Lowrey House is closed, why and what happens next?

This semester the men of Lowrey were relocated, and the resident counselor of Lowrey was let go.

Principia College President Dr. Daniel Norton announced in a May Watercooler titled, “Lowrey House Update” that the house would close because “[The dorm occupants had] been unable to meet the expectations of behavior and character that are foundational to the College.”

Norton said that the house has a history of alcohol-related incidents, and has been on probation since Spring 2024 for violations stemming from that academic year. He also noted that once an investigation ensued, “there were seven or eight hours of hearings,” that covered recent events in Lowrey. After these hearings, Norton said he learned the violations were so serious and so detrimental to the Principia community that he felt he “had no other choice but to close Lowrey.”

Ultimately, the decision to close Lowrey rested with Norton. However, other departments were involved. “I certainly discussed this with the dean of students, the Chief Executive for The Principia, and with The Board [of Trustees],” Norton said who “were very supportive of this decision.”

Norton said the support from Principia alumni has been overwhelmingly positive in regard to Lowrey closing. “We wondered if there would be some concern from alums and there really [haven’t] been any raised,” he said in the Watercooler announcement. “I feel like the language ‘initiation activities with underage students’ is clear and that can’t be tolerated at any college.”

A student’s perspective

Not all Lowrey residents were pleased with the decision, especially since not all of the residents were involved in the violations.

“We had an initiation that involved some students that didn’t go to the school and some students from other houses,” said Principia College senior and former Lowrey social head Riley Speidel. He said he did not notice that people were drinking at the initation, adding that during initiation there were other students who were “throwing up in Lowrey who weren’t in Lowrey or involved in initiation, it just happened to be really bad timing.”

Speidel said he disagreed with how the watercooler described the culture of the house. “The whole culture of silence and dishonesty and alcohol- centered initiation, is just insane ….. it is just so not true at all.”

Speidel said he was upset about how the events played out. “The part that frustrates me the most,” Spiedel said, “is that after everything came out, they punished the house by taking away freshman and new students to the house, we lost our spring house event, they declared that they were going to do weekly or bi-weekly room searches,” he said. “This was all before they did their, I would say, standard post-incident walk through trying to find out who was involved.”

Speidel said Student Life staff and Security dug through the trash bins behind Lowrey to find ways to tie alcohol purchases to Lowrey residents. “It’s maybe normal for student life to go through a dumpster of a house after an incident, so when people think something is going on in the house people would take all the cans that they collected throughout the entire semester and throw them away,” he said. “They were looking through the trash to find evidence of alcohol, they were looking through very specific bags trying to find anything that would could led them back to people.”

Speidel also said that “there was someone who had a prescription drug from a pharmacy that had his name labeled on it in the same bag as alcohol cans, so he got in trouble for that.”

‘There’s a lot to uncover’

Former resident counselor of Lowrey, Paul Needham said it’s a complicated subject. “It lands in that gray area too, where it’s like, this is not a simple situation, but then there’s a lot to it, there’s a lot to uncover,” he said.

Needham was careful to speak positively about the college and the community. “I do care about Principia a great deal. I think it’s a wonderful place to, you know, to be educated and to kind of like think through the issues of the day, and I think it’s a great institution even though they laid me off.”

Still, Needham said, “some big things really need to be changed [at Principia] but that’s probably true in every organization.”

Violations

Following the closure of Lowrey, the administration altered a section of the terms of the student code of conduct regarding substance use. “I feel like the level-1 violation didn’t have enough consequence,” said Norton. However, he said that change was not related to Lowrey and he was unaware that there was any correlation to those changes and the events in the house.

Last fall, the administration was looking to close one of the houses. Norton said that was not a factor in closing Lowrey, especially because it was a men’s dorm. “It was not strategic to close a men’s house,” he said. “We are tight on male beds with 60% of our students being male.”

Norton said he hopes that the community understands that Principia is “a dry campus, and we are doing our best to promote and protect a safe learning environment for our students, and I hope that message has been heard, that we are doing everything we can to protect that kind of dry campus environment.”

[Editor’s note: The online version of this article has been updated to clarify when probation and violations for the house began.]