As temperatures outside rise, so are temperatures inside many of Emerson College’s residential dorms. Recently, many students have raised concerns about the heating system reaching temperatures of up to 80 degrees—and some say regardless of what they do to fix it, temperatures continue to fluctuate.
“You don’t have much control,” Ben Hoffman, a sophomore visual media arts major and resident of the Colonial Building, said. “You can try and you can put the temperature down to the lowest setting, but it’s not going to … it’ll just ignore that,”
“Suddenly our room is 80 degrees and we’re sweating,” said Amelia Normington, a first-year business of creative enterprises major who currently lives in the Little Building. Normington added that living in a dorm that is low in a light well, a vertical, open area in the middle of the building, does not help her and her roommates get a lot of air.
Housing and Residential Education sent out an email to the Emerson community on March 19 in response to many students’ complaints. The email stated that “nothing can be done as of now” and advised that changing thermostat fan speed or changing the thermostat to “AC” just increases or decreases the air flow from the vents.
“I find that email ridiculous that this school is telling us, ‘Oh, if you’re warm, open a window,’” Teresa Basso, a sophomore visual media arts major who lives in the 2 Boylston Place residential hall, said. “For all the money that we are paying you, we should have more options than to open a window.”
Hoffman agreed with Basso’s sentiments, explaining that the proposed solutions have little effect.
“They’ll say, ‘Open a window,’ but here I am with my window open almost 24/7, with one small fan and one big fan that face opposite directions, blowing in and out, and it doesn’t do anything,” he said.
Hoffman also talked about air circulation in their dorms being an additional problem with the heat.
“For those of us living in singles, for example, we have much smaller rooms,” Hoffman said. “There’s a lot less space for circulation, which makes it even hotter. I remember last year I was in a double and it wasn’t huge, but it was still insanely warm, but there’s at least a little bit more room for air flow.”
Jennifer Lamy, associate director of sustainability, explained that the Little Building is a very “energy efficient” building: “The windows are good at retaining heat,” she said, and the windows can also cool down the rooms.
Lamy also explained how the college is a customer to the company Vicinity, with a main plant in Kendall Square.
“[Vicinity] creates heat there and it gets distributed to their customers through pipes underground,” Lamy said in an interview with The Beacon. Lamy added that once it gets above or below a certain temperature outside, the facilities team meets and decides when to only have heat or air conditioning running.
According to HRE’s email, it has not reached the threshold to switch the heating off.
“Currently, our buildings are on heat and will stay on heat until late into the spring semester as the temperatures continue to drop at night,” the email read.
Metzli Esparza, a first-year journalism major and Normington’s roommate, added that the common rooms have lower temperatures.
“Clearly enough people have complained,” Esparza said. “I understand that they might not be able to do anything, but I’d rather sleep in the common room.”
Last year, Olivia Lindquist, a junior writing, literature, and publishing major, lived in the Little Building.
“I was in a triple and we couldn’t get our room below 80 degrees,” she said. “We had a window facing the Colonial Building, so it was a brick wall that had no actual airflow.”
Lindquist also worked on a show last year with Emerson Stage in the Greene Theater, where the heating issue became a health risk.
“They had to call out emergency maintenance to switch on the air conditioning in the building for Tufte because of the fact that it was so warm in that theater that people were suffering early signs of heatstroke when we were rehearsing,” Lindquist said.
Grey Cunningham, a junior interdisciplinary studies major who lives in 2B, said it is “a little bit frustrating that this seems to be kind of a universal … thing.”
“I’m at a point where I’m like, I understand that some things can’t be helped,” Cunningham said. “I’m not upset at anyone in particular … because I know HRE does what they can to make sure everyone is comfortable … and their powers only go so far.”
