College within a college
By Hannah Benoit
After three years of living in Beard Hall, John Partridge can recall being roused from a dead sleep only once. It happened on a Sunday night in October 2004, when the Red Sox' Dave Roberts stole second base in a do-or-die championship game against the New York Yankees. With the Sox trailing 4-3 and facing elimination, Partridge had earlier given up and gone to bed. But the students of Beard Hall hadn't, and the triumphant roar from the television lounge was more than enough to wake the 35-year-old philosophy professor.
"I didn't miss an inning after that," he says, referring to the Sox' subsequent drive to a World Series championship.
Living among students in a college dormitory might strike dread in the hearts of many adults, but John Partridge and his wife, Nicole, happily took up residence in Beard with their baby daughter, Hannah, in January 2002. Partridge had accepted the post of faculty in residence at Wheaton's newest residence hall, becoming the college's first live-in professor in three decades and helping to launch its first "living and learning" house.
The family wasn't inhabiting a triple, as one student originally thought, but a light-filled (and nearly soundproof) two-bedroom apartment on the first floor.
Beard's faculty in residence (FIR) program grew out of the college's desire to enrich students' intellectual and social lives outside of classroom hours, and deepen their sense of community. With a faculty member living in the hall and participating in student life, the arrangement is similar to the residential-college model developed centuries ago at the British universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
"The point is not to absent ourselves from students' lives after four-thirty," says Dean of Students Sue A. Alexander, who served on the Founders Group, a campus committee that planned the pilot program in 2001. The construction of a new dorm, named in honor of trustee Anson Beard, Jr., opened up an ideal venue for the program.
Today, an increasing number of colleges and universities here and abroad are turning to the collegiate or "house" system. The movement is small but growing, according to Robert O'Hara, a Middlebury College visiting professor of biology and a proponent of the collegiate system. "Up through the 1950s, the only U.S. institutions that had residential colleges were Harvard, Yale, and Rice," he says. "In just the last ten years or so, places as diverse as Truman State in Missouri, Murray State in Kentucky, Princeton in New Jersey, Vanderbilt in Tennessee, the University of Central Arkansas, and Middlebury in Vermont have adopted the collegiate model."
After three years of operation, the 100-bed Beard Hall is like a college within a college. Its residents--sophomores, juniors and seniors--must apply to live there in "learning clusters" organized around self-chosen themes as diverse as Chinese culture, women's health, constructing guitars, angiogenesis and political participation, to name just a few. Throughout the year, the clusters develop theme-based programs, most of which are open to the campus community. The resident faculty member often joins in, and also develops programs of his own.
John Partridge created a popular faculty speaker series, inviting his colleagues in to speak informally on a topic of their choice.
The series was the brainchild of Jonah Cool '04, who told Partridge: "I want to know what faculty are really thinking, not just what they're saying in the classroom." Topics have thus veered from the ordinary while still drawing on the professor's field of interest: Students have heard Evie Lane (art history) speak on Rembrandt as the "Hitchcock" of the seventeenth century; her colleague Tripp Evans on the plans to rebuild Lower Manhattan after 9/11; and Geoff Collins (physics) on the intriguing topic, "Before Galileo Plunges to a Fiery Death: The Excellent Adventure of a $1.5 Billion Spacecraft."
And that's just the beginning. In any given semester, the roster of events at Beard is a fascinating olio of the scholarly, the practical and the downright fluffy. The two spacious lounges, one with an adjoining kitchen and both furnished with stuffed chairs and sofas, have seen everything from an annual ice cream social to film screenings; from a panel discussion on women of color to a "Gandhi Day" dinner, sponsored by Donna Kerner and her anthropology students in the "Feast or Famine" course. A popular wine-tasting event for students over 21 led to a follow-up tasting staged by Betsey Dyer's seminar, "Microbiology and Chemistry of Wine," as their final project.
Though students now vie for the chance to live in Beard, some were leery at first of having a faculty member in the building.
"Initially, students were not excited about the idea," says Dean Alexander. "They thought of the person as a glorified hall staff member with faculty status.... They didn't understand that there was a tradition at Wheaton of faculty living in the residence halls."
As recently as the early 1940s, in fact, the college required unmarried female faculty members to live in the dormitories, and college historian Paul Helmreich remembers women professors doing so well into the 1960s. The "House Fellows" program was phased out in that decade as college enrollment grew and changing cultural mores led to more relaxed dorm rules.
Wheaton's arrangement was not exactly in the classical mode employed at Harvard and Yale, "but nevertheless, there was an educational component as well as a custodial one," says Alexander.
The Founder's Group painted only a broad-brush picture of what a learning community at Wheaton might look like. "Their idea was that Beard was to be a self-governed, student-driven and faculty-overseen thing," Partridge says. Eager to help shape the new venture, he did some research of his own, and soon discovered the collegiate model. "It became clear that that's where the possibilities lay."
Over time, each of Beard's three floors began to develop its own identity, which led to friendly "inter-floor" competition and furthered a sense of community, Partridge says.
Ask today's students about their Beard experience, and terms like "family," "home-like" and "real world" crop up.
"It was so refreshing to have a real family and children living in the dorm with us," Student Mentor Zoe Hack '05 says of the Partridges, whose second child, James, was born while they were living in Beard. "This was especially nice for college students, who tend to get isolated from other age groups."
John Partridge agrees. "Our kids were mobile study breaks....Having kids made me more approachable."
Some of the most successful community-building events at Beard have been relaxing activities that offer a time-out from the rigors of college life. Nicole Partridge developed a series of leisure activities, including a gourmet chocolate tasting, a Halloween study break with pumpkin decorating, and a soap-making workshop. In the process, she was able to forge strong ties with the students.
"I think the biggest surprise was the closeness of some of the relationships I formed," she says. "And in several cases, I was not only forming relationships with students, but also their parents. One student from the Class of '04 is Greek, and her mother used to bake us cookies every Easter and Christmas! ... I remember one mother saying to me, 'We're so thankful to have you in Beard with our child.' What I didn't say, but should have, was how much their children helped me get through the difficult first years of motherhood! The students of Beard provided me balance."
Every Sunday evening, students gather in the lounge with the resident faculty member for "Beard Time," an informal get-together with food, conversation and sometimes an organized activity. Partridge says some of the best programming ideas have bubbled up from these evenings, and Jared Duval '05 notes: "It was an opportunity to have discussions outside of class with a professor, almost as a peer."
Students stress that Beard is successful largely because it is a community of choice that tends to attract responsible and committed students. Beyond that, there is no Beard "type." AJ Vasiliou '05, a student mentor at Beard this year, mentions members of the Trybe dance troupe living on one end of her hall and members of the College Conservatives on the other. "There's a lot of diversity between people on my floor," she says. "The only similarity is, they're all different.... Because Beard is almost a utopia, it teaches individuality within a community."
This kind of diversity is at the heart of the residential college concept, says Robert O'Hara. Just as "a liberal education ought to bring students into meaningful contact with the full range of human activity and inquiry, from the sciences to the arts to economics and athletics," a residence hall like Beard exposes them to "the full range of interests, talents and experiences represented by their fellow students. It's vital that the science student come to know the poetry student, and the poetry student the history student, and the history student the economics student."
Beard Hall's contemporary design features clapboard siding, tall windows and angled hallways. Because it is so clean and new, its residents want to keep it that way, students say. "I never saw a single act of vandalism when I was living there," says Duval, Beard's head resident during 2003-04. Dean Alexander agrees: "When you have a real sense of community and students feel it's theirs, vandalism drops off the repertoire."
Studio art major Heather Lawless '05 so trusted her fellow residents that she mounted two exhibitions of her work in Beard's public spaces, including a show in the lounge titled "Intimate Interiors." "I tried to create a gallery atmosphere," she says, "by titling the show, labeling each individual work, working with available lighting, and removing distracting elements from the room, like flyers on the walls. We teamed up with the annual Beard ice cream social to have an opening reception for this show, open to the entire campus and visiting family and friends."
January 2005 marked a new era as the growing Partridge family moved out of Beard and Assistant Professor of Theatre Stephanie Burlington '97 moved in. Burlington was one of the first faculty members to bring programming to the dorm three years ago, when her students in the first-year seminar "Theatre and Social Change" did a staged reading of The Laramie Project. As the new faculty member in residence, she plans to continue to use theater as a medium for bringing people together outside of class. She also hopes to establish a monthly opportunity for campus artists of every stripe to share their work publicly.
"I feel honored to work with such a great team already in place," she says, referring to the student hall staff as well as Area Coordinator Doreen Long of Student Life and housekeepers Mary Lou and Claire Fillion, whom students consider extended family.
With the success of Beard, will Wheaton extend the FIR program to other residence halls? Challenged by a shortage of student housing, the college is not likely to retrofit older dorms to accommodate faculty housing and common space. The model might not appeal to many professors or to all students, and many people on campus see the current variety of options--including wellness, single-sex and theme houses--as a strength.
Still, Dean Alexander dreams of trying variations on the learning community model--perhaps by placing a faculty member in a house near Lower Campus, home to many underclass students: "If we could create a 'house' identity for first- and second-year students in which faculty members play a role, that would significantly enhance the learning experience in the first two years."
