I was disheartened to read in The Observer last month that Howard Hall, where I lived for all four of my undergraduate years, will be shut down next summer. It pains me to contribute to the ancient, tired tradition of alumni writing angry letters, but the destruction of our nest, I think, entitles us Ducks to a few curmudgeonly words.
Howard Hall has more cockroaches than residents. Its rooms are smaller than many prison cells; it is unbearably hot in the summer and nearly as warm in the winter, thanks to its loud and uncontrollable radiators. It is cramped, quirky and uncomfortable.
But, for more than 100 years, it has been a home for generations of Notre Dame students – and one that most of us deeply love.
To me, Howard has always encapsulated the kind of life that should draw a student to Notre Dame. From my room in Howard Hall, I could be awoken by bagpipes on football Saturdays as festivities kicked off behind my building. I could see couples driving away from the basilica with “Just Married” banners streaming off the backs of their cars. I could make it from my bed to the dining hall in less than five minutes, and down the quad to O’Shaughnessy in seven. In Howard, we lived in the very center of Notre Dame’s thrumming heartbeat, in a building with nearly as much history as the university itself.
I know that buildings close and that, with time, campus footprints and student preferences change. I understand the building deficiencies that would cause some residents to cheer when the dorm’s closure was announced, as you reported. I certainly see the inequity in forcing families to pay the same room and board whether their child is placed in an amenity-poor building like Howard or in a gleaming new dorm more luxurious than many city apartments.
But I hope the University understands that something is lost when a residence hall as historic as this one is shut down.
With this announcement, nearly one in seven of the dorms on campus have been decommissioned as permanent residence halls in the 11 years sinceI was a student. More than 20% of campus dorm capacity now sits in buildings constructed in 2015 or later. This robs thousands of students and alumni of one of Notre Dame’s best icebreakers: asking “what dorm did you live in?” and knowing that someone decades your junior or senior may share your same response.
Notre Dame is already a place where pragmatic business programs are so popular that they require enrollment caps, while humanities departments struggle to recruit. It is increasingly a place where students order their lunch from a robot, rather than going to the dining hall and speaking aloud with the people who work there. Changes like these – which have also occurred in the mind-bogglingly transformative decade since my graduation – are endemic to education well beyond the borders of Notre Dame, and there is little any one university can do to halt or reverse their progress. But as a place rooted in mission and community – in educating the heart as well as the mind, as the saying so often goes – Notre Dame should, I’d say, be invested in doing all it can to slow them.
The decision on Howard has already been made. But, if other residence halls come up against the potential chopping block, I would encourage the university to consider the kind of place it is called to be. A campus whose students live on the periphery, whose buildings gleam with amenities but lack tradition, doesn’t feel like Notre Dame to me. A place whose best real estate goes to student life, and whose sense of community is measured in generations, not semesters – that feels like Notre Dame, as it has since the university was young and Howard Hall was brand new.
With a mournful quack,
Sarah Cahalan
Class of 2014
Dec. 3