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Mariella Santiago

Model trains at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Model Railroad Club, on Nov. 12, 2025, in Henrietta, N.Y.

On Oct. 18, Garett Lester — coordinator for RIT Model Railroad Club — posted a petition on PawPrints titled “Save The RIT Model Railroad!” It stated, “After almost 30 years in the SAU, the RIT Model Railroad Club is faced with destruction. The Center for Campus Life has notified us that we are being forced out of our room, and that we have less than 60 days to dispose of 50% of our club’s materials.” Exactly a week later, on Oct. 25, the RIT Anime Club and Tora-Con made a similar PawPrint. Their petition stated that they would also be forced to get rid of 50 percent of their materials and required to move out of their room altogether by March 6. 

The problem of club spaces has been an ongoing issue this last month, with four different clubs directly affected by Campus Life’s policy crackdowns: Model Railroad Club, Anime Club, Amateur Radio Club and the Rochester Wargamer Association and Guild.

Sara Bayerl, the Senior Associate Director for Engagement in Campus Life, explained that the changes were a result of their attempts to ensure that all clubs were getting equal access to resources. “What we’re working to do is align all of our policies and make sure… there’s no one club that has a space where other clubs don’t have the opportunity to.”

Bayerl elaborated that Campus Life usually only allocates campus space to “major club organizations,” for example, the College Activities Board or WITR radio. However, they do not feel they have the space in the Campus Center to allocate enough space for other Campus Life-recognized clubs. In the past couple of years, Campus Life has been consolidating spaces from “outliers” who had previously been given more than other clubs. In the process, they are attempting to organize their storage spaces, as well as “to streamline a process of shared storage for our clubs.”

Bayerl also emphasized that Campus Life is responsible for supporting 287 different clubs.

“We are supporting every single one of their events,” she said. “We’ve had probably our highest semester ever of student organization events that we’ve been able to help support and approve.”

Campus Life’s decision will make operations especially difficult for at least two of the clubs currently being affected by these changes: Anime Club and Model Railroad Club. It will likely irrevocably change their inner workings, and it may erase at least one of them from existence entirely.
James Wilkinson, a second year Mechanical Engineering student who’s been in the Model Railroad Club for both years, expressed concern for the status of club meetings if their space is downsized. “If we move to a space half the size, we’d have to tell half our club members to meet outside.”

Additionally, getting rid of 50 percent of their club materials would mean getting rid of the very things their club was created to preserve. The club is financially independent and funds itself through donations and its annual Tiger Tracks Train show. This show is the second-largest student-run event on campus, with over 2,000 yearly attendees. However, without the room and the train layout within it, the show may come to an end.

The Model Railroad Club PawPrint states, “Our request to the administration is simple. We have no need of funding, resources, or equipment. We simply request that they allow us to continue to operate in the room we have occupied since 1997.”

Though the Anime Club’s situation is different from the Model Railroad Club, given that they don’t have an entire model railroad to keep running, they will still face similar struggles without a location to keep their materials.

“They kind of sprung [these changes] on us,” said Destinye Yamada, the president of Anime Club. “They asked what things were used and not used, because they were going to have everyone move out of their rooms.”

For her and the club, the issue is determining how to downsize when the majority of their items are frequently in use. The club stores items that are often used in Tora-Con, the annual anime convention they run. This two-day event is the largest anime-culture convention in upstate New York. They also store out-of-print magazines, DVDs, books, VHS tapes, awards and various other historical items (although in the past few years, they were told they could no longer keep these in the storage room due to safety concerns). They loan out many of these items to the student population during their weekly Monday library hours.

They additionally meet on Tuesdays for a casual hangout called Maker’s Meetup, on Thursdays for main events and on Fridays for planning, with the occasional official event scheduled afterwards. The club sometimes meets on the weekends for special events like model kit jamborees, games, karaoke, barbecues, movies and other activities. Some club members come to all of these meetings every week, while others have more specific preferences.

Yamada stated, “A lot of us don’t have much trust in Campus Life. A lot of times we do stuff on our own, and then they come in and give us new rules with things to work around.”

Similar to the Model Railroad Club, the Anime Club is fully financially independent. They also generally profit from Tora-Con, and after reinvesting the necessary amount into preparations for the next year’s event, they invest the rest of their earnings into the Rochester community. According to the posted Pawprint, “Last year, over half of the $9,000 donated to GRASP (Greece Residents Assisting Stray Pets) during our Winter Charity Auction came from Tora-Con proceeds. Hundreds have also been donated to RIT departments and organizations for their own events.”

With these new changes, however, Tora-Con may be in danger. Anime Club needs its storage space to hold vital materials that make the event possible, and Yamada said the removal of 50 percent of their items could result in Tora-Con ending for good.

“We’d really like to keep running things the way they’re run,” stated Yamada. “All the things we have are important to us.”

Whether Campus Life can accommodate these requests for continued storage space is also an issue. It’s possible that the problem is not simply a decrease in the flexibility of Campus Life rules, but the lack of increase in on-campus space allotted to student organizations as the RIT student population continues to grow.

“We actually only recognize clubs [if] we can meet their needs now,” Bayerl explained. “We want to make sure that we’re not setting clubs up for failure… and sometimes we have to work through change management.”