Visitors to Scripps College are often struck by the beauty and peacefulness of the school’s campus and dorms. Nestled between walls, gates and gardens, Scripps dorms encourage students to relax in their many communal spaces — browsing rooms, living rooms, kitchens and interior courtyards.
This impression of utter tranquility isn’t an accident. From the college’s founding, Scripps dorms were built to feel like houses, protecting and enclosing students. The wider campus, too, was built on this sense of enclosure.
In her book “Alma Mater,” historian and past Scripps professor Helen Horowitz said the entire campus was planned as “a great courtyard, facing inward,” with buildings and walls forming a border against the outside world.
Walking on campus, you might pass through layers of archways, doors and gates. Each barrier creates a web of interlocking interior spaces within the campus, with the dorms and their inner courtyards nestled at the center. In comparison to Scripps, the other 5Cs are much more spread-out, with recreational public spaces outside of residential buildings.
“Scripps is ‘enclosed’ based on a Spanish Mission Style, like a modern monastic community for women,” according to George Gorse, Viola Horton professor of Art and professor of Art History at Pomona College.
These architectural choices shape dorm culture and social life at Scripps to this day.
Scripps was founded as a foil to the co-ed Pomona College. As Pomona began to grow and more women enrolled, James A. Blaisdell persuaded Ellen Browning Scripps to endow a new, adjoining women’s college, one that would effectively educate its female students. A women’s education needed women’s architecture.
When lead architect Gordon Kaufman and the founding Scripps administration were drafting the college’s architectural plan, they started with residential buildings.
“Academic structures and the library could come later; but young women needed the supervision and the common life of a college dormitory,” Horowitz said.
Scripps’ residence halls were originally designed to make their mostly affluent, Californian students feel at home — literally.
School governors wanted to “protect the femininity of young college women by putting them in buildings that look like houses,” Horowitz wrote.
According to a 1926 memorandum for the campus’ building committee, each residence hall was designed to have “the appearance and atmosphere of a beautiful home.”
Like houses, Scripps’ residence halls were meant to protect its students, offering a layer of privacy and safety from the outside with public spaces inside.
A Scripps College Bulletin from 1964 notes that “the resident halls, with their charm of atmosphere and appointments, suggest a fortunate association of home.”
“Most of these women in the 1920s and 1930s were coming from Pasadena, well-protected upper-middle class,” Bruce Coats, professor emeritus of Art History at Scripps and co-author of “Guide to the Scripps College Campus,” said. “They had chosen not to go to UCLA or USC because they might not have wanted to be in these big dorms.”
The enclosed domesticity of Scripps’ dorms was in part an effort to conceive a feminine space to fit a feminine education.
Safety and domesticity also meant supervision and surveillance.
In “Engendering the Institution,” Nancy Ware writes that “the grandly domestic scale of [Scripps’] resident halls, the walled campus, the elaborate sequence of interior spaces, the inward facing buildings, the diagonal axis that relates the campus to Pomona College are ways that gender is inscribed on the space.”
Residence halls, built in the California-local Spanish Mission Style, were comprised of single dormitory rooms surrounding central communal living rooms, residential dining halls and interior courtyards.
This conception of women’s privacy also regulated the social and public lives of students. Safety and domesticity also meant supervision and surveillance.
Each dorm had a single front entrance with a reception desk where students checked in and a faculty “house mother” that lived in the building. House mothers were present until around the 1950s, according to Coats.
“[The single-entry reception and house mothers] sort of set up the surveillance slash safety aspect of these enclosed dorms,” Coats said.
Although house mothers aren’t around anymore, two Scripps Residential Life faculty, called Area Coordinators, currently live on campus, according to the 2024-2025 Scripps Guide to Student Life.
The embedding of surveillance into residence halls stemmed in part from early-20th-century fears about the dangers of close relationships between women. Flourishing communal spaces within dorms served to steer students away from not only the outside world but also from their private living quarters and into the visibility of common rooms.
“The existing women’s colleges and the new ones of the war years feared close female relationships,” Horowitz wrote. “Thus in plan dormitories, the women’s colleges chose forms designed to strain expressions of female friendship which could not be monitored. Small, cell-like rooms hardly invited intimacy. In the 1920s, planning aimed to move socializing from the upstairs bedrooms and parlors downstairs to the public rooms.”
Current Scripps student Elise McDonald SC ’28 spoke about how these engineered public spaces affect current students.
“It’s really easy to eavesdrop at Scripps,” McDonald said. “All the places that people would go to have private conversations are eavesdroppable. i.e. Star Court, Toll Secret Garden, the student garden, even Seal Court if you’re dumb enough to say anything there. The only place you’re free of surveillance is the lawn and I think that’s why so many people choose to gather there.”
The movement of students into these spaces also incorporated them into the larger group, providing community but also a lack of privacy.
A 1928 College Bulletin, for example, notes that “Through the quick responses of the eye the Scripps student is constantly reminded that the loveliness surrounding her is not her private egoistic possession. It is hers as the member of the group.”
In a dorm that’s like a beautiful house and a campus composed almost entirely of enclosed spaces, facilitating a public social life remains difficult to this day.
“Scripps architecture discourages forming new friendships and connections,” McDonald said. “The tranquility of the courtyards leaves me wanting to feel uninterrupted by passersbys and strangers.”
Scripps’ residential architecture confines the college’s public life within the walls of dorm living and dining rooms, giving it a feeling of supervision. Eliet Williamson-Diaz SC ’23, a former Community Coordinator, noted how this enclosed domestic space leads to feelings of “heightened surveillance.”
“Even though it’s been almost a hundred years since Scripps was built, those feelings are still there, the remnants of the way the school was built are still there,” Williamson-Diaz said.
However, the enclosed design of residence halls also promoted an intimate (if insular) community and social life within individual dorms.
But changes to residence halls in the last 20 or so years — including the centralization of dining, increased room density and elimination of dorm governments — have weakened what was formerly a tight-knit culture.
The common rooms which formerly facilitated social life within dorms, for example, are now more private than public spaces.
“I think in reaction to the extreme surveillance of Scripps, Scripps students, not for a lack of friendliness, but to respect each other’s privacy and space, we don’t use our common spaces in any way,” Williamson-Diaz said. “They’re really just like private spaces.”
In 2000, Malott Commons opened to lower costs and increase the amount of residency space available for new students, as dorm dining halls were remodeled into private living quarters.
Administration at the time sought to promote community among Scripps’ students across different dorms, according to art writer Suzanne Muchnic SC ’62 in her forthcoming book.
“Primarily driven by a need to cut the cost of food service but also fueled by a desire to create a larger sense of community within Scripps itself and with neighboring colleges, Malott ended a long tradition of residential dining and relocated the art department to make room for a hub of community spirit and social discourse on the south side of the campus,” Muchnic wrote.
Jennifer Martinez-Wormser SC ’95, director and Sally Preston Swan Librarian for the Ella Strong Denison Library, graduated from Scripps in 1995 and experienced the college right before the switch to Malott Commons. She described the kind of homey environment and culture which the original architects of Scripps strove for.
“They often had a fireplace,” Martinez-Wormser said. “They had chandeliers. They had certain features that were a little more homelike. And just like in a home, in Browning [Hall], we walked through our living room to go into the dining room.”
This may have partially been the effect of a smaller student body; in Martinez-Wormster’s time, students usually only shared a room during their first-year. Since Malott opened, Scripps has expanded by about a third.
Moreover, having a private space of their own may have allowed students to feel more comfortable as part of a wider dorm community.
“If you had your own room, maybe you were more inclined to open the door and engage with the people around you,” Martinez-Wormster said. “It wasn’t uncommon for us to just keep the door open and we’d sit outside our doors on the carpet and chat.”
Today, the increasing density of dorms seems to be leading students to value their privacy more. Not only are doors commonly closed, students often do not even enter browsing rooms if they see that people are in them.
Louisa Chiriboga SC ’29 noted how the density of Scripps dorms may contribute to this high valuation of privacy.
“If I have to make a private phone call, I step out of my dorm because [there are] at least two people in there, and I go to the browsing rooms,” Chiriboga said. “And I think people see that you’re on the phone and they step out as courtesy.”
Chiriboga’s experience differs starkly from Martinez-Wormster’s, who knew many people in her dorm from meals and other shared activities. She remembers actively entering browsing rooms to see what was going on when she heard people talking.
The loss of dorm dining may be one reason for this change in attitude, but another is the discontinuation of dorm governments, called Hall Councils, and the events they planned.
Until as late as 2016, each dorm had a Hall Council made up of elected officials whose job it was to plan community bonding events, a role which has transitioned to Community Coordinators hired by the college. These Hall Councils also used to plan dorm-bonding parties. After filling out a form, Council members could move aside chairs and tables in the dining rooms for dancing.
Harvey Mudd College has a similar setup today to what Scripps dorms had 30 years ago. One poster saved by Martinez-Wormser from her time at Scripps advertises a joint party hosted by the Claremont McKenna College dorm Boswell, Scripps dorms Browning and Frankel and Harvey Mudd dorms Lynde and North.
Harvey Mudd and CMC throw similar dorm parties to this day, but Scripps parties as they existed before were disbanded along with their Hall Councils.
To throw a party, dorms go through a similar process with Harvey Mudd’s administration that Scripps councils used to do via a planning form. A former president of Lynde dorm, Carmel Pe’er HM ’24 said that Mudd’s administration is aware of the planning process, but mostly knows details such as how many people to expect and how many Campus Security officers are needed.
“We have walkthroughs with [the administration] and let them know vaguely what we’re planning, but they’re mostly just looped in, they’re not actually super involved,” Pe’er said.
These details are similar to what was asked of Hall Councils in their party planning forms, which were also saved by Martinez-Wormser. One checklist, specifically meant to moderate alcohol consumption, ensures that a certified bartender and students of legal drinking age are in attendance, and that sufficient “non-salty snacks” and an equal amount of non-alcoholic beverages are provided.
Today, there is no formal process to notify administrators of smaller dorm parties, which means that students throw their own parties which are often shut down by noise complaints from other Scripps students.
Because of this difference between Scripps and the other 5Cs, some Scripps students feel like they are missing out on meeting their neighbors and being a part of a larger dorm community.
Williamson-Diaz described feeling frustrated at the lack of trust between the Scripps administration and its students.
“To be simultaneously experiencing Scripps ResLife and Harvey Mudd dorm culture was a crazy experience,” Williamson-Diaz said. “There was a lot of frustration and jealousy and just being like, why can’t we have this?”
The social scene and culture of Scripps’ dorms has changed drastically since when Martinez-Wormser was there, but residential life hasn’t; students still live in the same dorms that were designed in 1929 and 97 percent of Scripps students live on campus for all four years of their education.
Scripps’ loss of both a wider campus social life and tight-knit dorm communities can be traced in part back to the college’s early residential designs and their blanket of supervised domesticity.
The original architectural vision of Gordon Kaufman and Scripps’ founders — of the “beautiful home” — has remained.
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