Temperature in Ohio University’s Ellis Hall hovered around 90 degrees on Tuesday.
Instead of attending her writing and rhetoric class in Ellis Hall on Wednesday, Ohio University student Madison Androw enjoyed free food from the Flavor of the Week event in Baker Center.
Many students like Androw had their Ellis classes before 5 p.m. cancelled Wednesday due to a broken air conditioner in the building.
OU made the decision to cancel class because of an "inability to manage” hot temperatures in the building, according to the alert the university sent out.
“A steam control valve failed on Monday in a way that caused damage to some of the internal coils in the chiller,” OU spokeswoman Bethany Venable said in an email. “Crews from Facilities Management were able to replace the steam control valve with a new one and make repairs to the damaged coils.”
The temperature in Ellis Hall on Tuesday afternoon reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit and a humidity of 50 percent, Venable said. By Wednesday at 1 p.m., the temperature in Ellis registered at about 74 degrees.
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This problem has happened in Ellis Hall before. Venable said in the summer of 2014 the university moved classes in Ellis to different locations after the building's cooling tower failed. The tower was replaced earlier in the winter, Venable said.
Replacing the chiller that malfunctioned this week costs under $500,000 and OU plans to replace this chiller during the upcoming winter months, Venable said.
Some students were not in favor of the university’s decision to cancel classes Wednesday.
“I think it’s kinda dumb," Androw, a junior studying biological sciences, said. "I think everyone here pays a lot of money to go to this university and they can’t renovate the building so we can’t even go to the classes that we pay for."
Danielle Valaitis, a junior studying international communications, doesn’t have any classes in Ellis, but said she was also upset with OU’s move to cancel classes.
“The few times that I’ve gone into the building, I think that it’s not exactly as well-renovated as some of the other ones,” Valaitis said. “I think it’s dumb that they have to close down an entire building, but the rest of the campus still has to go to class.”
Some students think classes in Ellis should have been moved elsewhere, instead of being cancelled.
“I’m sure there are some empty classrooms in Gordy (Hall) or somewhere close,” Leah Yodzis, a junior studying health services administration, said.
Other students like Emma McCallister, a junior studying journalism and English who has two classes in Ellis, were happy with the decision.
"I'm glad," McCallister said. “On (Tuesday), we actually still had to go and my professor’s like ‘dress nice and airy.’ … It was like stifling hot."
Even professors who teach in Ellis were pleased that classes were cancelled because of the heat.
Matthew Rosen, a visiting assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology, has class in Ellis on Tuesday and Wednesday. He said his class on Tuesday was supposed to last 80 minutes.
“It was too hot,” Rosen said. “When I walked in there my initial reaction was this is not gonna work. … I could tell that everybody was really struggling."
Rosen said he kept the class for an hour before letting them go. He said he was happy that class was cancelled on Wednesday, but the unexpected cancellation caused him to change his syllabus.
“It’s not good in a sense that it kinda throws a wrench in the course outline for the semester, but I’m glad that they did that because if they didn’t get it fixed it was really too hot to have class,” Rosen said.
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