7 Days at Macalester

By Catherine Kane ’26

Just about everywhere you look on Mac’s small campus, you will find examples of student engagement.

Campus organizations are a perfect reflection of this spirit. There are clubs for everything, from the big-tent groups, like the Outing Club, to the wonderfully niche, like Y.A.R.N. (Young Artists for Revolutionary Needle-Work).

Clubs aren’t the only place where this campus ethos appears: Macalester students like me show up at countless events out of simple curiosity, interest, and love of learning. Over the course of a week I looked at clubs, hackathons, late night music, and underneath the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center—and here’s what I learned.

4:30 p.m. Wednesday

Steam tunnels

At 4:30 p.m., I’m welcomed into a nondescript conference room in the facilities office, along with two dozen other students and staff, by Nathan Lief, AVP of Facilities. Lief is something of a steam connoisseur: he oversees the miles of tunnels and tubing underneath campus that deliver steam across campus to keep us warm in the Minnesota winters. The conference room is the first stop on a tour of the steam tunnels, boiler, and cooling systems underneath the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center. Lief presents a dashboard, created by a former student worker in the Sustainability Office, that tracks energy usage across campus.

“As summers get hotter and winters get warmer, the distribution of our use of energy on campus has shifted,” Lief explains. In the warmer months, more electricity is used for air conditioning, and in the winter, less natural gas to power the boiler.

Most students on the tour attend out of curiosity, interested in seeing the bowels of campus operations and the subterranean world under JWall. The pipes crisscrossing the rooms and corridors are painted in bright blues, reds, yellows, and greens, signifying what each line is carrying. The rooms and corridors resemble a colorful, industrial playground.

The boiler is the heart of the operation—it transforms water into steam using an ultra-hot natural gas flame. The boiler requires 24/7/365 monitoring by a highly-trained boiler technician. Lief notes as the campus transitions to geothermal, however, the boiler will be phased out.

“We used to hire a lot of US Navy veterans, but they discontinued their boiler tech position in the mid-nineties,” Lief says. He notes that an increasingly tight labor market for boiler technicians is an additional need for urgency in the college’s geothermal transition.

Unlike the tunnels connecting the dorms on the northeastern side of campus, the steam tunnels are cramped, with low ceilings and unfinished walls, hardly a glamorous hangout. However, some of the rooms housing the massive machinery are vast and cavernous, with a warehouse-like scale. Passing between corridors, we occasionally find ourselves outside, met with a rush of cool air, much welcomed after the heat and humidity of the steam rooms. Looking up at the gray winterish sky, it is clear how far below ground level we were, nestled in the very depths of campus.

Once above ground for good, I orient myself, spending twenty minutes after the tour peering over walls and down shafts around JWall to figure out where exactly we had been. I’m able to mostly trace our path above ground, but some things, it seems, are meant to remain hidden— secrets to stay in the tunnels.

6:15 p.m. Thursday

In the Kitchen With the Korean Cultural Organization

At 6:15 p.m. I hurry over to the Cultural House for the Korean Cultural Organization’s “In the Kitchen With” event. These events are part of a programming series coordinated by the Lealtad Suzuki Center for Social Justice, in which student organizations host meals at the Cultural House to share a cultural touchpoint through food.

In the C-House, I’m met by the sounds of students chatting at a long wooden dining table and the evocatively nostalgic smell of Spam. Laid out on the counter are a variety of Korean snacks: savory crisps, chocolatey cookies, and fruity candies. I sit down next to Luukas Cho ’28 (Chapel Hill, N.C.), who tells me it’s his second event with Macalester KCO.

Sophia Noh ’26 (New York City), one of the KCO chairs, announces dinner is ready, and the two dozen-or-so students at the event line up for budae jjigae, a Korean stew. Budae jjigae (which can be literally translated as “army base stew”) came to prominence during the Korean War when the country’s economy was devastated and food was scarce. However, American military bases in Korea were stocked with shelf-stable items like Spam and American cheese, which were smuggled off the bases and combined with traditional Korean ingredients like anchovy broth, gochujang, kimchi, and odeng (fish cakes).

The result is a delicious, hearty soup with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality. Budae jjigae is often served with instant ramen noodles, a holdover from Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula.

As we eat, Noh explains the rich and often painful history of the dish.

“Many older Koreans call it ‘garbage stew’ because of its association with times of struggle, and others dislike the reminder of Japanese colonization and American imperialism,” she explains.

Cho says that his Korean grandmother has similar feelings about the soup.

“My grandmother refuses to make budae jjigae,” he says. Cho recalls being introduced to the dish in Korean restaurants, as the dish has had a resurgence among a new generation of Koreans.

“I like KCO because it isn’t gimmicky,” Cho says. “There’s so many examples of commercialized Korean culture in the United States, but this feels real.”

Noh says she seeks to create events where people can stay to eat, learn, and engage in conversation, while also having the opportunity to cook dishes that are popular among Korean students.

8 a.m. Saturday

MacGPT

On Saturday at 8 a.m., around fifty students file into the Kagin Ballroom for the second annual MacGPT (Generating the Policy of Tomorrow). We fuel up on bagels and coffee for the day-long policy hackathon ahead of us. The event, launched last year by a committee of a dozen students, invites student teams to develop solutions for a public policy challenge.

At the opening ceremony, the day’s challenge is revealed: develop a policy that addresses two of the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals—Reduced Inequality and Sustainable Cities and Communities. Our mandate is to develop, write, and present an urban-focused policy that can address both goals. There also is a competitive element: at the event’s end a three-judge panel will hand out first, second, and runner-up prizes to the strongest policies.

I compete on a team with Everett Dalton ’27 (Boston), Owen Stein ’27 (Evanston, Ill.), Maggie Walker ’27 (Minneapolis), and Basil DiBenedetto ’28 (Portland, Maine). The five of us immediately choose a housing policy direction, as we believe it’s the best way to capture the challenge’s equity and sustainability parameters. We take an interdisciplinary approach: the Economics, Environmental Studies, Geography, and Political Science Departments are all represented on our team.

Throughout the day, we have group work time and mentoring from Macalester faculty members. Our group work times are frantic and chaotic: whiteboards covered in brainstorming diagrams and equations, furious typing, and, occasionally, heated debate. Mentorship from geography professor I-Chun Catherine Chang, economics professor Sarah West, and ecology professor Anika Bratt helps us refine our approach, ensuring that our policy is both practical and impactful.

We develop a proposal for an affordable housing tax credit system, using a carbon-intensity formula to provide greater tax incentives for sustainable development projects. A key feature of our proposal is the focus on converting underutilized commercial office space into housing, which would address the affordable housing crisis and also contribute to a more sustainable urban environment. In the evening, each group presents their policy to the judges. I’m incredibly inspired by the creative and thoughtful approaches taken by each group as they approach the questions of sustainable cities and reduced inequalities.

The day concludes with a networking dinner, where we meet Macalester alumni working in urban policy fields and hear a keynote address from Minneapolis City Councilwoman Katie Cashman. At the awards ceremony, the winning policy is an urban farming initiative; second place goes to a proposal aimed at reducing congestion and air pollution in Chicago; and our team is honored with the runner-up prize for our sustainable affordable housing policy.

MacGPT is a shining example of Macalester students undertaking a project and participating in an event simply because they have an interest in and curiosity about a subject, and hold an innate drive to create change in their communities. I found myself transfixed by my colleagues’ creativity and motivation the whole day.

10:20 p.m. Wednesday

Late Night Vinyl

On a bitterly cold night at 10:20 p.m. in Mairs Concert Hall, professor and director of instrumental activities Mark Mandarano sets the mood for tonight’s Late Night Vinyl. He tees up the night’s selection with the soft and mellow rock of Sting’s 1987 album Nothing Like the Sun.

“This is what was on the airwaves and the charts when Public Enemy first emerged,” he explains to an audience of two dozen students sitting in the concert hall. “All the rockers had gone soft.”

Mandarano has hosted these intimate Late Night Vinyl sessions since 2013, inviting the campus community to experience a full album on vinyl, from start to finish, surrounded by the hall’s expansive acoustics. Over the years, he’s played everything from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, to Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. But tonight, it’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back—Public Enemy’s incendiary 1988 classic.

“Admittedly, this isn’t the venue that this album was designed to be listened to in,” Mandarano says of the concert hall. “This was made for the clubs of the Bronx.”

After giving a short introduction to Public Enemy and the album, Mandarano slips the vinyl out of the album cover, gently places it on the turntable, and drops the needle. Soon, all the lights in the hall turn off; only the faint glow of the turntable on the stage remains. The air-raid sirens of “Countdown to Armageddon” fill the hall, an unnerving start to an album that went on to be considered a landmark of hip hop music. It stands in stark contrast to Sting’s “Englishman in New York.”

Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s work was a sonic and ideological bombshell at the time of its release, featuring a blend of abrasive, dense beats, rapid-fire lyrics, and samples that range from James Brown to news clips. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back came out at a time when the federal government, led by President Ronald Reagan, had cut funding for social programs and escalated the war on drugs.

In Mairs Hall, it feels as though every layer and texture of the music is laid bare, the acoustics of the concert hall stretching and illuminating every track in the acoustic mix. The clarity and depth of the production are amplified, revealing nuances in the music that go unnoticed through a pair of earbuds.

The album concludes with a raucous and defiant anthem: “Party For Your Right To Fight,” a track dedicated to the Black Panther Party and a nod to the Beastie Boys song “Fight For Your Right.” When the last of the chanting at the end of the track concludes, Mandarano invites reactions from the audience.

Several students comment on the sonic experience of hearing the album on vinyl in the concert hall. Others note the echoes they hear of Public Enemy in contemporary music.

“These guys were doing something totally different,” Mandarano explains of Public Enemy. “This changed the scene forever.”

After midnight, we head home in different directions, letting the campus rest up for a few short hours.

Catherine Kane ’26 (Falls Church, Va.) is a writer and environmental studies major.