Students Enjoy High-Tech Comforts Amid Campus Life
The image of the dorm student living a cramped, Spartan existence amid a pair of cots, a desk or two, a chest of drawers, a piecemeal music system and a coffee pot is giving way to a cramped life style sandwiched among all things high-tech.
Custom kitchens are not unheard of in some dormitories, and quite a few rooms are equipped with microwave ovens. A good number have color televisions--complete with remote control--and nearly all boast some sort of stereo (often state-of-the-art and including a compact disc player).
A not insignificant percentage also find space for a personal computer (sometimes two), a telephone, an accompanying answering machine and that most essential of study aids, the videocassette recorder.
But some things remain the same. Most students are still required to room together in cracker-box living quarters, parties remain a way of life and studying something of a nuisance. The opposite sex is still the most popular topic of conversation, though panty raids have gone the way of eight-track tapes since many living areas are now co-ed.
Students continue to cite the ease with which they can make friends and travel to their classes as the major advantages of dorms over other types of housing. And though similarities exist, so do some startling differences among dormitory residents surveyed at four Southern California campuses: Cal State Long Beach, Pepperdine University, USC, and Caltech.
On most college campuses, there are glaring extremes in the quality of dorm life and in the quarters themselves. But nowhere is the contrast quite so radical as at USC, a private campus with 26,600 full- and part-time students, 6,200 of whom live in school-provided housing.
Take Pardee Tower and Touton Hall. Pardee is USC’s newest residence facility, opened in the fall of 1982. It has seven floors and houses 288 men and women in immaculate comfort if not elegance. The building is staffed with a manager and includes a massive lobby featuring 10 video games, two pool tables and personal post office box-type mailboxes for every resident. The wall-to-wall carpeting is spotless. Laundry facilities and bathrooms are expansive.
The rooms themselves all have built-in wooden study centers (desk and shelves). They are big enough to comfortably house two computers, as one does. Freshman Jim Fenske, 18, an aerospace engineering major from Sacramento, and roommate Jeff Ramsey, also 18, a fellow freshman from Long Beach majoring in business administration, often work side by side on their Commodore SX64 and Apple Macintosh computers.
On another floor, 18-year-old freshmen sorority girls Sheri Berman, a business major from Jackson, Miss., and Heidi Pfannkuch, a voice major from Boulder, Colo., show off their electronic treasures: a VCR, a 19-inch color TV (both with remote control) and a pair of copper-plated fans.
No sorority girls live in Touton Hall, nor do any other females. It’s so old the university doesn’t even know the precise age, estimating the building was constructed in the early 1920s. USC purchased it in 1955.
Little remodeling appears to have been done during the last 30 years. In the lobby, visitors are greeted by a sign welcoming them to “The Twilight Zone.” The carpet is stained black. There is no elevator. The stairs creak badly. The plaster walls are cracking and coming apart in several places.
“If you lean against the wall,” one resident warned, “it’ll cave in.”
Fenske, who lives in Pardee but admits to having friends in Touton, says, “This is where the people who didn’t put in a request for their residency early enough ended up. But it’s not as bad as it looks. The guys here are about the most spirited group on campus.”
Famous for Parties
Indeed, Touton is famous for its parties and, specifically, for its annual Halloween haunted house. (There are those who say the place never even needs decoration.) Only in resident assistant Dave Dodds’ room can a television be found. Neither a VCR nor a remote control is anywhere in evidence, but one room does house a lizard and its baby. In that same room, one of the residents sleeps in the closet.
Walls throughout are painted a variety of colors and designs, the only Touton rule being that students repaint them white by school year’s end.
One student who would probably fit in well at Touton is Pardee resident Ambrosio Baldonado, 18, a freshman public administration major from Los Angeles. His pals call him Rambo because of his ability to scale the hall walls using only his arms and legs.
Baldonado also draws raves around campus for his collection of 125 empty Corona Extra beer bottles glued together and displayed in the window. It took him 3 1/2 weeks to gather them, he says.
At Cal State Long Beach, only 1,360 students out of a full-time enrollment of 18,000 live in on-campus housing at this mostly commuter school. Of that number, 480 reside at the plush new Parkside Commons, a group of five buildings that opened last spring.
But new isn’t necessarily better if you ask Parkside resident Gregory Ryan, a 20-year-old junior film production major from Hancock Park.
“These walls are so new there are no memories,” Ryan complains. “They have no personality. They’re like jail cells. At USC, the dorms have character. If those walls could talk, they’d tell stories.”
Making some of their own memories are Rick Lopez and Dave Snow, 18-year-old freshmen who have not yet declared majors. Lopez is from Los Angeles, Snow from San Jose. Cardboard cutouts and posters scattered around the room tend toward beer moderne . Other Parkside rooms are decorated in cheery balloon wallpaper, still others with posters of the pop group Wham!.
Vital Equipment
But it’s a phone-answering machine that many dorm students consider most vital. A random poll of residents found that the device ranks just behind the stereo in popularity among dormies. Coming in a close third would be a television set, followed by computers and VCRs.
Ownership of a VCR doesn’t seem terribly important to campus residents, but having access to one is, according to the random poll. One student, who requested anonymity, put it this way: “It used to be pizza, beer and the football game on the tube. Now it’s pasta, gin and tonic and ‘Gone with the Wind’ on the VCR.”
Brian Blair, a 22-year-old junior public relations major from San Marino, has an especially distinctive room. His buddy Buck lives with him--on the wall. Buck is a mounted deer head fashionably attired in hat and sunglasses.
Quiet hours for study are strictly observed and the students say they do most of their carrying-on during weekends. Just to make sure, a resident assistant and in-residence member of the faculty act as buffers, if not policemen, for each building.
With its breathtaking locale overlooking the Pacific shores of Malibu, Pepperdine University--a Church of Christ-affiliated private university--is the antithesis of Long Beach State.
The campus of 6,500 students has few if any dorm parties, and nothing stronger than sparkling apple juice may be served. Students caught with liquor in their rooms are suspended and, if drinking persists, they are shipped out, according to Carl Mitchell, dean of students.
A male visiting a female’s dorm room is required to sign an open-suite petition and leave the room by 11 p.m. While he’s in the room, the door must be left ajar. Members of the opposite sex are likewise prohibited from dancing together on campus grounds, in view or not.
Are such policies too restrictive for the ‘80s? Says Lori Losey, 20, a junior broadcasting major from Lancaster: “You know what it’s going to be like before you get there, and if you don’t like it you shouldn’t come. If you want to have fun, there are places off-campus to go to have fun.”
On-Campus Requirement
Another condition of attendance is that students live on campus for at least their first year. Roughly a third of the students living at the Malibu campus populate the residence halls and upperclassmen apartments, most of which were built for the school’s opening in 1972.
The Malibu dormitory has two students in each room and four rooms to a suite. Men and women are on separate floors. Roommates are paired by a housing adviser, a practice that is--not surprisingly--a hit-and-miss proposition.
It was a hit for Trevor Norris, 19, a freshman business major from Sun Valley, Ida., and his roomie, though it hardly looks that way on the surface. Norris’ side of the room is crowded with an Apple Computer, a low-distortion stereo system and a phone-answering machine as well as a tiny refrigerator. The walls are jammed with framed portraits of classic cars and pictures of Twinkies.
His roommate is Mark LaMoure, a graduate student 11 years Norris’ senior, and the only furniture on his side of the room are a twin bed and desk. On the wall is a picture of Jesus Christ, a map of the world, a “Journey to Success” poster, two well-marked calendars and an elaborate time-competency chart on which LaMoure schedules virtually every moment of his time. Philosophically, Norris agrees, the two couldn’t be more dissimilar. “But somehow we mesh perfectly,” he says. “We stay out of each other’s way. And, thank God, he doesn’t smoke.”
Losey and her suite mate, Kerry White, also 20, say the secrets to their success in getting along are a mutual affinity for teddy bears, a love for “Dynasty” (which they watch faithfully every Wednesday night on their portable black-and-white set) and their taste for toaster-oven prepared junk food.
How do great scientific minds of tomorrow live today? Rest assured they do everything to the beat of a different calculator at Caltech, and dorm life at this renowned Pasadena technological school is hardly an exception.
All Caltech student activity is governed by an honor code, a loose set of standards that essentially says, “Be honorable and treat others at Caltech honorably.”
“But all others are fair game,” adds Doug Bloomer, 19, a junior physics major from Flagstaff, Ariz.
Housing director Nancy Carlton says the code is assumed to apply to housing and she has thus instituted rules. “But they interpret the rules to meet their own needs,” she maintains. “If they think it’s a silly kind of policy, they’ll ignore it.”
Bloomer agrees. “Rules are considered unnecessary,” he says. “They’ll get more adherence if they’re referred to as traditions.”
Caltech’s undergraduate students certainly have their own ideas about right and wrong. The housing office master key fails to fit most of the room locks, since students almost immediately install their own.
Different Personalities
Every dorm building--indeed, every floor and most every corridor--has its own personality and generally its own name. The rooms are extensions of the individuality of the student body, which numbers slightly more than 1,700, with 95% of the 840 undergraduates populating residence halls.
Cats roam freely in hallways, and some students even keep rabbits as pets. Most houses operate a makeshift bar, with tending done in shifts.
In one of the school’s older dorms, Dabney House (constructed in 1931 as part of the four-building South Complex), the walls are teeming with graffiti, and not merely your “Dodgers No. 1” or “I Love Bruce” variety. Instead it’s “Apathy Is the Next Best Thing to Not Being There” and “Egg Surgery Damaged Frosh Brain Salad.”
There is one other curious sight in Dabney: Two of the students, one male and one female, eschew clothing most of the time while wandering through the complex.
