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To mark the 150th anniversary of St. Olaf College, 16 faculty and staff members are contributing chapters to a new book titled Honest Storytelling: A Sesquicentennial Exploration of Identity, Mission, and Vocation at St. Olaf College. As part of the Honest Storytelling Project, Assistant Professor of English Jennifer Shaiman is writing a chapter tentatively titled “Home on the Hill: How Students Shape their Living Spaces and How those Spaces Impact Identity and Community.” She shares a glimpse of what she’s learned through her research so far — and how Oles can contribute to her work with their own stories of life in campus housing.

I first began asking students to submit photos of their dorm rooms for a writing assignment in 2010. Since that time, I’ve seen photos of hundreds of dorm rooms and read an equal number of papers where students examined their peers’ anonymous photos for evidence of what they might reveal about being a college student in America. (Even after all those photos, the first time a student showed me the floorplan of a Mohn room, I thought it was a prank). We’ve looked at YouTube “dorm-room tours” and discussed dorm-room decorators (as recently reported on by the New York Times).

For a place where students live for only nine months before packing up for the summer, these rooms hold a place of significant importance in a student’s experience. However, students aren’t the ones who design the structure of these places — and while they feel the effects, they often don’t know the reasons the spaces are built in the way they are. In my essay for the Honest Storytelling collection, I set out to discover a little more about why St. Olaf residence halls were built in the sometimes strange configurations that they are and how this impacted the students who lived there. Much of what I’ve found so far tells the story of how students responded to the restrictions and assumptions of those who built the spaces and made the spaces their own. 

St. Olaf students aren’t likely to hire a dorm-room decorator. If a new Ole hasn’t already arranged a matching room set with their roommate, the first trip to Target is crucial for making the blank slate of a dorm room feel more like home. Even back in the days when students had to gather the straw from nearby farms to stuff their own mattresses, they found ways to personalize their rooms.

Early personal photographs show photo collages of family, friends, and pets, much like students today still put up. As early as 1938, the Olaf Messenger was reporting on personalization of student decor. A product of its moment, one article notes, “You’ll see a room that is very tailored, the beds covered with spreads of plain materials with straight lines, tailored drapes, and the furniture set in straight lines. A personality reveals itself and you know instinctively that here lives a girl with an orderly mind, a girl who likes plan [sic] fine things. Right next door you may find an entirely different sort of room, all lightness, softness, and fluff. Walk down another door and you might enter the room of an outdoor girl with tennis rackets and golf clubs in conspicuous places and with outdoor pictures on the wall.”

By the more progressive 1960s, dorm decor can make the man as well. A set of roommates in a Thorson Hall double constructed a pretty groovy set up: “The thing that makes it in our room is the heavy middle. It segments the room into two or three spaces… some rooms are just halves. The closet is the abrupt change. We made it a second room, took the closet stuff out, threw in cushions, and tuned it with flat-black and art.”

Residents of Mohn Hall also worked to make the space their own: “A room needs atmosphere, [Steve Knutson and Marcus Lehmann] say. They overcame the banality of the bolted-down room by overwhelming it with color. Stylized blue and green Mod art patterns cover the walls, and shade the lights. Comments? ‘Every room needs a plant and a good view. The room doesn’t really have a theme [….] It’s sort of Algeric-Moroccoan like the Arabian Knights.’”

For a place where students live for only nine months before packing up for the summer, these rooms hold a place of significant importance in a student’s experience.

Sometimes, students went beyond decorating their rooms to personalized them in more permanent ways. Nowhere was this more true than in Old Ytterboe (1901-1997). By the 1950s, students had started to describe the building as worn and old, but still much loved. They seem to have shown their love of place by carving initials into the building and painting targets to throw ski poles at on the walls. Sometimes love manifests strangely in youth. But this, the 1954 yearbook claims, had been stopped by the renovations — but not for long!

In 1977-79, Scott Emkovik built a series of short-term modifications to his dorm room: first a swimming pool, then an ice rink, and finally, a small, but functional, ferris wheel. Starting with the swimming pool, he built a frame, lined it with plastic, and filled it using a hose and the bathroom faucet. Somehow, this one-night pool party didn’t do any damage, and Emkovik revisited the scheme the following year. This time, he insulated and redirected heating vents and left the windows open during a typical Minnesota January. The school caught on to this experiment, and that was the end of that. Less information is available about the ferris wheel, but we know that it had four seats, blinking lights, and music.

While these were singular constructions, Ytterboe became the home of elaborate lofts that persisted from year to year until the college tried to ban them in 1984. One student objected in the Mess, “One of the reasons anyone comes to Ytterboe is because of the lofts. They offer opportunity for creativity.” They certainly did, and the administration reached a compromise with students by the end of the school year, officially making the lofts part of choosing to live in Ytterboe. There’s no word, though, on how they felt about the bar that one enterprising student constructed.

The need to loft beds for space was not, of course, limited to Ytterboe. In 1978, all nine dorms had at least three lofts (Ytterboe had between sixty and eighty). Students in Hoyme and Ellingson also constructed additional seating and storage in their room by making window seats. Like the lofts, these were eventually disallowed. However, in recognition of the practical reasons that students expressed themselves in this way, the college now offers lofting kits and the New Hall and townhouses come with window seats already installed. The window seats are back, not only in New Hall, but in current images of rooms in Ellingson as well.  

When I show students archive images of the early days of St. Olaf, they notice the similarities to their own rooms. They comment on the photograph collages on the walls (though they wonder at all the books). Yet, when they research the dorms, the stories they most often retell are those of the building’s namesakes and the history of the structure’s construction and demolition. Those stories reveal the people and places that are important to institutional memory, both the good (Agnes Mellby and the building that bears her name) and the more questionable (Gjermund Hoyme and Mohn Hall). However, this story misses the experience of the students and the ways that they have contributed to the changing community of the college over the years. I believe it is also important to amplify the student’s voices and stories about how they made, resided in, and expressed themselves in their intensely residential community. 

What did you do at St. Olaf to make your room your own? I’d love to hear stories at shaima1@stolaf.edu about how previous Oles customized their rooms! And if you had a loft in Ytterboe (or elsewhere), please share pictures!