SOUTH HADLEY – When a July summer heat wave settled over the Northeast, Mount Holyoke College student Gillian Kurgman sweltered as her room on the third floor of the 1873 dormitory climbed to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mount Holyoke limits air-conditioning units to only students with a special accommodation from a doctor or mental health professional, so Krugman and the cohort of students in summer dorms rely on the “cooling centers” in their common areas for thermal comfort. As the evening temperatures hang in the high-70s, several students began sleeping on couches in the cooled rooms.
“We have been told to not sleep in those rooms, that is a fire safety hazard,” Krugman said. “But because the conditions have been so atrocious, students have been sleeping in these rooms.”
Like many universities across the commonwealth, Mount Holyoke, Amherst and Smith colleges, as well as the University of Massachusetts Amherst, built dormitories decades or centuries ago without air conditioning nor the electricity and wiring needed to accommodate hundreds of window air-conditioning units.
“We understand that heat advisories … can be challenging,” Mount Holyoke spokesperson Christian Feuerstein wrote in a statement. “The existing electrical infrastructure on campus cannot support individual air conditioners in all student rooms. MHC has put in air conditioners in the residence hall common rooms where students are residing.”
Some higher-education institutions in the Pioneer Valley, like Mount Holyoke, are embarking on geothermal heating and cooling projects that will ultimately add air conditioning to some dorms. But air conditioning is often in the later stages of these projects, and Mount Holyoke recently paused the construction of the critical Energy Center needed for its geothermal project.
As summer heat continues to climb to record-breaking temperatures each year, students without an accommodation are left to stay in cooling centers, shower regularly and sweat through the record-breaking heat.
“I’ve been sleeping with four ice packs at a time, showering 10 times a day. Those are the tips and tricks the school offers,” Krugman said. “After I shower and I walk into my room, I’m almost instantaneously dry.”
When Krugman ordered an AC window unit, the college held it in the mailroom and sent it back. She measured the temperature of her room daily and found her dorm’s temperature was 10 degrees hotter than outside.
After a couple weeks in the heat, Krugman had enough. She returned home to New York.
“I’m more worried about the vast majority of the population which reasonably shouldn’t have to have an accommodation to have access to a healthy, habitable temperature,” she said.
Thermal comfort challenges in these old buildings continue beyond the summer season. UMass junior Rachel Morina recalls sleeping through the heat of Baker Hall during her sophomore winter, which remained over 70 degrees.
“My friends have talked more about how hot it is in the dorms in the winter and how hot and dry it gets,” she said. “We end up keeping the window open through the winter.”
During her freshman year, Morina lived in Oak Hall at the Commonwealth Honors College, one of the few buildings on campus with air conditioning. She remembers meeting her friends from other housing communities in her dorm during late summer, early fall and early spring to cool down during the day.
“Solidly the first month it’s pretty hot, but I have more memory of it being really hot at the end of the year, Morina said. “You’re used to the cold, and then in April or May it starts to get pretty hot. One of my friends was in a triple and the room was so unbelievably hot in April.”
New student orientation leaders Devaj Chopda and Shrish Kapoor add that, besides the two weeks in July that hovered around 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the heat in summer is “very decent,” though temperatures and humidity are on the rise again this week in the region. The leaders remain in Northeast dormitories Crabtree, Mary Lyon and Knowlton all July and August, welcoming new cohorts of students to the campus. As the temperatures climb, Chopda said that the university provides each orientation leader with box fans for their rooms and hallways to increase air circulation.
“Like many campuses across the country, our campus has limited residence halls with air conditioning,” spokesperson Emily Gest said. “Over the summer, we juggle and prioritize across a number uses including new student orientation, camps and conferences. Given demand for summer beds, residence halls without air conditioning are utilized during the summer.”
Gest adds the UMass flagship is incorporating carbon-neutral heating and cooling into renovated or new dorms.
Smith College, meanwhile, is installing cooling in the Smith Quadrangle on Kensington Avenue as it wraps up the second phase of its geothermal heating and cooling project. Erinn McGurn, AVP of Sustainable Capital Programs for the college, adds that the third phase of the project, which focuses on the central area of campus, will bring the total air-conditioned beds on campus to 1,000, or 45% of the college’s housing.
“No one wants to suffer through 85-degree, 80%-humidity days.,” McGurn said. “This is really about comfortable environments and environmental control in the most effective ways, and that means cooling.”
This summer, both Amherst College and Smith College are providing window air-conditioning units for individuals in summer housing. Smith plans to use only its cooled beds for summer months moving forward.
Cooling capacity calibrates a geothermal system, pulling heat out of buildings and putting it back into the ground. McGurn adds that this type of cooling system creates flexibility to meet the volatile seasons in fall and spring.
“When we are thinking about students needs, they are coming around here in August, then are here to mid-May, then we go into our reunion program in June, and conferences and summer programs follow right after,” McGurn said. “We want those experiences to be great for people, and a lot of times environmental controls are a big part of that experience because if you’re feeling uncomfortably, it can pull you from the experience.”
