CdC Office Locations Changing This Week
OSE, MIPS and SCA relocating to different spaces within the CdC
By Natalie Nemes
In an email sent on Monday, Jan. 30, the Office of Student Affairs announced that the Student Center & Activities (SCA) offices, Multicultural & International Programs & Services (MIPS) and the Office of Scholarly Engagement (OSE) would be relocating to different spaces within the CdC.
Starting Wednesday, Feb. 1, through Friday, Feb. 3, it was planned that the SCA offices would move from their current locations in the hallway adjacent to the Information Center to offices in the Student Organization Center. Beginning the week of Monday, Feb. 13, MIPS will move to the space currently occupied by the Center for Community Work & Learning (CWL) near Starbucks. The CWL, along with the four other branches of the OSE, will gain spaces formerly occupied by MIPS and the SCA near the Information Center. The Information Center will remain in its current location.
As stated in the Jan. 30 email and previously iterated in a Tuesday, Dec. 6, email from Provost Anita Thomas, “[T]here are three goals of this work: 1) enhance and expand space for student diversity initiatives; 2) coordinate and co-locate space for our Office of Scholarly Engagement; and 3) establish a permanent space to educate, celebrate, and advocate for our LGBTQIA+ students.”
According to Matt Goodwin, associate provost of student affairs, there are three challenges at the center of rethinking the utilization of spaces in the CdC: finding on-campus spaces for offices that only exist in a remote capacity, locating a central hub for the entirety of the OSE and “ensuring that the resources that we have for students were adapting to our student population.” For example, Goodwin continued, MIPS is a situation where students have maxed out their current space.
Office of Scholarly Engagement
Global Studies, which currently occupies offices in the hallway behind MIPS, will now be delegated an official space with the CdC office relocations. Raine de Campeau, director of Global Studies, explained that since the fall of 2021 the office has been borrowing spaces MIPS offered them after Global Studies was moved out of its office in Derham to an entirely remote presence in November 2020.
With the CdC space reshuffling, Global Studies will officially obtain the two offices it currently occupies, as well as two additional offices, all located in the midst of spaces that will be occupied by staff members of other branches of the OSE. Campeau said she is “really looking forward to being in the presence of these other offices and the work that they do. Because I think there’s something that happens when you share space, and you have that more constant contact.”
Campeau and CWL director D’Ann Urbaniak Lesch both said they see how having all branches of the OSE centered in the same area will help students engage in the many high-impact opportunities the different OSE offices offer. “We just really want to make it super easy, accessible and available,” Lesch said. “And the first step of that is people knowing about things and being able to talk to people who can encourage them and support them and help them through the processes. So that’s going to be much easier in a shared space.”
According to the Jan. 30 email, the new OSE space will also include common areas for students to gather together, as well as a shared office for the directors of Antonian Honors, Collaborative Research and Competitive Fellowships. Rafael Cervantes, director of Antonian Honors, reiterated that the OSE is about creating opportunities and pathways for students, and that part of that is carving out a common space for students to collaborate and talk about their experiences within the OSE departments.
Student Center & Activities
Sami Johnson, associate director of the SCA, said last week that the SCA was still in the process of moving gradually from the current SCA office suite to the Student Organization Center. She acknowledged that moving is daunting, and that “trying to figure out some of the student organization displacement is challenging, because you all have had great spaces.”
Some of the student organizations that occupied offices in the Student Organization Center, such as The Wheel and commuter advisors, have been relocated as SCA staff members have moved into those spaces. Many of these organizations will move into a shared conference room near the Student Organization Center.
Johnson described how the SCA has worked to move the objects the SCA stores for student organization use from its office suite to the Student Organization Center, cleaning out some of what it used to store in the process. The banner-making table has changed locations to make room for where the SCA front desk will eventually be, and there is a bookshelf containing helpful resources pushed against the wall of the Student Organization Center where clubs can easily access it.
SCA’s bookshelf, newly located in the Student Organization Center, contains resources for clubs, books on women leaders and student publications.
Moving Forward …
Looking to the future, conversations surrounding a multifaith space and a space for queer students are still ongoing. “The university is very close to announcing the placement and status of a new university multifaith prayer space,” Goodwin said.
Concerning a space for queer students, he added, “I think a queer student space is where the university is going in terms of recognizing both students who share non-straight identities, but also a space for allies. … Trying to understand what is the right type of space, where that space is located and what we seek from the space are all questions that we’re talking about right now.”
Students can expect more changes to the CdC in the future, since these relocations are the first of three phases to enhance the building. Phase two will be called FF&E for fixtures, furniture and equipment, Goodwin said, where those occupying the new spaces will identify furniture needs for those areas.
“Phase three gets a little more intrusive in terms of building out space,” Goodwin said. “It’s also the phase that we have the least amount of specifics on because the phases build off one another.”
Finally, Goodwin emphasized that “as much as we can, truly we’re trying to keep student needs at the center of this work.” He continued, “It’s been helpful to connect with the things that we’re hearing, the things that we’re seeing and how that’s informing what we decide to do.”
According to Goodwin, students can hopefully look forward to the second phase of the CdC refurbishment beginning this summer in addition to the office relocations happening this week. At the end of this project, ideally the administration’s goal is to have enhanced space in the CdC to maximize student use in many ways.
