Photo by Tara Monastesse ‘25.
The Gorse Children’s Center parking lot contains parking spaces for both student and faculty/staff.
By Tara Monastesse ’25
Managing Editor of Content
There is a certain humbling ritual that every car-owning resident of 1837 and Mandelle Halls must undergo at some point.
After you pull into the narrow lot that provides parking for both residential halls, you slowly inch along, scanning each row of cars with a sinking feeling in your stomach. Eventually, you reach the end of the lot and sigh in defeat, beginning the awkward process of doing a three-point turn in the cramped space in front of the 1837 Hall main entrance. Once again, you have arrived in the lot outside your dorm and discovered that there is not a single open parking space.
Usually, this means you will have to park in the Gorse Children’s Center parking lot, located down the hill from the dorms. If you’re prone to driving-related emotional outbursts like me, this realization is usually accompanied by smacking the steering wheel with the heel of your palm and uttering a few choice words. Sometimes even the Gorse lot will be full, and from there, you have two choices: either park in the Dickinson lot if there is space and trek all the way to your hall, or circle each lot aimlessly, wasting gas — worth its weight in gold these days — until a space finally opens up.
While having to park across campus from your dorm may seem trivial, these inconveniences add up. The New England winter is only getting closer, making unnecessary treks across campus during the frigid nights all the more troublesome. Having to carry bulky items such as groceries to and from one’s vehicle is another reason that this situation is undesirable.
I do not think it is unreasonable for Mount Holyoke students to expect parking to be accessible after paying $150 annually for student parking privileges. This fee is understandable and, I would argue, relatively affordable. Similar schools, such as Smith College, also charge the same amount as Mount Holyoke does for parking. $150 is certainly a much less steep cost for student parking than the one charged by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose cheapest option for car registration last year was $291. However, I find it frustrating that even after paying this fee, finding a parking space on campus is still very difficult.
In the official Parking Rules and Regulations guidebook, “The College does not guarantee that there will be a space available in the parking system for every registered vehicle.” While I appreciate the honesty, I wonder why the student body has never challenged this policy before. Would you be fine if, after making a purchase at a store, an employee informed you that the item was, in fact, unavailable but still kept your money?
A resident of an apartment building would reasonably expect to have a space in which to park their car outside the building after paying rent every month. Why should residential students at a college, who pay for their room and board, expect anything different?
My complaints about parking are nothing new. Students have brought the issue to the Student Government Association during senate meetings, which I covered during my time as a News Editor for Mount Holyoke News. The SGA E-Board has stated that a long-term solution to the parking shortage would take 5-10 years to implement.
My grievances, of course, are not with SGA: I appreciate their efforts to make the College administration aware of the situation and to relay student concerns. What I fail to understand is why the College continues to exacerbate the problem by enrolling record numbers of students when they are aware that the problem exists and will only continue to get worse.
Let me be clear: I am not advocating for the construction of a new parking lot. The last thing our college needs is for money and time to be invested in clearing out land on our beautiful campus to build another soulless stretch of pavement. What I am advocating for is a more optimized allocation of our current resources. The College needs to either convert more faculty/staff parking areas to student lots or limit the amount of parking decals available for purchase each semester.
While I adore the new Yellow Sphinxes of the Class of 2027, the fact remains that they are a particularly large class, with 587 matriculants. I have to question why the College continues to enroll students in record numbers when there are not enough resources available to support them, whether that be parking spaces, class sizes or even housing — underscored by the need to house students in the Willits-Hallowell Center temporarily earlier this year after an unexpected amount of students accepted an offer of admission. The parking issue is reflective of a greater problem present at the College, which is that students are being admitted to the College without the resources they need to succeed.
Now is the time for confessions: I am not an innocent party. Since the beginning of the semester, I have racked up five parking tickets for parking in faculty/staff-only parking areas across campus. Two of these instances, I admit, were the result of laziness — I simply wanted to park closer to central campus to access Blanchard Hall. However, the other three were instances where, exhausted at the end of the day, I simply did not have the energy to find valid parking after discovering the 1837 and Mandelle Hall lot was full and took up a space in a faculty/staff lot for the night instead.
The email I received from the Parking Office after receiving my fifth citation, ominously titled “Parking tickets,” explained that I would be referred to Residential Life for a “possible perimeter parking ban.” Upon inquiring, I received an itemized list of each offense, which is how I discovered that I had received two tickets over the course of two days after mistakenly parking my car in the faculty/staff section of the Gorse lot after finding that there was no student parking space available outside my dorm. Am I correct for having broken the rules? No. Was I set up to succeed by being provided with reliable student parking? The answer is also no.
What will happen with these tickets is up in the air, if I am being completely honest. As a first-generation low-income student, I am still trying to wrangle together my tuition payment for this semester. I do not have the money right now to pay these tickets upfront, nor the time and energy needed to dispute them. Right now, they are strewn across the backseat of my secondhand car or else jammed haphazardly into the driver’s side door compartment. I have to wonder at the efficiency of repeatedly ticketing students for parking in faculty/staff lots rather than simply providing them with reliable parking access.
Now that I am an upperclassman at Mount Holyoke, I am acutely aware of how important it is to have access to a car in this area. While the PVTA is a great resource, it cannot account for the many transport needs of students, such as needing a ride to the train station in Springfield or to CVS for medicine to treat a cold. I am aware that owning a car at Mount Holyoke is a great privilege, and it is one that I do not take lightly.
Because of this, I expect that the College would put more effort into making car ownership accessible to its students. As long as students at Mount Holyoke need a personal vehicle to meet their everyday needs, they should be given reliable parking after registering their cars.