Libraries are places meant for silence, places meant for peace, places where one goes to study and learn. Libraries are not places meant for social gatherings or where friends can gather to chatter loudly, laugh even louder, and snack. Ask any Claremont college student and they will agree. They will also probably mention the hordes of high school students that always seem present in the Honnold Mudd Library. While Honnold is certainly an excellent resource for CHS students, many students have begun to see it as more of a hang out spot than what it actually is.
Honnold is a library that is not only open to all of the students that attend the Claremont Colleges, but for Claremont residents and CHS students as well, a rare yet generous gesture that not many colleges extend towards their surrounding communities. As such, it is a privilege to use its facilities and resources, a privilege that more and more students seem to be taking advantage of. Bringing in a ruckus with them, many CHS students that visit Honnold seem to be less focused on their study material and more on chatting with their friends.
The argument that there are students that respectfully make use of Honnold’s resources, like many students within the IB program, is a valid one, but it does not account for the growing population of those who do not. It does not account for the growing number of students that use Honnold’s basement for idle conversation and gather in its cafe to snack and gossip. Honnold offers a number of study areas to accommodate many different study needs, with floors that require absolute silence to floors that are much more suited for study groups. And despite this variety it appears that CHS students are still quite a bit of a nuisance. There may be areas that are more suited for groups, but this does not mean that students may be as loud as they please.
The issue is not with the fact that many CHS students visit Honnold, but that a growing number of students visiting Honnold, with the intention of studying, end up spending most of their time goofing off. It is when students do this that they become a disturbance to not only their school peers who also visit Honnold to study, but also the college students and professors who use Honnold to work. The truth is that Honnold is not a CHS facility, nor a place where CHS students can come and go as they please. If CHS students do not buckle down and get more serious and respectful about visiting Honnold, it may be a possibility that they will lose that powerful resource altogether.