Rumor-Busting The Courts

The construction of a new temporary dorm on campus met much controversy after contradictory and misleading information hit the internet. The greater student body heard about the College’s plan to build The Courts, a temporary modular housing unit that will stay on campus for at least the next three years, first from a July 12 Morning Call article titled “Muhlenberg College adding temporary dorm after banning frat from its campus house.” The article was later corrected. A week later, Samantha Narciso published an article to The Odyssey on the same topic. In this time, quite a few Muhlenberg students took to the internet, raging that women were to be housed in what was perceived to be trailer parks while the fraternity brothers, who were supposedly to blame, were put in existing housing. Now that the women have moved in, and the curious students have had a chance to check out the new building, the fuss has all but died down. But there still remains the question—what is fact and what is fiction?

Aaron Bova, Senior Associate Director of Housing, sat down with The Weekly to try and clear up some of this misinformation.

Regarding the housing shortage, Bova explained that at the beginning of the summer Muhlenberg was short between 40-60 beds, and, according to his interview with The Odyssey, only 18 men were slotted to live in the Sigma Phi Epsilon house that closed. Bova explained that although the closing of the frat house was a factor, it was not the only one. Bova cited both higher retention rates, meaning more upperclassmen returning than in previous years, and a larger freshman class. The target range for admissions, according to Bova, is generally between 580 and 590 students. The Office of Residential Services (ORS) runs into problems when that incoming class number is closer to the higher end of the scale.

“Anytime that the yield, or the return, is closer to 600,” said Bova, “even though it sounds like a really small number, given that we’re a small college, even a difference of ten to fifteen to twenty students can be pretty significant for us because we have limited housing resources.”

This year’s freshman class was about 593 students, according to the Public Relations department’s article on the class of 2020.

There were two times that the College has had more students on campus than it did beds, explained Bova. Then, he said, the College had simply moved students off campus into local apartments, similar to Muhlenberg Independent Living Experience (or MILE) apartments, to free up more space for first-years. At one point, Bova said, the College rented 36 rooms from Tremont apartments, which totaled a quarter of all the available rooms in the building.

This year, ORS was able to extend the deadline to apply for off-campus housing, and as a result moved between 13-15 students off campus, which left about 40 students who wanted to live on campus without beds. According to Bova, Tremont could not provide enough apartments to house these remaining students, although he wasn’t entirely disappointed.

“To be honest, it was a little bit lower on our list of viable options because… it wasn’t highly desired,” said Bova. “It wasn’t a preferred living situation. From a Muhlenberg perspective, it was too far from campus. It’s just under three-quarters of a mile, which, from the Muhlenbubble perspective is far. We found that there was more dissatisfaction with students who moved to Tremont apartments or to other apartments.”

The College did look at other apartments as well, Bova explained, but they were either deemed below Muhlenberg’s standards, or the apartments themselves were not interested in subletting their rooms to students. The College also considered repurposing the Phi Kappa Tau building, but Bova said it was more conducive to office and academic space based on the number of students who needed housing, and transformed it into that instead. Finally, the College arrived at the idea of temporary modular housing.

“A lot of people that work for the college, myself included, had seen examples of it at other colleges,” said Bova. “We were familiar with places where it had worked, we were familiar with other colleges that had used it successfully.”

What really sold him on The Courts was what he thought would interest the students as an on-campus housing option.

“The biggest selling factor for us in why we went with The Courts versus the other options was that we could do it centrally located on campus, which we felt was important to our students…Since we’re a small campus most people want to be close to the things that we’re utilizing everyday…Also, we knew we would be working with sophomores, and we wanted to keep it in close proximity to their friends.”

When the time came to decide who should live in the new building, the idea of moving the Sig Ep brothers not only made little sense to Bova, but also could not be done.

“The fraternity was closed down during the end of the spring 2016 semester. The housing lottery occurred. Those people who were slotted to live [in the Sig Ep house], 15 of the 18 participated in the housing process; they selected housing already. We didn’t know we were going to have the Courts at that time. How would we have housed those students there?”

Instead, ORS made the choice to fill the dorm with sophomore women for two reasons.

“When we looked at how we were going to fill The Courts, we knew two things. One: we needed to make room in first-year housing because the class was bigger. And two: we knew that we didn’t have space in Martin Luther, East or Taylor, but we had women who were sophomores who did not want to live in Brown,” said Bova. “Of the 40 women we moved to [The Courts], all but 4 of them had signed up to move out of Brown.”

Although Brown Hall is typically perceived to be a freshman dorm, it typically consists of about 15 percent upperclass women, Bova explained. Therefore, the easiest way to make room for a larger incoming class was to move women out of Brown.

Although Bova admitted the women weren’t given the choice to stay in Brown, those that ended up in the Courts have an overall positive attitude towards the dorm. A lot of the women placed in The Courts were some of the last to pick in the housing lottery at the end of last school year. There had been rumors that because of the closing of their house, the Sig Ep brothers scheduled to live in the house were put back into the lottery, and as a result South and Robertson had closed faster than last year. This rumor, however, is far from true.

“If they’re a rising senior they’ve only gone through the lottery as a rising sophomore and a rising junior. And the reason I bring that up is that there was…a lot of rumor this year that Robertson and South filled quicker than it ever filled before, which is not true, if you look at…the past ten years of history… it has always filled during the senior lottery, with the exception of… the year before, the 2015 lottery. Two suites went into the junior lottery the year before last year, which is probably why rising seniors may have had a little bit more of an expectation that there would be more suites available,” said Bova.

Bova suggested that if South and Robertson did close earlier this year, it wasn’t just because of the extra people.

“The real factor [is] the fact that a lot more seniors did pull sophomores in with them… the four-person groups were made up with more seniors who were choosing to bring sophomores and juniors with them than in the previous year,” said Bova.

There was never any intention not to be transparent. Bova explained that he had been working closely with the women who were going to be living in The Courts, and had simply not broadcasted the information to the whole community just yet.

Bova was not contacted by the Morning Call. The Morning Call got its information from Muhlenberg Capital Projects Manager David Rabold, whose quote in the article was a response to a question from a commission member. Rabold had attended the Allentown City Planning Commission meeting where the exchange took place, in hopes of getting approval to build the new temporary dorm that came to be known as The Courts.

“I was unaware of the breadth of the audience I was addressing,” said Rabold. “My answer was accurate in the context within it was asked.”

“I learned to be more careful when speaking in public on behalf of one’s organization,” said Rabold of the incident.

The Weekly will continue this investigation.

Photo courtesy of David Budnick