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Act Three: The Sheltering Sky  Given the Administration's habit of selling out student space for the convenience of their business ventures (E&R Cleaners, CU Graphics, the SBDC, the Specialty Shop, etc), the sudden vacancy of the Specialty Shop was a novel opportunity for students, and David Bernstein, station manager of ROC-U and member of the MC2 planning committee, wrote a proposal saying that if the MC2 failed, the Specialty Shop space would be great for the almost-on-air radio station.  Initial reaction to the idea, especially from fellow students, was "Great idea. It'll never happen." But as time went by, reports began trickling in that certain high-powered members of the Administration were getting very enthusiastic about the idea. With a certain degree of alarm, Bernstein and the MC2 proposal committee realized that his rather generous condition of "if the MC2 fails" simply gave the Administration another excuse to kill it.  Meanwhile, Evans met with Dick Ford, Director of International Development, and learned that I.D. had been trying to turn the Red Room into classroom space since they first moved, and that every request they had made had been ignored. Ford, not surprisingly, was unhappy about this. He insists that I.D. needs its own classrooms, its own computer laboratories, and its own student carrels. I.D. is right next door to the Graduate School of Management, which has its own labs, but Ford refuses to entertain the idea of sharing the space. He also refuses to use the classrooms in Downing Hall (the new name for the Downing Street School, according to the Phone Directory), claiming that they are "too far away" from his offices in Carlson.  Meanwhile, back on the EMS front, Evans had a new idea: move the cleaners into the first-floor storage room in Dana Commons. The room is currently being used by Bon Appetit, and a member of the food service said that they wouldn't be needing it. But when Evans told Connors about it, Connors said the idea wouldn't fly because Bon Appetit doesn't know if they're going to need it, and furthermore it's Business Manager Mike Dennis's job to give away the food service's space. And Dennis isn't willing. To put the nails in the coffin, it isn't ventilated enough for the laundry.   So with Lonstein's new (but as Connors insists, temporary) office deemed unacceptable, the laundry service deemed unmovable, and the residence halls deemed untouchable, EMS is still homeless. Chief Goulet has offered them asylum in the Campus Police station in Bullock; an unhappy and typically unsatisfying solution for arguably the campus's most important student group.  Ironically, Milstone offered EMS a room in the basement of Sanford, roughly five years ago, and EMS refused, citing a preference for proximity to Campus Police. According to Milstone, the offer still stands. Unfortunately, it's complicated by events since then. For one, WheatBread magazine is in the room, technically sharing with JOTA and the now-defunct Clark Socialist Union. If the MC2 goes through, JOTA and WB will move to Dana Commons, and EMS will have a space. If not, they're still homeless. sidebar: E.M.S. Emergency Medical Service  The Emergency Medical Service (EMS) of Clark is the all-volunteer student-run and -administered medical service serving Clark University and all Clark-owned property. It is on duty 24 hours a day.  The EMS is composed of Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and First Responders. They receive the same professional training and background as state, county, and city EMSes (such as the ambulance people who come when you dial 911). Their average response time in 2 minutes. They are the 1st line of defense for everything medical condition from sprained ankles to cardiac arrest. EMS is not authorized to prescribe medication.  EMTs must take more than a hundred hours of training courses. Linda Gosselin, EMS Coordinator, teaches the EMS course through COPACE (which is offered every fall in Shrewsbury Adult Education).  EMS exists under the auspices of Campus Police, although it is an independent group and all records are kept strictly confidential in accordance with state law.  For the 1995/6 academic year, EMS had a total of 26 students on its staff. At least 2 or 3 are on duty at all times, 24 hours a day.  Current EMS President Mike Cross says that the two biggest problems facing EMS, besides the lack of a space, are "Frivolous calls (but better they call and don't need it then not call and need it), and the lack of campus awareness." Karen McKenna will become President of EMS at the semester's start.  If you doubt the importance of EMS, consider what safety and health would be like around here if students had to rely on Health Services and their cold-pack cure-alls. [Source: Mike Cross, Bill Evans.]

And that's if they choose to take it; there is still the question of its location in Sanford, which is the dorm farthest from the center of campus, and the fact that it is unventilated, non-handicapped access, and doesn't have private showering facilities.  Meanwhile, the MC2 was conceived in May, and Evans, et al, were determined to get a decision by the end of the summer. Unfortunately, the MC2's formal proposal took months to finish, and as of this writing, the members of the Senior Administration are looking it over and are planning a decision within the next few weeks (maybe). They've also said that they're waiting a recommendation by the UAC, who, at last check, was not a Senior Administration advisory committee, and who furthermore is not meeting until September. Solutions and Preventive Maintenance  The fact that EMS and the MC2 spent four months trying to unravel the space problems here, and still failed to get decent locations, is the consequence of a conceptual collision: Clark's "enterprise system," which creates parochial, paranoid, and uncooperative attitudes among all the departments, services, and offices here, meeting head-on with the current state of Clark's campus: congested, convoluted, constricted, and compromised. Stupid administrative deals from the past are now haunting the students of this campus, complicating the lives of people like Connors, Evans, and Collins, and making problem after problem for any student or student group trying to expand, create, or mobilize.  Relocating EMS and Escort should have been easy. Possibilities abound. EMS is the harder one to relocate, and solutions to the problem exist, if one prioritizes.  The room that contains E&R Cleaners fits all the EMS requirements, including a private bathroom (a very rare feature). E&R, meanwhile, only works 2 days a week, for a few hours a day. And between Tuesday and Thursday all they do is store 50-70 bags of laundry. All they need is access to a loading dock for delivery and pickup (no laundry is actually serviced at Clark-- it all goes to Manchester, New Hampshire) and a place to store. The space in the basement of the UC that houses CU Graphics is perfect. Move CU onto Main Street, where they can replace the business that they put out of business (Kwik Copy, the unofficial official printing service of Clark U. for close to a decade (isn't our Main South outreach initiative impressive?)), and move EMS into the E&R room.  Also, an RD apartment would be perfect. If EMS raised the $$$, could they book the double singles and move in? No, says Milstone, "It's not a money issue, it's a student issue. Even allowing for no-shows, the dorms are close to 100% capacity for the Fall." That is, if you include things like double-singles in "capacity."  Thus, one solution would be to remove the double-singles and make the rich seniors bunk up like the rest of us. Housing would lose, lessee, $15,000, but it would significantly ameliorate the campus space congestion, opening up opportunities for student groups, administrative offices, and so on. (Of course, the real tragedy is that it comes down to choosing between these options. If space allocation was handled coherently, many financial-vs.-practical dilemmas could be avoided.) And, predictably, there's no chance Housing will kick out all the seniors who grabbed the double-singles in the housing lottery and lose all that money.  Of course, Hope Lonstein's office would work perfectly in there, too, but then, Lonstein has very modest space requirements and could fit comfortably practically anywhere-- especially in a dormitory like Maywood. Actually, especially in a room in the basement, with easy access to the street-- like the E&R Cleaners room. Milstone says that this is alright with him, but that it needs to be approved by Lonstein's supervisor, Jack Foley. Foley was "on a business trip" as we went to press and was unavailable for comment.  Another solution is to use the Wright Hall social lounge, which is on the 1st floor and has a door that connects to Health Services. The social lounge is as long as Wendy's Clark Brunch, so a wall would need to be built, but that's the only renovation necessary. Unfortunately, Milstone says he "would never shorten the room and never compromise social space." As he rightly points out, Clark is very deficient in terms of common social space. (There was a time when Jonas Clark and the Little Center (ne Commons) provided this function, but apparently common social space is not a priority at Clark.)  Taking a step back, these relocation issues, and therefore almost every complication of this past summer, were preventable.  First, Milstone should not have made the deal that moved out the EMS. The reason for the deal seem to be that he's really keen on moving all the residence halls into the "A.C. Model," (what he calls the "hottest trend in university housing"), and giving the Bullock RD an extra room seems to be a step toward that goal.  Second, Hope Lonstein and the Escort Service didn't need to be moved at all. This, and the resulting domino-effect, could have been prevented by investing in a dozen free-standing cubicle dividers and some office furniture. As it stands now, Dana Commons' second floor contains an enormous unused kitchen, hundreds of square feet of empty floor, and Lonstein's old office, which was originally supposed to be a Function Room, but is the only ready-made office space on that floor.

sidebar: R.L.H. Residential Life and Housing  Residential Life and Housing (RLH) is the office through which Clarkies get their shelter, unless they're upperclassmen or are related to a Trustee or something. It was once called Housing and Residential Programs (H&RP), but it was altered to keep with Clark's policy of randomly changing the names of everything every nine months.  Even though RLH is completely independent financially, freshmen and sophomores are required to live on campus. Thus, RLH is guaranteed a minimum income, no matter how lousy their policies, the RA training, or the living conditions. This guarantees the one possible benefit of Clark's pseudo-capitalistic system is avoided: quality control spurred on by competition and consumer choice.  David Milstone, the Director of RLH, is technically an Assistant Dean of Students, although his job requires more business savvy then personal finesse. RLH's offices are on the 1st floor of 22 Downing St. Portable office dividers would have made the rest of the floor into perfectly functional office space. Why is Education's project, which benefits 30 Worcester kids and a few Clark students, more important than the Escort Service, which benefits hundreds of students repeatedly, for years?  If we take another step back, we can see that the situation at the start of the summer was also preventable. EMS has been around for decades, and has never really had a place to call their own. After EMS declined the offer of Sanford, their space was created in Bullock Hall, and as Milstone tells it, that space was temporary from the start. Of course, he and EMS had 5 years to relocate, but they never did.  E&R Cleaners, meanwhile, does not deserve their own space. The room they are in is a "designated quarantine room," in case a student gets a communicable disease but cannot go home, but that does not mean they are actually sharing. Milstone was kind enough to suggest making them share with EMS, but the question is how they were able to monopolize a room in a student resident hall when space is so scarce.  Another oddity is E&R's existence at Clark. E&R is a corporate cleaning company that services mostly prep schools and certain Ivy League institutions. They are not servicing any more than 50 to 80 students a month here. However, because Housing works like an independent business, RLH does its own contract negotiations and service booking, and Milstone apparently really liked the idea of an Ivy-League-style laundry service. According to Milstone, E&R had been doing summer work at Clark for a few years when, in 1991, they "offered" to serve the campus full-time. Doing away with them altogether might be the most reasonable option here.  CU Graphics was slam-dunked into the University Center in 1993. According to Linda Connors, she and the UAC were simply contacted one day by then-Business Manager Jack Foley's office and informed that the Administration had negotiated a contract and CU Graphics was moving in. Mind you, Connors' job as Director of the University Center is to allocate space in the UC, and the UAC's job is to make intelligent recommendations to Connors about the UC's space, but apparently the office of Administration and Finance knew better. Thus, CU Graphics usurped the ailing Game Room, taking another student space for the sake of some unrelated for-profit business. Moving them onto Main Street would open up many possibilities for the basement of the UC, some of which were mentioned above, and some of which weren't (such as moving the MC2 there).  And perhaps if the Small Business Development Center wasn't using 7 rooms in Dana Commons, Clark would have a music scene and a Multimedia Center, and EMS and Hope Lonstein would have permanent homes right now.  The last question to ask is: Why did Clark allow the Space Committees, which could have decided all these issues months ago (in theory), to fall into disuse and vanish? Committees aren't always the best way to solve problems, but one responsible committee could have prevented the crisis of location experienced this summer.  Clark University, as a physical institution, is a living testament to the horrors of idiotic architecture. From the 15 years of constant renovating it took to get the Goddard library into semi-functional shape, to the monumental mediocrity and waste of the University Center, anybody attempting to work in this place has enough "natural" geographic obstacles to make Lewis and Clark blanche. Unfortunately, the Administration has been compounding these problems with short-sighted and self-serving policies that, as a matter of practice, compromise and undermine student activities and student projects. Until this school's officials get their priorities straight, and learn to address student needs in their decisions concerning the university's geography, Clark will continue to be the school "where two wrongs don't make a right-- but three lefts do." [Disclosure note: Randy Mack was one of the principal players on the MC2 proposal committee.]