Unpopular Cal dorm has grand reopening
UC Berkeley restores Tudor building to its origins as a residential college
Bowles Hall is a residence hall unlike any other at UC Berkeley — a gorgeous Tudor mansion nestled just next to the football stadium in the hills above campus. Despite the building’s castle-like facade, for many years it settled into genteel disrepair, an allmale dorm that was out of favor with students and unaffordable for campus upkeep.
Now, due to the efforts of countless Bowles alumni, the residence hall has been restored to its former glory. In a return to long-lost tradition, UC
Berkeley celebrated the reopening of Bowles Hall this weekend. The dorm is now an alums-funded residential college, where students can live, eat and study for the entirety of their collegiate experiences.
Following a $45 million, 11-year effort to restore the building, Bowles Hall has reopened as a coed residential college. Hundreds gathered Saturday to celebrate the reopening, with alumni spanning the building’s history returning to campus to witness the return of the residential college’s legacy.
In recent years, the building’s upkeep became too expensive for the campus, and many freshmen would mark the all-male dorm as their last option when applying for housing.
“The saying was you don’t choose Bowles, Bowles chooses you,” said junior Joshua Godwin, who lived in Bowles his freshman year before its renovation. “My freshman year, Bowles was my fourth choice. Now, people are choosing Bowles.”
Some 183 hand-picked students moved into the hall on Aug. 20. They will live side by side with five graduate students and three Berkeley academics, including one professor emeritus.
On a campus where students typically move off campus after one year in the dorms, the new Bowles Hall offers the antithesis of the typical Berkeley experience: a four-year, all-inclusive academic environment where students learn, eat and grow in a single residence hall their entire collegiate life.
“This is such a large university, it’s easy for students to slip through the cracks and just become a number,” said Melissa Bayne, a lecturer in psychology and the new dean of Bowles Hall. “Here, they are being fully supported.”
Bowles Hall first opened its doors to male students in 1929 as a fully functioning residential college. Believed to be the first residential college in the nation, Bowles was modeled after the British college systems of Cambridge and Oxford. The space was meant to encourage community building and intimate academic engagement by using a model of selfgovernment. Its smallschool environment was meant to help students navigate Berkeley’s massive and at-times impersonal campus.
Bowles residents from the 1960s remember the dorm for its tight-knit community and lively spirit, fostered by the residence hall’s all-inclusive nature. Fred Strauss, class of ’70, recalled an annual luau in the building’s front yard, with students converting the lawn into a makeshift pool and building an elaborate waterfall from the building’s seventh-floor balcony.
Warren Nordgren, class of ’62, remembered dropping water balloons on students returning home from final exams, and stringing a phone line between Bowles and an all-female dorm, Stern Hall.
“It was hard to connect on campus, so here you connected,” said Richard Jacobs, who graduated from Berkeley in 1972 and lived in Bowles Hall.
But over the years, the hall lost its all-inclusive atmosphere. By the 1970s, Bowles had become a standard dormitory, no longer governed by its residents and instead managed by the university. In 2001, it stopped serving food in the building, so students living there had to go to other residence halls for their meals. In 2005, the rooms became available only to freshmen.
The dorm risked fullon closure when the Haas School of Business attempted to acquire the property and use it as a home for the school’s school’s executive education center, a nondegree program that offers training for companies. A $25 million anonymous donation was funding the effort. That’s when Bob Sayles, a 1952 Bowles alum, stepped in.
Sayles saw the potential remake of Bowles Hall as an affront to the building’s origins, which had focused on enhancing the undergraduate experience. Determined to save the residence hall, Sayles resolved to bring the building back to its former glory. He and a small group of men who had once lived in Bowles rallied around the issue and founded the Bowles Hall Alumni Association. They then began raising funds and interest around the prospect of restoring Bowles as a residential college.
“The goal here is to make their university experience as full as they can make it,” said Bowles alumnus John Baker, vice president of the Bowles Hall Foundation. “We want people to feel like they’ve got a home.”
The planning paid off in 2015, when the Bowles Hall Foundation signed a lease with the campus that will pay for the residence hall’s operations for 45 years. Bowles was closed for the 2015-2016 school year, while it underwent complete renovation, including returning a dining hall to the building and completely remaking the student housing. Renovations concluded in late July, and students were moving into the building less than a month later for the start of school.
“I was really scared about the big-school aspect. I thought this would be the perfect place to bring a small community to a big place,” said Arun Sundar, a freshman who moved into Bowles last week. “We’re a family already.”