Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 12, 1991 TAG: 9104120402
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Some colleges are even rewiring residence halls to keep up with rising energy demands.
"Students have so many more things than they did before that they are not willing to accept four walls and a basic room anymore," said Doris Collins, the associate director of residential housing at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
The average undergraduate, college administrators say, is likely to live in a dormitory room crammed with high-technology creature comforts, including personal computers and high-speed printers, color televisions and videocassette recorders, microwave ovens and electric popcorn poppers, hair dryers and electric shavers, powerful stereo systems and compact disc players and more. Much more.
Collins, who is also the president of the Association of College and University Housing Officers International, said American colleges have only gradually become aware of these mounting electrical needs, and can only gradually respond.
"We have to take one building or a section at a time," she said, describing the arduous process of upgrading older buildings, often World War II-vintage brick and wood, for the needs of gadget-laden students. "We can't afford to turn it all around at once."
At Haverford College, a small liberal arts institution outside Philadelphia in Haverford, Pa., workers will soon swarm over a 168-unit student apartment complex. In what is becoming a rite of summer there, several of these apartment buildings at the edge of campus are shut down each year and rewired just after commencement in May.
Haverford's president, Tom G. Kessinger, said students now own so many appliances that "the walls in some students' rooms look like the flight deck of the space shuttle."
Time was when those rooms looked more like the garret of a poverty-stricken writer, equipped with a few ancient outlets and fragile fuses. With a chuckle, Kessinger recalled the Haverford of the 1950s, when he was a student.
"I had a three-speed Victrola and a manual typewriter and thought I was well off," he said. "Now, typewriters are out and Victrolas are in museums, and students have computers, little refrigerators, VCRs and color televisions."
"Although enrollments have been stable or flat, at residential campuses electrical uses have been creeping up 3 to 5 percent simply because of student increases in consumer items," said Wayne Leroy, vice president of the Association of Physical Plant Administrators of Universities and Colleges.
"In the housing being built right now, we had to sit down and calculate how many electrical outlets were necessary for a two-person room," said Sam Morabito, a University of California at Los Angeles vice chancellor.
"We were astonished to find that now it requires 16 outlets, which is four or five times the number that was needed 25 years ago."
by CNB