The Scripps Voice

By Megan Petersen ‘15
Copy Editor

Christie Kweon welcomes guests with an offer to have a seat on her brand-new and incredibly comfortable couch. The Scripps College sophomore has ample space in her new room—plenty of room for all her usual dorm furniture plus the couch and a mini fridge—because she has her own room this year. But this luxury, not available to many sophomores, didn’t come without a price. Kweon and 22 other Scripps students landed single rooms this year by leaving Scripps altogether and moving to Pomona.

For several years Scripps has had problems with what many call a “housing crunch.” The College’s 2007 Strategic Plan outlines plans for growing the student body (currently just over 950) to 1,000 by 2017. The plan states that this can only happen if the student-faculty ratio and class size remain consistent and if endowment goes up, but the plan never specifically mentions new living spaces. Though a new dormitory is rumored to be in the planning stages, more first-years are living in “forced” doubles and triples (e.g. a room designed to be a single is now a double, a double is now a triple, etc.), more upperclassmen are sharing living spaces, and there are precious few suites and single rooms available, often going to juniors and seniors with higher room draw numbers.

And, now, there is spillover housing available on the third floor of Smiley Dormitory, smack in the middle of Pomona’s campus.

Though the third floor of Smiley is in some ways equipped specifically for Scripps students—they have their own Scripps Residential Advisor, for example—the dorm is still much different from what many Scripps students are used to. An average-looking Pomona dormitory, Smiley might be considered a far cry from their home campus, which Forbes ranked among the most beautiful campuses in the world in 2010. Additionally, Pomona’s housing isn’t segregated by sex, which one would think might bother Scripps students accustomed to their women’s-only living space.

But Maxine Yakobe (’14) and Natasha Kraus (’15) were both more concerned about living on the third floor of a building without air conditioning than the dorm’s aesthetics or the genders of its residents. Heat was among the first things Kraus mentioned when asked about living at Smiley, and Yakobe said she was sometimes unable to sleep on hot nights.

Despite her discomfort, this is Yakobe’s second year living at Smiley. “It has a really cool dynamic,” she said, because it feels like a bunch of students living in one big suite rather than a floor full of singles. “I’ve made lots of Pomona friends and really broadened my social group,” Yakobe said.

“It really brings you out of your bubble,” Kraus added. Both emphasized the convenience of being so close to Pomona’s Smith Campus Center, which holds the Coop Fountain and hosts parties such as Pub various events throughout the year. “I like the proximity to 5C social life,” Yakobe said.

Kweon, who lives just down the hall, also says she enjoys Smiley, but tries not to compare living at Pomona and living at Scripps. “Obviously these are two different colleges. If you’re going to compare, you’re going to have to highlight the negatives more than the positives.”

Though she has to leave the dorm early to make the trek up to her morning Core III class, Kweon says Smiley doesn’t inconvenience Scripps students as much as people might think. “There’s this perception at Scripps and Pomona that this is the worst dorm” or that people who live at Smiley are “trying to detach from Scripps,” which she asserts is untrue. Kweon works at the Sallie Tiernan Field House and also has three classes at Scripps this semester, and said that she often finds it convenient to spend time at Scripps between commitments, studying either in the Student Union or the Denison Library, and come back to Smiley at the end of the day.

Many Pomona students don’t have an opinion about the Scripps takeover of their living space. Antonela Miho, a Pomona sophomore who also lives in Smiley, was open to the idea of spillover students coming to her college. If another college needs extra living space, “we have it,” she said.

Other Pomona students are not so welcoming. “She doesn’t even go here”— one Pomona sophomore, who asked that he remain anonymous, referenced the movie “Mean Girls” to express his frustration at having been deferred housing last fall, thus not knowing where he’d be living until three days before move-in this August. “Why is their housing secured, while mine was in the wind?”

This is the second year that Pomona has set aside rooms for overflow Scripps students, and, with no new dorm in the foreseeable future, the third floor of Smiley may be Scripps territory for several more years to come.

By Mikayla Raymond ‘15
SAS Media Relations Chair

Hello Scripps Voice Readers! My name is Mikayla Raymond and I am this year’s SAS Media Relations Chair! It is my job to keep you all up to speed with what’s going on in SAS so that we can all participate and be aware of what’s going on in our community.

SAS training began a week before classes started, and during our numerous meetings with both the executive and programming branches, as well as Dean Lee and President Bettison-Varga, we were able to discuss (and occasionally argue about) our goals for the start of the semester and how best to implement these goals. One of our biggest goals is to increase our visibility on campus. The largest aspect of this change will be an overhaul of the SAS website. Over the summer, we began designing a more attractive, useful, and better organized website to help both SAS and the student body communicate, participate, and advertise events as well as to make necessary information for CLORGS and student leaders more readily available. The site still has a very long way to go, but we have made a lot of progress and expect to have things running soon. In conjunction, I am leading a WordPress tutorial for SAS officers so that the entire SAS team can upload important information online for your viewing pleasure. In the same publicity vein, we are currently working hard to create an enticing logo for use on the SAS Website, flyers for SAS events, and t-shirts. We are also working on building our Facebook presence so that students can engage with us easily. We are confident that these changes will begin to create a closer connection between students and SAS and help inform students about what we are currently doing on campus.

Another goal is to create a set of policies for the Student Union. We want to make the space as useful for Scripps Students as possible and are currently working out procedures for reserving the conference rooms. We also want CLORGs to have the option to reserve the entire Student Union space for community events.

Additionally, we are in the process of revamping the Hall Council system. We are reevaluating the existing structure and plan to make significant changes to create a more substantial role for these representatives on our campus and within SAS. The current structure of Hall Council is not facilitating the need for more student representation on SAS and more collaboration between SAS and Residential Life, Peer Mentors, Hall Directors, and RAs.

If you have been using your dorm kitchen, you likely noticed some new additions! Thanks to a generous gift from last year’s SAS, every dorm kitchen is now fully stocked and ready for you to use. These lovely tools include: toasters, hand mixers, vegetable peelers, can openers, pots and pans of all sizes, silverware, strainers, knives, and more. No more running over to GJW for a cupcake tin and then back to Dorsey for a spatula! Until next time, keep yourself informed by liking our Facebook page, and by looking out for signs about Hall Council and First-Year Rep elections! You can visit the SAS Facebook page here.

By Carolyn Angius ’13
Staff Writer

With dorms renowned for looking like palaces and perfectly manicured lawns and gardens, there is no denying that the employees of the Scripps grounds, facilities and maintenance departments are extremely important, active members of our community. In fact, I can guarantee I see more of maintenance department employees than I do of my professors, or even some of my closest friends, on any given day. The irony, however, is that this visibility does not correlate with any sort of relationship or closeness

I exchange the typical “Hi, how are you?” and “Have a great day!” daily with my dorm’s housecleaner and I often sheepishly apologize and thank as I tip-toe around a ground worker’s piles of raked debris along the walkway to Routt. While I appreciate all the hard work the maintenance and grounds departments expend to make our campus beautiful, and I by no means take for granted their dedication. I find myself feeling uncomfortable with my relationship with the people who work so hard to create an environment from which we all benefit.

Last Friday morning, my six suite-mates were all milling around our suite when our dorm’s housecleaner entered and began vacuuming our living room and cleaning our bathroom. She even took out our trash. A few of us who saw her picking up jumped in to help her pick up detritus from the floor and clear a path for the vacuum. All of us engaged in small talk, discussing fall break and our weekends for a few moments. Once she had left, however, leaving behind polished sinks and a clean carpet, my suite-mates and I discussed our discomfort with the cleaner’s responsibilities. None of us felt comfortable with allowing anyone outside of the suite to come in and clean up after us–we felt embarrassed, ashamed and apologetic. As 19 and 20 year olds, we felt shameful allowing—and indirectly employing—another human to clean up after our own messes.

I greatly appreciate all the work of our maintenance and grounds workers and I would love to speak with a worker about their perspective on our campus’ students. I wonder if our grounds and maintenance workers feel like valued members of the community, and if not, I want to discover and implement ways in which we can build relationships with the people that give so much to us. Lastly, in light of my experience in the suite, I would be extremely interested in finding out if there is a way to alleviate facilities workers from cleaning the suites and private bathrooms without compromising their pay or job security on campus.

Going to college, I had certain visions of what college parties would entail. I remember chanting, “Toga! Toga!” with my friends as we watched the Delta Tau Chi fraternity boys throw a party in Animal House. What struck me most about Animal House’s portrayal of college was the sense of community. Alcohol may have been the main event, but the sense of community grew around the parties. However, at Scripps, dorm community suffers due to the reinforcement of the closed door policy. For those who are not familiar with the alcohol policy, the Scripps Handbook states: “Possession and/or consumption of alcoholic beverages by those persons 21 years of age or older is permitted in individual student rooms as long as a) the door is closed b) there are eight or less people in the room c) the individual serving the alcohol does not consume alcohol.” The first question I asked myself after reading this policy was: why would Scripps provide alcohol for SARLO-