Best All-College Supper EVER!

On Friday, we hosted the All-College Supper in the new Common Room and backyard of 35 Park Place. First I have to say how wonderful it is to have the new common room for these kinds of events! Second, it was the best All-College Supper ever! We had at least 160 people, including 140 students, the HTC staff, and several Directors of Studies.

The theme was “Let the Games Begin!” and did they ever! We had board games, Wii, cornholing, Non-Beer Pong, and card games — the only thing we forgot was duck-duck-goose! In keeping with the theme, everyone was asked to dress as their favorite game-related character or item. The HTC staff came dressed as the characters from Clue:

Kathy as Mrs. White, Cary as Mr. Green, Jan as Mrs. Peacock, Me as Prof. Plum, Beth as Miss Scarlet, and Margie as Col. Mustard

Jan and I learned how to play the two most quintessential OHIO college games: cornholing and beer pong (without the beer, of course)! The only down side was not quite having enough food for this big of a turn out. Next year, we’ll have to order chicken, pizza, and something else to go along with all of the side dishes and desserts the students bring.

It was a great kick-off to the school year!

35 Park Place: A Home for Honors Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, I wrote about the remodeling of our building, 35 Park Place. In Part 2, I want to answer the question, where has this remodeling gotten us?

Throughout the construction, my common refrain was that the new space was going to transform how we exist in our building. After occupying the remodeled space for about a month now, I’m delighted to report that it has indeed transformed HTC in several important ways.

First, one of the changes I made to the plans I inherited was to make what was originally conceived as just the new common room into a multipurpose room. Initially, the room was to be divided into two areas, a sitting area and a dining area. These spaces were to have demarcated by a design in the carpet (became too expensive to do), raised ceilings (which we kept), and some columns (I nixed them). Instead, we have one large space.

Most of the time the new space will serve as an area for our students to study, relax, talk with one another, and just generally hang out. Dean Fidler first created a common room in order to build a greater sense of community among HTC students. The new common room is the next step in expanding her vision for that community:

We furnished the room largely using surplus furniture, which meant that we spent less than $500 to outfit the entire room. (Blinds have also been installed since this picture was taken.) Our students now have more room than ever to hang out in the building.

35 Park Place: A Home for Honors Part 1

Ohio University’s Honors Tutorial College is housed at 35 Park Place, a converted two-story home that sits next to the president’s house. It’s a homey, comfortable place to work. We like to think of it as a ‘home for honors.’ In this blog post, I want to write about this building and about how it’s changed in the past year.

Built in the early 1900′s, 35 Park Place was once the home of Dean Irma Voigt before Ohio University acquired it. It served as the offices of the College of Arts & Sciences before housing HTC. The university architect’s office was also once in the building’s basement, which is difficult to imagine once you’ve seen the basement!

Since becoming the home of HTC, the building has provided office space for the dean, the assistant dean, and our staff. We also have a conference room. Under previous deans, the building has housed the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards (ONCA), which helps students from across the university apply for national scholarships, as well as office space for faculty fellows. My predecessor, Dean Fidler, had also taken one of the front rooms and made it a common room for students to use as they saw fit.

Soon after I became dean in July 2009, the physical space of 35 Park Place began to change. The first step in this process was decided before I arrived: the provost’s office wanted to provide more prominence to ONCA, and so that office was moved to the Faculty Commons in Alden Library. (Simultaneously, the Office of U.S. Fulbright Programs was moved into HTC and that office was also moved to the library.) This move freed up three offices on the second floor of 35 Park Place. I quickly decided to make one of these offices a study room for our students. The other two became space for our “HTC Media Machine” and storage space.

The second step in this transformation began when I was presented with the plans to add onto the back of our building. Dean Fidler had begun a project that would have resulted in a two-story addition that would have provided additional office space upstairs and a new, much larger common room downstairs. She had saved money, solicited donations from alumni, and hired the architect to draw up plans.