An $8 million renovation of the Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center greeted students as they returned to campus, providing the community with a remodeled cafeteria and additional lounge spaces upstairs. On the first floor, the Information Desk moved to the Grille’s previous location, with a gender-inclusive restroom taking the Information Desk’s former place. The desk also serves as the entrypoint for the cafeteria, with either biometrics or a card swipe as available options for students on a meal plan. The Grille moved to the second floor, with the upstairs conference rooms removed in favor of more lounge spaces.
The campus center renovation is one of the first steps of the Comprehensive Campus Plan (CCP), a vision for Macalester’s future that has been years in the making, according to Assistant Vice President of Facilities Services Nathan Lief.
“It takes a while to plan these things out,” Lief said. “It’s not something you just do in two months. There’s a whole planning piece — we did outreach to campus, and that all takes time.”
One key finding from the survey, according to Lief, was that “nearly every student is passing by Weyerhaeuser once or if not more times a day,” despite few having reason to go in. This finding motivated the decision to move the Office of Student Affairs and Macalester College Student Government (MCSG) into the first floor of Weyerhaeuser. Meanwhile, Lief cited the growing student body and long lines in café Mac as the primary reason for reimagining the first floor of the campus center.
In this vision, a cafeteria employee shares the desk and can assist students with swiping into the café with their ID card or by waving their hand using a biometric hand scanner.
Students’ biometric data is secure, Information Technology Services assures. An algorithm converts the fingerprint into a template that “is impossible to reverse-engineer … back into a fingerprint image. After conversion, the original images are immediately discarded. Additionally, the initial fingerprint image is a partial scan, not a complete scan,” according to Macalester’s Café Mac Turnstile FAQ. Nevertheless, students are not required to enroll.
On the second floor, the remodel added a gender-inclusive restroom and a commuter kitchen where the Atrium was. Equipped with a sink, two microwaves and a water bottle station, students who live off-campus can now prepare and eat meals on-campus. Additionally, the Open Pantry has moved permanently to Room 242 to serve students struggling with food insecurity.
Without the conference rooms on the west side of the building, Lief wants the new lounge spaces to become a hub for student life.
“What I really hope is that it’s a more compelling place for people to be,” Lief said. “And I hope that people appreciate those views into the center of campus.”
Early impressions of appreciation for the additional seating and more expansive views from many students justify the redesign.
“I really like how they took out the meeting rooms,” Aiden Yang ’25 said.
However, feedback has not been universally positive. The lack of outlets, especially around the high-top tables, has been a complaint. Another student, who wished to remain anonymous, preferred the seating options in Café Mac last year. Nonetheless, first impressions indicate that students welcome the renovations to the second floor of the campus center, including the new location of the Grille.
The next steps of the CCP include the construction of a new residence hall and welcome center, as well as reinventing Weyerhaeuser Chapel and Briggs House. Beyond that, Macalester has a plan in place for renovating several residence halls, demolishing and replacing the Humanities building, and renovating the Olin-Rice Science Center.
