housed in Stearns,” recalls Daniel Woodruff ’85. “I worked the midnight shift every four days, and had to sleep through the daytime heat.” (He eventually settled on two solutions: running a full-sized fan 10 inches from his face at full speed, or driving to Santa Monica and sleeping on the beach in the early morning fog.)

Following the January 2008 opening of Rangeview Hall (later rechristened Berkus Hall), SA���ʴ�ý’s first new residence hall in 25 years, the College seized the opportunity to refurbish Erdman, Wylie, and Bell-Young with new wiring and plumbing, fire sprinklers and alarms, paint and floor coverings, and modern accoutrements such as wireless Internet, card key locks, and, yes, air conditioning. The move more than doubled the number of air-conditioned residence halls and increased the number of students living on campus to 85 percent.

In a hillside area southeast of Thorne Hall described by landscape architect Beatrix Farrand as a “no man’s land” in 1939 (“needs carob trees and olive seedlings,” she noted) sits the Central Chiller Plant. For decades, much of the campus has been cooled by the 5,792-square-foot facility, which was built in 1998 and revamped in 2015. “Some of the buildings that weren’t built with air conditioning units are hooked up to the Central Chiller Plant,” Caldwell explains. “The cool water it produces cools many of the academic buildings and some of the dorms as well. It’s not the greatest cooling method when it gets really hot, but it is effective generally for a lot of spaces.”

Braun got air conditioning in 2015 as part of an extensive renovation. But five other dorms dependent on the Central Chiller Plant for their cooling— Chilcott, Haines, Pauley, Stearns, and Stewie—were insufficiently cool in the face of a heat wave. (Although Stearns is the second-newest dorm after Berkus, it’s also the one that gets the hottest, Thomas says—”And I know that because students and families put temperature probes in their rooms and shared that information with me.”)

For nearly a decade, REHS has taken progressively broader measures to offset the impact of excessive heat, renting portable air conditioning units to cool the lounges and providing box fans for individual rooms at the start of the school year.  “Additionally, the College has been in the process of assessing the long-term, considerable investment required to add air conditioning to residence halls, including the necessary electrical grid upgrades,” Dean of Students Rob Flot wrote in September 2017. “A project of this magnitude requires consideration by the Board of Trustees’ buildings and grounds committee.”

But the College’s multi-year initiative, beginning with Stearns, never materialized. Citing “competing priorities” in the operating budget—namely, urgently needed improvements to Norris Hall of Chemistry and increased demand for financial aid—the College tabled the project indefinitely in 2019. “While I understand that a number of you will be disappointed, I believe this is the appropriate decision,” Flot wrote to students that fall.

Isaiah Thomas arrived at SA���ʴ�ý in February 2020 after six years working in student affairs at Swarthmore College—and six weeks before the pandemic sent students home for the remainder of the academic year (and all of the year to follow). In their absence, Thomas says, REHS advocated for non-AC improvements to the residential experience—such as the all-inclusive laundry initiative they put into place, with free washers and dryers in every residence hall.

Once students returned to campus in the fall of 2021, the cost of air conditioning eased back into the conversation. “Before the pandemic, we had run some numbers to figure out how to install air conditioning and the number was high,” Caldwell says. “These older buildings have electrical capacity and structural issues. We couldn’t just bolt air conditioning to buildings—we had to figure out how to power them. A lot of SA���ʴ�ý’s underground utilities are old as well, so it became a bigger engineering issue.”

In response to the heat wave at the start of the 2022-23 academic year, REHS set up cooling zones around campus, including cots in study lounges. Response was mixed: “A lot of the messages we were getting from students and families was ‘How do I go to a premier liberal arts college and your solution [to the heat] is a cot in a study room?’” Thomas recalls. Many students declined the option.

At the direction of then-President Harry J. Elam, Jr., Thomas worked with Caldwell and his team as well as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Amos Himmelstein to brainstorm a better air- conditioning solution for the 2023-24 school year.  As a temporary fix, the College rented portable generators—a clunky but effective means of keeping everyone cool for the first two months. “There were these big yellow tubes, and I was fearful that the unsightliness of it would be problematic to families on move-in day,” Thomas says. “But they were all so appreciative. So, we did that for two years.”

“Last fall was a very challenging heatwave, and the College is committed to making improvements, both in the short and long term to address student health and comfort,” Thomas wrote in August 2023. The Occidental Promise had outlined “elevating the residential experience” as a priority, he added, with the expansion of air conditioning “as an important step toward this goal.”

In revisiting the permanent AC plan, Caldwell says, “We looked at different options for what kind of air conditioning we were going to put in, and then how to build out the electrical infrastructure to handle all the new equipment.” Armed with a more cost-effective proposal, Himmelstein and Caldwell presented the new plan to the buildings and grounds committee, with Thomas in attendance. Ultimately, the Board signed off on the proposal, and in June 2024, the installation process began with Pauley and Stewie.

“I think the Board realized that this was important in regards to our student retention as well as our ability to remain competitive,” Caldwell says. “When they get phone calls from their children or grandchildren saying, ‘I can’t study because it’s 107 degrees in my room and there’s no air conditioning,’ it hits differently.”

Evaluating the carbon impact of the project, “The Board really zeroed in on finding not only the best value but also the most environmentally responsible solution,” Caldwell adds. “And I think we got it.” Another selling point was the ability to rent out the newly air-conditioned spaces for summer programming. “There are people who need housing during the summer in L.A., so now SA���ʴ�ý becomes more attractive for that.”

In the same year that Pauley and Chilcott halls were completed, a Page 1 story in the Occidental newspaper from 1960 about the College’s then-new Booth Music and Speech Arts Center and Kenneth T. Norris Hall of Science carried the headline “Modern new buildings offer hot Tigers air-conditioned shelter.” (Both Booth and Norris, coincidentally, will undergo renovations in 2026.)

Sixty-five years later, air conditioning is front-page news again—but the work of REHS is never done. According to Thomas, about 75 percent of SA���ʴ�ý seniors opt to stay on campus for a fourth year—even as they seek the opportunity to have a more independent living experience.  “If students’ No. 1 request has been air conditioning, their No. 2 request is more single rooms on campus,” he says. The challenge? Creating more single spaces to meet demand.

This fall will see the opening of the Paulhan House, a duplex adjacent to campus that had been rented primarily to for 15 years prior to its purchase by the College in 2020. When Thomas was brought into meetings on how the space should be used, “I said that the main thing we need is singles, singles, singles. So, the majority of the spaces are singles. Now I need a bunch more of those to build that experience.” And everybody would be cool with that.