Fans, Portable Air-Conditioners, and Italian Ices: How Colleges Are Combating the Heat Wave

The University of Pennsylvania doled out Italian ices and sent ice trucks. The University of Maryland at College Park dropped mattresses in one of its chilly 75-seat lecture halls, while one student reported sleeping in her bathing suit on towels in her 90-plus-degree dorm room.

It’s common for colleges and universities to house students in lounges and common spaces as unexpectedly large classes arrive on campus at the beginning of the academic year. But in recent weeks, as heat waves have lashed the United States, and especially the Northeast, many colleges have adopted all sorts of tactics to help students cool down.

Both Dartmouth College and Maryland offered first-come, first-served sleeping spaces in cooled rooms, jury-rigging multipurpose rooms, lounges, and student centers into shelters from high temperatures and humidity. As the heat index cracked the triple digits last week, Penn students scoped out lounges freshly equipped with portable air-conditioners. Heat advisories drove students to cots and cool spaces at Yale and New York Universities.

Temperatures in the mid- to upper-90s have put additional pressure on institutions already shuffling students into unconventional living spaces due to housing shortages and confronting expensive choices about renovation. It’s tough for such colleges to think much beyond short-term solutions, like cots and mattresses, for what appears to be a temporary problem.

At Maryland, for instance, officials had already squeezed 350 new students into converted lounges, triples, and quads thanks to a higher enrollment than expected. Then, after a series of heat advisories last week, they bought about 400 fans, took some 80 mattresses out of storage, and asked resident assistants, the police, and a fire marshal to ensure the new sleeping spaces were safe, said Deborah Grandner, director of resident life. The new sleeping locations will stay open through the end of this week.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of options at our disposal,” Grandner said. The university has worked for a decade to equip buildings with air-conditioning for students who expect it, but some buildings are too old for AC installation to be sensible, and “we need to be a good steward of our students’ financial resources.”

The university will need to think about heat waves in the future, Grandner added. While she stresses that she’s not a weather expert, two weeks of extreme heat present a logistical tangle.

A Question of Design

Heat waves like those oppressing the United States this summer are among the more obvious effects of climate change, and they’re only expected to get worse in the coming decades. They also don’t affect just the youngest and oldest members of the population. A Harvard University study conducted in the summer of 2016, the hottest year on record, found that, during a Boston heat wave, college students sleeping in rooms without AC showed decreased cognitive function, in part because of factors like interrupted sleep, compared with students in cooled dorms.

The heat waves are persisting even as institutions expand conservation programs and cut energy costs.

“We don’t want to convey the message that air-conditioning should be implemented widely,” said Jose Guillermo Cedeño-Laurent, associate director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program, who helped lead the cognitive-function study. Traditional air-conditioning is a century-old technology that consumes lots of energy and generates its own greenhouse gases, he said. Instead, as campus buildings become obsolete, administrators could look to new ventilation strategies and models of cooling like those pioneered in Singapore. “It’s a question about design,” he said.

Such notions may feel abstract at the moment, as students spend a few uncomfortable weeks in last-century dorms.

But serious heat waves, by one measure, threaten about 30 percent of the world’s population, according to a 2017 study. By 2100, when those students’ descendants are living in buildings put up or renovated today, heat waves are on track to threaten 74 percent of the population. Fixing the problem with traditional AC may only worsen a “feedback loop,” Cedeño-Laurent said.

New York University plans to renovate Rubin Hall, an un-air-conditioned 600-student residence hall in which “a few dozen” students took the university’s offer of cots on the lower floors, John Beckman, a spokesman, said in an email.

Beckman added that the university had installed or maintained AC in similar renovations because that step cut emissions and energy use. “Our response to global climate change should not be avoiding air-conditioning,” he said. “Rather, when it comes to heating and air-conditioning, the answer is going to be making sure a building is as energy-efficient as possible.”

Within three years Robin Hall will close for upgrades, including AC. “The students grumble, understandably, but also make the best of it, to their credit,” Beckman said. “And we wait for the weather to break.”

Yale, for its part, last year debuted two brand-new residential colleges, built purposefully with no air-conditioning. They were designed to use something involving “chilled air” during the summer instead, Jonathan Holloway, dean of Yale College, told the Yale Daily News. Last week, as temperatures peaked, one of those residential colleges ended up inviting students to escape the heat in its air-conditioned buttery and basketball court.

Update (9/6/2018, 10:28 a.m.): This article has been updated with additional information about New York University’s renovation from a spokesman.

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.