Summoned to an urgent meeting with Gene Awakuni, vice provost for student affairs, the two graduate students didn’t know what to expect. “We thought, ‘What could be that important?’” Grace Chang recalls.
The news was better than Chang, ’92, MS ’94, and Lisa Marin could have imagined: thanks to a substantial gift from John Arrillaga, the long-anticipated Graduate Student Center suddenly was good to go. “Stunned incredulity,” Chang says of her realization that ground finally would be broken. “It was really an incredible moment.”
Chang, a medical student and former chair of the Graduate Student Council (GSC), and deputy chair Marin had spent their year in office talking up the need for a center with anyone who would listen, including the University president and provost. Another item atop the list of graduate student concerns: more on-campus housing. “I’ve moved five times since I got here, and I still don’t live on campus,” says Marin, a fifth-year graduate student in biological sciences. “And that includes spending three months on an ex-boyfriend’s couch.” Her predicament is not unique: fewer than 60 percent of graduate students live on the Farm, and a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto costs an average of $1,126. Then there’s the high cost and scarcity of child care for the youngest of graduate students’ 500 children. Monthly fees for infant care, for example, top $1,400 at campus day care centers.
Now, some of those concerns are being alleviated. Plans for additional housing are under discussion. The provost has begun meeting with graduate students and postdocs to discuss the child-care crunch. And Arrillaga, ’60, stepped forward last April with an offer to pay the costs of architectural drawings and construction for the $3.75 million community center.
When it opens—as early as July, or in September at the latest—the new center on Escondido Road should be a magnet for graduate students housed on and off campus. “Most graduate students either live in the east village area, or commute out that way,” Marin says. “So it should be very convenient to have the facility there, where families can walk over with their kids.”
Modeled on the Arrillaga Alumni Center, the two-story Graduate Student Center will have 12,000 square feet of space for meetings and general hanging out. The first-floor pub will serve finger foods and hot meals provided by Stanford Dining Services, “and, yes, we’re hoping to obtain a liquor license so alcohol can be served,” says Awakuni. A hardwood, multipurpose room across from the pub will be available for dinners, dances or aerobic classes. Upstairs, a large-screen TV will be the focus of activity, surrounded by pool and/or foosball tables and plenty of couches. On the same floor: a copy center, computer room, children’s play area with toys and kid-size furniture, plus administrative offices and conference and meeting rooms.
“Mr. Arrillaga basically is designing the shell of the building—stairways, bathrooms, elevators and major exterior walls—but what goes on inside has been left more to the users,” says Steve Allison, current GSC chair. “We’re going to be able to walk into that building and say, ‘This is an idea students had.’ ”
Plans are more preliminary for housing adjacent to the Law School that would accommodate many of its 580 students. Most already live on campus, but they are not grouped in a dorm near the law quad, as is the case at some other top schools. A survey two years ago also confirmed some students were commuting from the East Bay and San Francisco because of housing costs in the Palo Alto area, says Frank Brucato, senior associate dean of finance and chief financial officer for the Law School. “If we had to guess where the future would be in the next 10 to 20 years, in terms of how law schools will be competing for students, we think it could be in housing.”
