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Earlham’s eighth on-campus residence facility for students, East
Hall is the College’s first based on the suite system popular
today with students at many of the nation’s other colleges and
universities. Offering open suites of two to four sleeping
rooms each, the design of East Hall will provide more private spaces
for small
groups of students, said Dean of Student Development Deborah
McNish, who called the dorm “an important new option” for
Earlham undergraduates residing on campus.
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Artist's Rendering of East Hall
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East Hall’s architectural plan also calls for
it to connect with the existing Warren and Wilson residence
halls immediately to the northwest and southwest, respectively.
The result will be a
new residential quadrangle — replete with attractive new courtyard
and terrace — that when fully occupied will house nearly 20 percent
of Earlham’s rapidly expanding student body (another robust first-year
class is expected to arrive on campus in August). East
Hall itself is expected to become home to 132 EC students.
Beyond its suite-based interior arrangements, the new
residence hall will provide on each of its three floors
not only a great room for casual use by students, but also a lounge
for more organized yet
still informal interactions with faculty and campus visitors.
Each level of the building will include, as well, spacious
kitchen and dining
areas and separate study spaces.
The ground floor of East Hall, meanwhile, will give
the entire Earlham community an exciting new place to gather
and “engage
with the world” in its cyber café, where coffee, snacks
and sweets will be available, along with numerous computer
terminals providing access to the Internet.
The new building also will serve the College’s
academic mission directly through its inclusion of a classroom, where
courses that blend
formal and experiential instruction or that are most appropriate
to a residential setting may be taught. Several music practice spaces,
too, are included in the hall’s plans.
According to Jim McKey, Earlham’s vice president
for institutional advancement, the construction of East
Hall addresses immediately one
of the most important initiatives of the College’s comprehensive
strategic plan — as set out in “The Earlham Imperative,” published
last year — which is “the continuous improvement of facilities.”
Not only does the building promise to be an attractive,
modern enhancement of the campus’s physical plant, said McKey,
but its additional spaces will give the College more freedom
in making housing assignments, thus permitting over time the phased
renovation
of some existing residences. Ultimately, McKey said, that
work will greatly improve Earlham’s position relative to some
of its peer institutions in the area of student housing.
“This building recognizes clearly,” said
McKey, “that the
expectations of prospective students, and current students,
too, are high, and that the college must undertake such projects in
order to
remain competitive.”
Old Observatory
Built just as the Civil War was beginning in 1861,
Earlham’s original celestial
observatory near the northeast corner of Carpenter Hall is the oldest building
on campus and the only one remaining from the 19th century. Although fallen into
disuse long before the 2002 installation of a new observatory on back campus,
the tidy brick building’s historical legacy as the first college observatory
in Indiana — and its subsequent listing on the National Register of Historic
Places — has assured its continuing presence as a part of Earlham’s
topography.
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Deloris Mabins-Adenekan, Earlham's director of annual
giving and alumni relations, prepares to clean
a work table and bench removed from
inside the old observatory. Mabins-Adenekan says
the goal of the clean-up project is to reopen the
historic building by fall for visits by area school
children.
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Still, for many years College administrators puzzled
over what to make of the green-domed building besides a curiosity, conversation starter and/or handy reference point
on maps of the campus. With work begun earlier this summer by a group of Earlham alumni and Richmond community
volunteers to clean out and revitalize the old observatory, it appears an answer finally is at hand.
“What we want to do is make it, if not a visitors’ center, then a
sort of starting point for people who do come to visit campus, particularly school
children” said Deloris Mabins-Adenekan, Earlham’s director of annual
giving and alumni relations and a facilitator at last February’s Institute
for Creative Leadership sponsored by Main Street Richmond-Wayne County, the Urban
Enterprise Association and Wayne County Vision Office. In a series of workshops,
participants in the leadership program learned skills and concepts designed to
enable them to understand what makes an effective community, how to contribute
their own unique talents to a given enterprise and how to work in teams to transform
challenges into possibilities.
“The observatory clean-up project is an end
result of those workshops,” Mabins-Adenekan
said. “We hope to have it ready for visits by local school children and,
possibly, other area civic groups this fall.”
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Richmond community members Alison Clark and Jay Smith
work to
clear the inside of the old observatory of cobwebs,
dust and dirt. Clark,
daughter of College Provost Len Clark, and Smith,
husband of Earlham
graphic designer Julia Jensen, volunteered for
the clean up project as a
way to put into action the lessons about teamwork
they learned as
participants in last spring's Institute for Creative
Leadership, sponsored
by several local civic groups.
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Still housing the large achromatic (refracting
light without spectral color separation) telescope purchased
for the College in 1856 for the then-immense sum of $630 — the
observatory itself cost only $400 to build five years later — as
well as a fine transit instrument acquired shortly thereafter
from the U.S. government, the old observatory in the future may
be outfitted, Mabins-Adenekan said, with other exhibits describing
Earlham’s growth and involvement in the community since
the founding of the original Friends Boarding School in 1847.
“A lot of that is still being discussed,” said Mabins-Adenekan. “One
thing we have to keep in mind is that the building is not heated or air conditioned,
which would definitely have an impact on what can and can’t be put inside.”
Even so, Mabins-Adenekan believes the old observatory
itself provides a great opportunity for local teachers
to enhance with a “hands on” experience
lessons about Richmond and Wayne County history. (And even, perhaps, about
religious tolerance and academic freedom in the early days of
the republic; in the mid-19th
century, after all, the kind of scientific inquiry represented by the observatory — especially
at a religious institution like Earlham — was much at odds with the views
of many of the nation’s religious leaders.)
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“Like the Gaar House, Starr Historic District
or (Wayne County) Historical Museum,” Mabins-Adenekan said, “we
want to have the old observatory available as another example
of the historical importance of Earlham and the Richmond
area.”
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Contact:
Kevin Burke,
director of media relations
765/983-1323
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