An Overdue Conversation with Tom Mannion, Caltech’s Cornerstone of Student Life

Tom Mannion (left) and the much-beloved Davey (right). (Photo: YouTube)

Senior Director for Campus Activities and Alumni Engagement, Tom Mannion, has been a fixture of Caltech life since 1993. His name is synonymous with many of the Institute’s most cherished traditions: House dinners, Cooking 101, the Olive Harvest, and the vibrancy of student life. To learn more about Tom’s myriad contributions to this campus (and check off a dusty Tech to-do list item), I recently sat down with him for an interview.

Thanks for your time, Tom! How did you end up at Caltech?

In October of 1993, a job search firm found me and asked me to apply. They were recruiting for the Manager (now Director) of Housing. At the time, I had been at George Washington University, where I did undergrad and grad work and served as student body president. We did cool stuff in student government, so the university kept hiring me to do things, and I got really into Residential Life and Housing.

I was really active on the facilities side, and as an area coordinator, and as an assistant general manager, running lots of RAs, and staff, and I advised the residence hall government (which is like the IHC here). Residence Hall government was part of a national organization, and we were selected School of the Year, nationally, and I was Advisor of the Year for the North Atlantic Organization. I sort of got a name in those circles!

I decided to move on to West Virginia for a company that designed, built, and managed private housing and food, an actual for-profit that I don’t even know exists anymore. I then moved to West Virginia to manage private housing and dining in Morgantown. A couple months in, Caltech called. I hadn’t even heard of it, but the interview was almost all undergrads, who asked things like, “What would you do if a couch were thrown out of a window on to the Olive Walk?” I loved the spirited interview..

Pasadena wasn’t what I expected California to be—mountains, East Coast-like architecture. I was flown back to West Virginia, got the offer, and was asked to start in two weeks. Given my personality of being spontaneous, I said yes, packed a suitcase, and they handled the rest—even shipped my trash can, paper towel included.

Caltech was that active in the moving process?

They shipped everything, paid for everything—the shift was totally transparent. I went out here, and all my stuff eventually followed. They even kept my trash can and wrapped the dirty paper towel at the bottom.

And what were those first few months on the job like?

Everybody was fighting witheach other when I arrived, so I had everyone take the Myers-Briggs instrument and used the results to physically shift people around to more comfortable personal space.. Undergrad and grad housing were separate units—I combined them, and we later added faculty housing. Back then, housing reported to business, not student affairs. It was going well, but it was stressful.

My first day, I thought people were burning leaves—it was the massive Altadena fire. Three months later, the Northridge earthquake hit at 4:31 a.m. I threw on a suit and came to work. I’d never experienced an earthquake, but people appreciated how fast I showed up. Between fires, quakes, and mudslides, it was a rocky start. After that, Caltech took me off probation, probably afraid I’d quit.

Then-President Tom Everhart called about fixing childcare, which I didn’t realize had become my job after my bosses left unexpectedly. It was a community forward venter that did not give enough priority to Caltech families. Over a few tense years we were able to turn it into a center for almost exclusively Caltech families. Two of President Everhart’s biggest concerns were childcare and student food—things a president shouldn’t be stuck dealing with with all of the time . Around then, I decided to ditch our dining contractor (which cost hundreds of thousands and made little money) and create Caltech Dining Services.

The Winnett Student Center in the 1960s. Once home to Mannion’s technical bookstore, the building was demolished in 2017 and replaced by the Hameetman Center. (Photo: Caltech Archives)

Around the same time—this all blurs—Student Affairs tried outsourcing the bookstore. Faculty rebelled. Kip Thorne chaired the committee, and we fought to keep it internal. The task given was to create a world class technical bookstore Amazon had just started; they only sold technical books then. I remember Steve Koonin sang the virtues of Amazon , but others really knew nothing about it. We renovated Winnett—which looked like a paddleboat to me—and moved the Red Door café there. We built Caltech Wired, a great computer store.

I also picked up graphic arts/mail services and started renovating JPL dining, where a cbigger contract combined with campus meant less expensive and thus better food. Professor Bellan, leading the Admissions Committee asked to expand dining options for admitted students, and we followed through—kosher kitchen, halal kitchen, the works. This was all motivated by the motto: Nothing that I do or won’t do will be the reason someone doesn’t come to Caltech. That was our mantra.

Good mantra.

I started developing very good relationships around food. David Baltimore and I worked together on a place called the (Frank) Capra Retreat, but development encroached on it, and it wasn’t very usable. Around the same time, the campus was in open revolt over a proposed Richard Serra piece. Baltimore said, “What would it take for that not to happen?” I said (actually kidding) , “A million dollars for a retreat fund.” So now we have a million-dollar retreat fund that pays for students to go on overnight group retreats—the original purpose of the Capra site.

How did life change across different administrations?

I’ve had something like 13 bosses in my first five years here, just bouncing all over the place. Everhart left, Baltimore came in. I’d grown up in Swarthmore, and he’d gone to school there—standard greeting is “Peace,” Quaker-style, so we’d flash the peace sign at each other. At one Caltech event, I handed him a bottle of Francis Ford Coppola wine, and he said, “Francis and I played tuba together in high school.” Turns out they were in the same tuba section in Great Neck, Long Island. Small world.

Avery House was a different kind of project—it wasn’t about beds so much as a new model. We opened a building whose revenue didn’t even cover the debt service. Most of the rest of my housing portfolio—especially grad housing—was already paid off. Avery changed that; suddenly, undergrad housing wasn’t “free” of debt anymore.

The funniest Avery moment: I sat in a construction meeting and saw card readers drawn in everywhere—on doors, in the dining hall, you’d just “swipe” and pay. But our ID cards were just laminated photos. At GW, I’d helped pioneer mag-stripe cards for Domino’s and such, so I said, “What’s the system?” Blank looks. You can’t just bolt readers to the wall—you need programmers, data flowing into POS, security.

We ended up spending several hundred thousand dollars on a proper card office, equipment to make new IDs, readers campus-wide, and POS systems that could actually take the card. It completely transformed how we did business. Before that, everything was honor code, all-you-can-eat lunches and dinners.

It changed the way we feed you guys. Before, you ate cafeteria-style in your House for lunch; students always asked, “Why can’t we eat at Chandler? It’s so much better than House food.” So we brought Chandler-style dishes into dinner, developed vegan, kosher, and halal programs, and eventually got ranked top ten by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. The holdout was lunch—students didn’t want to give up House lunches. The ID card finally let me sell declining balance as part of the board: you could now “spend” your plan at Chandler, Red Door, wherever. That opened the door to everything.

We would have had to do it eventually, but Avery forced us to do it immediately. When Everhart took the first swipe, I proudly showed him the reader…and it didn’t have power. So we had a learning curve.

When Avery opened, it wasn’t an undergrad house; undergrads were the majority, but there were 30-some grad spaces and some faculty spaces. Gary Lorden called it “the Athenaeum for the rest of us,” and the outside courtyard was meant to be like that for people who weren’t Ath members. That’s why the building and that courtyard are gated separately. For lunch, we weren’t allowed to take cash—only cards. We built a tandoori station, a high-end Chinese wok, sandwiches, salads—India and China were a big focus.

Gary’s idea was that nobody could live in Avery for more than a year, and you had to interview to get in. I had to laugh; demand was never that high. Blacker people sort of formed a “Blacker alley” inside Avery, but they were just students living there—Blacker didn’t control it. Grads weren’t crazy about it either because you had to be on board.

Eventually, the faculty voted to make Avery a House. It was conceived as an entrepreneurship model: entrepreneur-in-residence, guest apartments where artists or founders would live and teach for a term. R. Stanton Avery became a good friend. He gave $6 million of the $16 million cost—enough for the naming, He’d call when he came to campus; he could still drive but had trouble walking, so I’d get to sit and hear his stories. The abacus in the Avery museum? He claimed the first “innovation” in thousands of years was using a piece of toothbrush as a decimal point.

Stan was wonderful. His wife, Ernestine D. Richter Onderdonk Avery, was too—she passed unexpectedly. He told me that at Pomona, he once lived in a converted chicken coop. Eventually, he became chair of the Caltech Board.

Didn’t realize he was so powerful.

He confided in me, when starting his business Avery Dennison Corporation, and Denisson had been aggressively trying to put him out of business and he acquired Dennison eventually and the name, Avery Denison, and the Dennison in the name offended him: the one thing to do before he died was to take the Denison off Avery Denison and never got around to that as far as I know.

Under David Baltimore, a report was issued to evaluate student affairs, quality of life report, or some such thing, and recommended we hire a full-time Vice President of Student Affairs. Around that time. I started being given a lot of student life stuff to try to make students happier, we had a horrible problem where students were always discontented, and alumni reports were always bad.

So we created Campus Life as the overriding department: campus, dining, childcare, and student activities. They ended up moving me to 400 S. Hill in a place where I could start a cooking class and become part of the residential living program, which was what they wanted, and was a place where we did our own programming, manners dinners, and cooking classes.

Manners dinners?

The donor, James Crawford, gave money and we worked together to create wine and food pairings, and manners dinners. Master of Student Houses of was a faculty live in position that I partnered very closely with. I ended up absorbing a lot of the programming stuff they did over time, working with some of the MOSHes there. (MOSH was a precursor to Residence Life; they used to be in charge of the RAs, discipline, everything.When Residence Life was created the [position became more of a pure link between academic and House life)

We had over 15,000 visits to that house a year for programming. It could be as much as the entire freshman class for dinner, 500 people for a Meat Club—

Sorry, Meat Club?

An open grill night at Meat Club (left) and the chaos of meal prep for a Sunday open dinner (right). (Photos courtesy of Tom Mannion.)

Meat Club was huge for a while—open grill nights with different charcoals where you cooked your own meat. I also hosted Sunday dinners for 300–400 people—GoT, football, whatever. Folks helped cook and clean. It was cooperative.

That all started under Margo Marshak, our first professional VPSA, who really shaped what I do—along with David Baltimore. Student complaints about the quality of life were constant, but things started to improve. Alumni satisfaction went up.

When Jean-Lou became president—Bob Grubbs told me, “You’ll like this guy”—he immediately connected with students, showed up to my cooking classes, and stayed on campus most of the year. Then Margo was let go—the faculty wanted a faculty VP. Change happens.

Students harvesting olives (left) and reaping the benefits (right) at Caltech’s 2012 Olive Harvest Festival. (Photos: Edible Education)

We launched the Olive Harvest Festival around then, which we had for four years in a row. Some students made homemade olive oil with a window screen and a centrifuge. I got Jean-Lou involved, and that led to a 2,000-person event: from the entire Ath long down through the Olive Walk, RF courtyard, and all the way to Thomas-Gates. It was one big dinner table. The oil was terrible that year—full of bugs—so we got creative with fly control. Blind tastings even had students picking canola oil as their favorite!

Around that time, ASCIT asked for a cooking class. With André Mallié’s help in sourcing great ingredients, it became a huge hit—one year, people overloaded REGIS trying to sign up. Good Morning America and Reuters even covered it. Food is a great bridge to science and community here—students still say it’s their favorite “class” at Caltech. Being able to appreciate the food and science of it at Caltech will make your life here a lot better.

What’s your philosophy of food education?

Food science is still a young field—we don’t even know if a strawberry tastes the same to you as it does to me. There’s so much we don’t understand—like texture or even sound vibrations in the jaw. That’s why cooking together at Caltech is so fun—it’s science you can taste. Bringing Hawking into the class every year also added a lot of credibility.

Tell us about Hawking.

Stephen Hawking with Tom (left) and a Cooking 101 class (right). (Photos courtesy of Tom Mannion.)

Those were great times. We first had Hawking in Avery in 2001 for Indian food—I learned his diet and what he could and couldn’t eat. That’s when I got to know Kip Thorne, too—he’d do anything for undergrads. When gravitational waves were confirmed, everyone wanted Kip, but he flew back just to attend cooking class, then left the next morning. Students still cherish that. He still does it.

Manners dinners, cooking, having faculty attend—I think that’s been huge. Students see professors as people, and even as role models. That’s what it’s all about: showing there are people they want to be like.

I once took 14 students on a two-week East Coast Student Experience Trip—me, a passenger van, dropping them at different dorms, driving across states, feeding them. I was totally frayed by the end of the trip—but it was worth it. We saw Harvard’s faculty-in-residence model, which was fantastic. Swarthmore felt closest to Caltech in student life. We visited Williams, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Harvard—schools we thought were our best mirrors.

Interesting. Caltech’s East Coast mirrors…

It was really valuable! I brought in peer-review people from other colleges, so I looked at dining, housing, stuff like that, and I’ve engaged like that with them at other schools. So sharing experiences and learning from each other is really valuable. I had somewhat of an experience here for changing everything because I was outside of Caltech and trying to do some modernization.

That entire area outside the bookstore and dining, where there are tables and the umbrellas, when I first put stuff there—I can’t tell you how much grief I got. Some people called it “Mannionland,” derogatorily, and thought it was blocking the way to the lab, and it shouldn’t be there. Goes to show you the pains of change! It’s successful now, but it was painful to start.

I think everybody appreciates it now.

It was one of the few fully communal spaces on this campus. I can tell you that I appreciate it immensely.

What was that original Red Door like?

RD had been a student-run business, located in a room in Browne.

I remember they weren’t making money. For instance, I went in and asked, “How much is that cup of juice?” Turns out they weren’t charging enough for the juice to even cover the cup and the juice.

I worked with them a bit—I believe Mark Wise was on the RD committee and was good at that. We had a great manager called Kate Finnegan, who I think still works here and did a super job. Eventually, we moved that into a part of the dining, and the idea was to have grad students still involved. When I got out of that fix, it was the hub of campus.

It is the hub of campus.

Its roots were graduate student-run.

Anyway, Student Life got too big, so we brought in Peter Daily—he’d run food at Santa Anita Racetrack—to take over Dining and later Housing. That freed me up to focus on Student Life. The office moved around a lot—400 S. Hill, then back—hard to keep track.

I bounced between business, finance, and student affairs for a while, but under Provost Koonin, we landed permanently in student affairs. That’s why everything I do now—dining, bookstore, housing—is under that umbrella. Graphic services, mail, and childcare fit better under business, so those shifted out as we reorganized.

What did happen to that bookstore, by the way?

They got rid of it with the innovation. I probably created the finest technical bookstore within any distance, but you can’t make money that way anymore—people simply buy books in college bookstores . It’s just not feasible. The way college stores make money is, unfortunately, through clothing.

People would just sit down on the furniture and read books, but not read them. If they wanted to buy them, it was obvious that Amazon could beat any place we had for volume.

Shame! So, as you were saying—life at 400 S. Hill.

A typical event at 400. (Photo courtesy of Tom Mannion.)

We developed a very robust student activities program that supported students when they were free on nights, holidays, weekends, stuff like that. And that Caltech’s hard, but it’s worth every minute. We got to see a lot more of that in alumni data, satisfaction, and less negativity for a while, anyway.

What do you attribute that to?

Caltech’s really small here. Check-in, half of our students are already here, so that leaves half (a hundred plus) students checking in for the first time. At GW, we had two thousand freshmen. So I went there and was like, “Where is everybody?” And realized I could memorize every undergrad’s name and get to know most of them, at least back then.

So, it’s small numbers: I could easily see a hundred students a day, on here and on campus, and that’s ten percent of the population. To make such a big difference is just exciting, and they know we care. It’s much easier to do that here than at other schools. The downside is that the gossip mill travels really fast. So constant engagement and good communication are the key.

That’s what you can do at Caltech. But I can easily look you in your eye and figure out what kind of day people are having. Just being able to know and have those interactions can make such a difference so much more easily than in other schools because we’re so small, certainly in our undergrad population. It’s a blessing!

Where else can I get to know everybody? And you get to know their needs, what’s hurting them, what they want to do. And open dialogue—that’s the key. Can never guarantee that everybody wants the same thing.

I recall some story about burgers?

Here’s the hamburger story: I would implement hand-packed burgers, where you have a patty out of fresh meat like you find at a restaurant. In a Food Committee meeting the Page House Rep went ballistic! It wasn’t a perfectly flat disk, so the tomato slipped off when you tried to eat it, and all hell broke loose. So we got rid of hand-packed burgers. Had such a rebellion, it just wasn’t worth it.

Ballistic?!

Not an exaggeration. There was rage! Another time we had a rotisserie leg of lamb—most hated meal ever, people just didn’t like lamb enough. Also, probably our most expensive!

This has been quite the far-ranging conversation. You have quite the history!

People mostly know the modern stuff. You know, I come from a background of Eastern European and Soviet studies and quantitative military analysis. Security Policy Analysis, or Studies. A lot of math! My master’s paper was so good that it was classified immediately by my professor, who was on the National Security Council: “This is really good, but nobody else is going to see it.” It was only after I was hired into a Student Affairs position at GW that I started student development and related coursework and training.

Closing comments?

It’s just exciting. All I have to do is look back at the alumni who were part of my program or cooking class and see what they’re doing. I think everybody at Caltech would make a difference, and that’s why we’re all here. Even a dog can make a difference.

Davey very much makes a difference.

Davey, difference-maker, and the author. (Photo: Diego Barcenas)

Caltech’s good at appreciating people for their area of expertise and what they’re good at, too. Also, at many schools, you have to beg the faculty to get involved in the campus, and at GW, the faculty never got involved. It was a pleasure to see the opposite here—a faculty-run school. That’s probably what makes it so special.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.