This week, the cultural house team is hosting an awareness week of the cultural houses on campus.
Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion, Tanya Williams, credited cultural house fellows, Tamar Westphal ’12 and Divya Chandramouli ’14 for developing the awareness week. “It is an opportunity for people to better be connected and to know the cultural houses because we run into so many people who don’t have any conscious of what they are.”
Westphal and Chandramouli held a Taboo Dialogue on Tuesday afternoon, entitled “Culturally Connected: Are cultural houses needed at MHC?” The cultural house team also organized tabling in Blanchard throughout the week along with visual material and a bulletin board introducing the staff.
“The Cultural House Team’s main focus this year is raising awareness of the houses, as so many people don’t know about them, where they are, what’s there. The houses are terrific resources, but they’re under-utilized. At the same time, we need to make sure that more people start using these spaces, as we’re encouraging them to do, we educate everyone about the importance of these houses as cultural spaces, so that everyone who enters them does so respectfully,” said Westphal.
Westphal also suggested that tension could arise if the cultural houses were not treated respectfully and appropriately. “The houses are all available as programmable venues… so there are many groups/offices who use the houses for meetings that are unrelated to the
use cultures. This is causing some tension. Since the houses are available to everyone, we really need to ensure that people are aware of how to treat them appropriately.”
The cultural houses are OneCard accessible to all students every Monday and Tuesday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Wednesday through Friday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Board members of the organizations affiliated with each cultural house are granted access from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day. Students are also able to access the houses by requesting a specific time and date for an event. Students have raised concern around the open hours policy. When asked about the campus-wide OneCard access, APAU board member Elizabeth Laguerre ’13 stated, “Just the fact that the betty is open to the public and is being reserved without members of the orgs it is affiliated with being notified have disrupted its sense of space and place. I feel like the Betty, my home away from home, is now being taken away from me because I can no longer go there and feel one hundred percent comfortable.”
Previously the cultural houses had house-sitters who were assigned specific hours to sit in the house during open hours. “It didn’t make sense to me to not have a house that was accessible to all of campus in the sense.” Williams made the decision to get rid of the house-sitters and instead make the houses OneCard accessible for students to come during designated open hours. There are two cultural house fellows who oversee the houses and two programming assistants who manage programs and related events for each house. Cultural Housing Programming Assistant, Jasmine Yepa ’13 remarked, “The main purpose of the houses is to serve as an open and safe space for the entire MHC community to socialize with the identities and orgs affiliated with the houses. The houses should also be seen as an educational space to learn more about a specific culture or identity that is connected to a house.”
The cultural house team plans on furthering this awareness campaign into the coming spring semester including an information night in Blanchard scheduled for February. According to Westphal, the evening will serve as an informal introduction to the houses, during which attendees will learn about the Cultural House Team staff, open hours, and how to take advantage of the resources in the houses.
“I think that there is a power in cultural houses because I see it from a perspective that the house can be a place where people feel stronger to confront the racism that exists on the larger campus,” said Williams. “I’m just trying to understand the program aspects and programming space and how do we balance all of this.”
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