ERIC ED566720: Housing Honors. National Collegiate Honors Council Monograph Series

2015·27.6 MB·English

by  ERIC

housing honors

housing honors
Linda Frost, Lisa W. Kay,
Edited by
Rachael Poe
and
Series Editor | Jeffrey A. Portnoy
Georgia Perimeter College
National Collegiate Honors Council
Monograph Series
Copyright © 2015 by National Collegiate Honors Council.
Manufactured in the United States
National Collegiate Honors Council
1100 Neihardt Residence Center
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www.ncnchonors.org
Production Editors | Cliff Jefferson and Mitch Pruitt
Wake Up Graphics LLC
Cover and Text Design | 47 Journals LLC
Cover photo of the Guerry Center Reading Room of the
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Honors College
courtesy of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
International Standard Book Number
978-0-9825207-4-1
table of contents
Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk About
Housing Honors ...............................................ix
Linda Frost
Part I: Housing Honors Today
CHAPTER 1: Where Honors Lives: Results from a Survey of the
Structures and Spaces of U.S. Honors Programs and Colleges ........ 3
Linda Frost and Lisa W. Kay
Part II: Profiles of Spaces and Places in Honors
CHAPTER 2: The Commonwealth Honors College Residential
Community at the University of Massachusetts Amherst ........... 47
Melissa Woglom and Meredith Lind
CHAPTER 3: Do Your Homework First, and Then Go Play! ........ 57
Larry Andrews
CHAPTER 4: The Genesis of Barrett, the Honors College at
Arizona State University ....................................... 83
Mark Jacobs
CHAPTER 5: Building Community in Árbol de la Vida ............ 93
Patricia MacCorquodale
CHAPTER 6: Living to Learn, Learning for Life: Housing Honors
Classrooms and Offices in an Honors Residence Hall ............. 105
Karen Lyons
CHAPTER 7: Where Honors Lives: Old Central at Oklahoma
State University .............................................. 115
Robert Spurrier and Jessica Roark
v
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 8: Life of the Mind/Life of the House:
“This Place Matters” .......................................... 125
Vicki Ohl
CHAPTER 9: “In an old nave’s grime”: The Spencer
Honors House ............................................... 141
Rusty Rushton
CHAPTER 10: Pick Your Battles: It Is Possible to Have Belonging
without a Space to Belong To .................................. 147
Mariah Birgen
CHAPTER 11: Honors Space: What to Do When There Isn’t Any ... 153
Joy Ochs
Part III: A Forum on Honors Housing
CHAPTER 12: Honors Students’ Perceptions of the Value and
Importance of Honors Housing ................................ 163
Angela D. Mead, Samantha Rieger, and Leslie Sargent Jones
CHAPTER 13: Honors Housing: Castle or Prison? ................ 183
Richard Badenhausen
CHAPTER 14: Building Honors Community through
Honors Housing ............................................. 193
Barry Falk
CHAPTER 15: Lessons Learned from Nevada’s Honors
Residential Scholars Community ............................... 201
Tamara Valentine
CHAPTER 16: It’s All in the Family: The (Honors) Ties that
Bind Us .................................................... 215
Jamaica Afiya Pouncy
CHAPTER 17: Winging It: Why Offering Honors Wings Works
at Oral Roberts University .................................... 219
Ashley Sweeney, Hannah Covington, and John Korstad
vi
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 18: One Size Does Not Fit All: When Honors Housing
May Not Work .............................................. 227
Laura Feitzinger Brown
CHAPTER 19: Living-Learning Communities: As Natural as Cats
and Dogs Living Together ..................................... 233
John R. Purdie II
CHAPTER 20: The Colliding Cultures of Honors and Housing ..... 241
Melissa L. Johnson, Elizabeth McNeill, Cory Lee, and Kathy Keeter
CHAPTER 21: It Came with Everything: A Baby Grand Piano,
Hardwood Floors, Regular Flooding, 200 Honors Students, and a
Live-In Scholar .............................................. 247
Gloria Cox
CHAPTER 22: Living in Hogwarts: The Experience of a
Dean of Honors and His Wife While Living in an Honors
Residence Hall .............................................. 257
Keith Garbutt and Christine Garbutt
CHAPTER 23: Anomalies and Ambiguities of a
Faculty-in-Residence ......................................... 275
Paul Strom
Part IV: The Future of Housing Honors
CHAPTER 24: The Place to Be: Designing a City-Connected
Honors Residence in Rotterdam ............................... 283
Remko Remijnse
CHAPTER 25: We the Students: Surveying Spaces and
Envisioning the Future ....................................... 301
Tatiana Cody and Rachael Poe
About the Authors ........................................... 307
About the NCHC Monograph Series ........................... 314
vii

introduction
What We Talk About When
We Talk About Housing Honors
Linda Frost
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Facilities can aspire to certain qualities as an expression of
a civilization. Some of these qualities are readily apparent.
Some are not.
—Max DePree
When I went to college in the early 1980s at Bowling Green
State University in Ohio, I entered as a freshman in the honors pro-
gram. I have very specific memories of those first classes I took as
an honors student—a section of honors sociology in which I wrote
a case study of my German immigrant grandfather; an honors sem-
inar in 1930s avant garde theatre in which the students wrote and
performed plays based on the dreams they recorded nightly in their
dream journals; an honors marine biology lab that ended at the
professor’s house with a dinner where the group sampled the sea
life the class had been studying; a section of honors composition
taught by the legendary “Dr. Bob” Bashore, a former director of that
program and the man most responsible for my eventual choice of
nineteenth-century American literature as my academic specialty.
Many of these classes took place in an open lounge area in the base-
ment of some otherwise nondescript building, the name of which
I can no longer recall. What I do remember is how different that
setting was from the traditional layout of my other classes. Rather
than occupying the rows of metal-footed tablet desks that popu-
lated my other university classrooms, the honors students usually
sat on crescent-shaped couches or other furniture reminiscent of a
1970s-era church youth-group room.
ix
Introduction
I have specific memories of the people I met through honors—
Joelle and Dave and Brett and Cindy—many of whom were in classes
with me but all of whom, more importantly, lived in the same “study
dorm” I did. While not strictly an honors residence, Prout Hall was
indeed reserved for a particular population of the campus, one
that required some kind of academic pedigree or membership in
an academically enhancing program for entrance. All the National
Student Exchange Students, for instance, lived in Prout Hall,
including a gang from Maine who fascinated us with their taste in
sweaters and constant use of the word “wicked.” When I looked up
Prout Hall on the BGSU website, I found out that I was actually part
of the first living-learning community established on that campus
in 1981. (Sadly for alumna me, the building was demolished two
decades later to make room for a new student center.) Located in
the very center of campus, Prout boasted what was reputably then
the best cafeteria on campus, as well as the first co-ed residential
facility. The main lobby proudly displayed an outdated and much-
abused portrait of Alice Prout herself, a BGSU First Lady from days
of yore. When the residents threw Love Boat and Halloween parties
in Prout, they always dressed Alice in construction paper costumes
scandalously scotch-taped to her oil portrait.
In my memory, then, honors is something that has always been
clearly housed. Whether it was in that strange, very un-classroom-
like classroom where students sat on pillows on the floor and talked
about the politics of immigration, or in the fireplace room and
hallways of Prout where my friends and I talked about poetry and
whether or not we should register for the draft, honors for me has
always lived decidedly somewhere.
But what that “somewhere” means is a harder question to answer.
It quickly emerged as a key question for me when I departed the
University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to become an honors
director myself in 2008 at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU). I left
behind a tiny but sweet office in a renovated and historically sig-
nificant church where I co-taught interdisciplinary courses about
time and space in what had once been the sanctuary (see Rush-
ton, p. 141). My office at EKU, though, was in the bottom corner
x