Every now and then, the members of the Stanford Alumni Club of Palo Alto get together and write out a check to their alma mater. It’s not a huge sum—usually about a thousand dollars for music scholarships or unrestricted financial aid. Still, you’d think such a loyal band could find a room on campus for its wine-and-cheese gatherings without having to cut through yards of Cardinal-red tape. “We really have to scrape around to find places for our group to meet; sometimes I end up calling the Episcopal Church out on Sand Hill Road,” says Glenna Violette, MA ’69.
Neil Menzies, ’97, MA ’98, has had similar problems booking space for the Bay Area Cardinal Young Alumni. At one recent on-campus seminar, he says, “we had people sitting on the floor and the windowsills.” Finding adequate and affordable meeting rooms “is just a pain.”
The Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center should solve such problems. The three-story facility at the corner of Campus Drive and Galvez Street, on the site of the old Band Shak, will have its grand opening Saturday, October 13, during Reunion Homecoming weekend. About 30,000 square feet on the first floor are reserved for graduates of the University, while the upper two stories house 300 staff members from the Stanford Alumni Association and the Office of Development. The alumni amenities include a living room for drop-in conversation, a library where visitors can peruse books by alumni authors, several conference rooms, an indoor-outdoor café, a ballroom for dinner parties, lectures and the like, a business center, lockers, showers, a special services officer to answer questions—even bicycles to borrow (see special section).
“This is a place that will allow us to do [the kinds of] alumni programming that we just found so difficult to do before,” says Alumni Association vice president Carolyn Manning, ’78. “We can host reunion dinners in the great hall. We can have informal faculty talks in the café in the evening. We can do all sorts of things that will draw people back to campus, because now we have the space.”
Led by John Arrillaga, ’60, donors provided approximately 90 percent of the cost of the $37 million facility. The center is named for Arrillaga’s late wife, who served on the Alumni Association’s executive board.
And it’s a building with a message, says Manning: “Alumni are truly welcome on campus. There’s a place for them here.”
