Chabot College Library and Learning Center held a ceremonial opening last week, but students have already gone so often that it’s quickly become a campus cornerstone.
More than 35,000 Chabot College students have visited the new library and learning center– the tallest building on campus—this semester, already surpassing last year’s total. College administrators are calling it an educational “renaissance” after years of distance learning since the pandemic.
“It’s really important to have that visible centerpiece of the campus, which this building has been since day one,”said Paul Pinza, the Chabot College dean of liberal arts. “It’s such a modern and contemporary building, and we really designed it with a lot of student feedback in mind.”
Constructed through part of $950 million in Measure A funding passed in 2016 by the Chabot-Las Positas Community College District, the Library and Learning Center encompasses 63,000 square feet for multicultural clubs, study rooms, and guest presentations – there’s even a prayer and meditation room. Each floor is designed to be progressively quieter, from common spaces on the bottom floor to deep-focus rooms on the top floor.
Chabot College student David Sanchez Delgado said he’s used the library and learning center nearly every weekday this semester. As a computer science major, he said the designated quiet places have helped him achieve the focus needs when writing code.
“I like the design, it’s pretty modern. I still kind of miss the old place,” Sanchez Delgado said, “But this one is much more of an improvement over how it was.”
The Library and Learning Center is a departure from the mid-century stone masonry architecture common throughout the rest of the campus. Yet the new building’s geometric clean lines and splashes of orange — the school’s color — over a chrome exterior is attracting students in a way that Chabot College hasn’t experienced since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I almost want to use the word ‘renaissance,’ because it has that type of feel to it,” Pinza said. “The timing is quite remarkable in the sense that since last year, students have had an appetite to be back on campus and learn face-to-face.”
Those spaces have been important for multicultural organizations to provide “culturally responsive resources” to the diverse student population at Chabot College, said public relations and marketing director Dionicia Ramos Ledesma.
The second floor contains spaces for ethnic clubs like the Latino academic support program Puente and the African American higher-education organization Umoja. Ledesma also spotlighted the RISE program, which focused on students who have been impacted by incarceration. Together with more than 90 study room reservations and 10 tutoring sessions per day, Chabot College administrators like Pinza believe a library is something to make noise about.
“We’re pretty unique among the California Community Colleges. Not all of them are seeing enrollment increases like we are,” Pinza said. “But we are seeing that kind of critical mass of students starting to come back on campus and now they have an academic support center.”