ACADEMIC AND CAMPUS LIFE SERVICES
The provost and dean of the faculty is the chief academic officer of the university. Among the responsibilities of the provost are the oversight of all academic programs; the hiring and evaluation of faculty; and the disbursement of funds for travel, research, and curricular development.
The dean of student academic services oversees and assists the academic progress of Lawrence students. The dean assigns and supports faculty advisors, especially as questions arise concerning variations from traditional courses of study, academic progress, and withdrawal from the college or conservatory. The dean of student academic services serves as advisor to the Honor Council.
The student academic services office also supervises academic support services, including the Center for Teaching and Learning, which provides help with writing, speaking, quantitative, and study skills, as well as content tutoring in most courses offered by the university.
The dean of students supervises extra-curricular, residential, career, international student, multicultural, health, counseling, and volunteer services. In addition, the dean advises the Judicial Board and effects liaison with local authorities.
The campus activities staff advises students about campus organizations and co-curricular activities; helps students identify campus and community resources to support their interests; assists student organizations with leadership/membership development and program planning; manages Memorial Union; and advises fraternities and sororities.
The Office of Multicultural Affairs promotes dialogue, understanding, and respect among the many cultural and identity populations represented within the Lawrence community. The office supports a range of programs designed to develop and sustain cooperation and collaboration among students, faculty, and staff. The assistant dean of students for multicultural affairs serves as a resource and advocate for students from groups traditionally under-represented at Lawrence.
The Office of International Student Services supports the international student population through immigration-regulation advising and procedural assistance; cultural, financial, and academic issues advising; and administration of university compliance with the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). The coordinator of international student services is an advocate for Lawrence’s diverse international population and offers appropriate resources and services to meet student needs.
The Office of the Dean of Students initiates programs to enhance campus life. The housing and residence life department includes the residence hall directors, residence life advisors, and residence life managers, who coordinate activities, oversee the general operation of the halls, serve as community leaders, and help maintain a safe and comfortable living environment. The housing coordinator is responsible for the management of the housing-selection process for returning students, as well as the matching of new Lawrentians with roommates and placing them in room assignments.
The Career Center provides individual career counseling to students and alumni, assists students with choosing a major and developing an internship, and offers guidance with the application process for graduate and pre-professional programs. The Career Center maintains a library of print and online information on careers and graduate schools, hosts employers wishing to conduct on-campus interviews, collects and publicizes full-time and part-time employment opportunities and internships, and assists students with career decision making and job-search activities. The Career Center also offers self-assessment testing to assist students with career decisions.
Confidential health and counseling services are available to all students. Health Services is staffed by a registered nurse and physicans who can aid students with health concerns. Counseling Service staff members offer individual appointments, as well as outreach programs to support the psychological well-being of students and allow them to achieve their academic and personal goals. Drug and alcohol education and wellness programming are integral parts of this outreach.
Main Hall
Main Hall, the building at the heart
of the campus, is perhaps the most visible symbol of the Lawrence tradition.
Constructed in 1853, it originally housed
all of the college — classrooms, the laboratory, the library, administrative
and faculty offices, a dining room, a chapel, and even living quarters.
During the Civil War, Main Hall was rumored to have been a station on the Underground Railroad to Canada; in 1974, it was entered in the National Register of Historic Places of the U.S. Park Service.
It now houses classrooms and faculty offices for the humanities, along with the John G. Strange Student Commons, an advanced Humanities Computing Laboratory, and the Hiram A. Jones Latin Library.
Youngchild Hall and Science Hall
Stretching out south of Main Hall are other major classroom buildings,
including Youngchild Hall of Science and Science Hall.
Youngchild Hall, built in 1964 and fully renovated in 2000-01, houses the physics department, the geology department, and part of the biology department.
Connected to Youngchild by a glass-enclosed atrium, Science Hall, dedicated in October 2000, provides space for the molecular sciences. The building has state-of-the-art research and teaching laboratories, a number of which are shared spaces used by several of the sciences. The chemistry department occupies the first and second floors of the building, and offices and classrooms for biology are found on the top floor. A third-floor bridge within the atrium allows close contact between the biology laboratories and offices in Science Hall and those in Youngchild Hall.
Lucia R. Briggs Hall
Briggs Hall, opened in 1997, houses
the anthropology, economics, education, government, mathematics, and psychology
departments,
with laboratories
for developmental psychology, clinical psychology, social psychology,
sound and
language psychology, ethnography, and archaeology/paleoanthropology.
Other facilities include computer classrooms for mathematics and
computer science
and a statistics laboratory, along with other classrooms, seminar
rooms, and meeting rooms for departmental student organizations,
the Office
of Student Academic Services, and the Center
for Teaching and Learning.
Wriston Art Center
The Wriston Art Center features three
spacious galleries; studios for painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking,
ceramics, computer-assisted
art, photography,
and art metal; a visual-resources library; a print study room;
a seminar
room; a 150-seat auditorium; and an outdoor amphitheatre.
Music-Drama
Center, Ruth Harwood Shattuck Hall of Music
The Music-Drama Center houses teaching
facilities for the Conservatory of Music and the theatre arts department
and is the site of concerts,
recitals, dramatic
productions, films, and lectures. It contains studios, numerous
practice rooms, classrooms, and three performance spaces: the 250-seat
William
E. Harper Hall;
the 500-seat Stansbury Theatre; and a smaller experimental theatre,
the F.
Theodore Cloak Theatre. The webcast studios of student-run WLFM
are also located in the Music-Drama Center.
The Ruth Harwood Shattuck Hall of Music, opened in September 1991, connects the Music-Drama Center with the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. It provides additional classroom space, two large rehearsal rooms, including Elizabeth Miller Hall, jazz and percussion studios, faculty studios, practice rooms, student study areas, the Carl J. Waterman Ensemble Music Library, instrument storage, and a recording studio.
Seeley G. Mudd Library
The library’s primary purpose
is to support the liberal arts curriculum of the university. To this end,
the library staff builds and organizes the library's collection and provides
the best possible service to faculty and students as they engage in the teaching/learning
process.
The library collection consists of over 390,000 books and periodicals; 340,000 government documents; 1,750 current periodical subscriptions; 15,650 music scores; and 124,000 videotapes, recordings, and microform items. The Milwaukee-Downer Room houses a rare book collection of over 3,400 items dating to the 16th century, while the Lincoln Reading Room contains published materials about the life of Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Civil War. The Archives contain historical documents and artifacts of Lawrence University and Milwaukee-Downer College, and the Visual Resources Library in the Wriston Art Center provides access to a wide variety of photographic and digital images.
To teach students how to identify, retrieve, and evaluate appropriate materials, librarians work with classes as assignments are made and provide individual instruction at the reference desk. The library is open 110 hours per week, with extended hours during exams.
The library’s computer system offers a gateway to the Lawrence collection, as well as to other library catalogs, full-text online resources, and the World Wide Web.
Mudd Library provides well-designed group study rooms, individual carrels, lounge seating, and offices for students to use in research projects. There also are media-viewing and music-listening facilities. Students may connect to the campus network at various locations in the building, using their own laptop computers, and there is a wireless network available throughout the library.
Information Technology Services
Information Technology Services staff
members have offices in the library, where the Information
Technology Center provides
the setting
for non-credit
technology
training
for all members of the Lawrence community. Computer facilities
for use by faculty,
staff, and students are widely distributed throughout the
campus. The university provides central computing servers accessible
from all parts
of campus
over a high-speed connection and offers world-wide communication
via the Internet. Data connections are available
from student rooms in residence halls and small houses. In
addition, wireless
network access is available in the library, Science Hall,
Memorial Union, and Shattuck Hall (new locations are added
each year), and many other campus locations provide ports
for
wired connections
to the
campus network.
The large residence halls contain computing labs with laser printers. Principal academic buildings contain additional public labs as well as interdepartmental facilities tied more closely to aspects of the curriculum, such as foreign languages, studio art, applied statistics, music, and the social sciences. While applications of computing are thus found throughout the Lawrence curriculum, powerful high-resolution graphics workstations are located in laboratories for computer science and physics; several other science departments use computing equipment extensively in their course offerings.
Lawrence
Memorial Chapel
Built in 1918 and renovated for the second time in 1993,
the 1,200-seat Lawrence
Memorial Chapel is used for public
events
such as the
Lawrence
Artist and Jazz Series, ensemble concerts, public meetings,
and the
university convocation series. In
recent years, the chapel has been host
to such performing
artists as Emmanuel Ax, the King's Singers, Joshua Bell,
Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazx Orchestra,
Bobby McFerrin, the Academy of Ancient Music, the Mingus
Big Band, and
Dianne Reeves.
Residence Halls and Dining Services
Lawrence is a residential college, and more than 95 percent
of all students live on campus in one of the residence
halls or
small houses.
Residence
life is designed to promote the educational and social
development of students. Residence halls are supervised
by professional
residence hall
directors,
college graduates trained specifically to deal with residential
living. Each
residence
hall director supervises a team of student residence
life advisors (RLAs) whose main function is to help students
acclimate to
campus and residential
living.
Each hall is small (no more than 185 students), and community-building
is the prime objective.
Each hall is unique and displays that distinctiveness in many ways. The oldest is Ormsby Hall (1889) and the newest is Hiett Hall (2003), located on the hillside behind Ormsby, overlooking the Fox River. The 79,500-square-foot building houses 183 students in suite-style accommodations.
Kohler Hall is Lawrence’s substance-free residence, and all campus residences are smoke-free. Representative hall governments establish living rules, which supplement university regulations. Each residence building on campus quickly becomes “home” to the residents, and students are encouraged to respect it and use it as such. Residential living at Lawrence is an integral part of a student’s total education, and the members of the professional and student staff make it their goal to make living on campus an enriching experience.
Students living on campus eat in either of two university dining areas — one on each end of the campus. Jason Downer Commons, on the east, has a central serving area and several dining rooms. Rooms also are available at Downer for small group meetings. Across campus, Colman Hall houses the Lucinda Darling Colman Room (Lucinda’s). Featuring slightly different fare in a homier atmosphere, Lucinda’s serves breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday and dinner Monday through Thursday. Several meal plans are available.
Memorial
Union
Situated atop a bluff overlooking the Fox River, the
Memorial Union is
the center of campus co-curricular activities.
Campus organizations
frequently
use Riverview Lounge for their meetings and social
gatherings. The Viking
Room provides alcoholic and
non-alcoholic
beverages, snacks,
and good
company each
evening, and the Underground
Coffeehouse — which
offers a selection of specialty coffees, teas, baked
goods, and other treats — often
features live entertainment. The game room has pool
tables, board
games, a large-screen TV, and video games. Appetizing
fare also is available at the Union
Grill, where the
menu ranges from hamburgers
and ice cream to
salads and vegetarian entrees..
Union Station, the campus store, has gifts, supplies, and Lawrence paraphernalia for sale. The campus Information Desk provides check cashing, a fax machine, information and referral services, photocopying, equipment rental, and on-campus mailboxes for campus organizations and off-campus students. An Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) is available in the union. The campus activities office is also located in the union, and its staff works closely with the Lawrence University Community Council (LUCC) and student publications that share space in Mursell House.
Diversity Center
The Diversity Center is a gathering place for students who wish to explore
their cultural heritage and identity. The center features a comfortable lounge,
seminar rooms, and meeting rooms for campus organizations dedicated to increasing
awareness of diversity-related issues. In addition to facility resources,
the Office of Multicultural Affairs supports programs and annual student-focused
events that promote the understanding and celebration of diversity.
International
House
International
House is Lawrence’s center for international
education and is devoted to cross-cultural experiences
and understanding. The first
floor provides gathering places for international students,
language tutoring, organizational meetings, receptions, and meals of all
kinds. The second floor houses the off-campus programs
advisor, the Office
of International Student Services,
the TSA program
for visiting Japanese students, and the ArtsBridge
America office.
Alexander
Gymnasium and Athletic Fields
Alexander
Gymnasium, completely renovated in 1986,
is the center for 19 of Lawrence’s 23 varsity
sports. Facilities at the gymnasium include two
regulation gym floors, three regulation racquetball/handball
courts, a wrestling room, a weight room, and three
batting cages.
Six tennis courts are on the campus close to three of the residence halls. Near the gymnasium are the Banta Bowl, a 5,255-seat football stadium and lighted field built into a natural ravine; Whiting Field, which has an eight-lane all-weather track; and playing fields for baseball. softball, and soccer.
Buchanan Kiewit Center
Dedicated almost exclusively to health and recreation,
the Buchanan
Kiewit Center contains an eight-lane
swimming pool
and diving
well; a gymnasium
equipped for basketball, volleyball, tennis,
and badminton; a four-lane running track;
a weight and exercise room; a dance studio; racquetball
courts; and saunas. It also is home to men’s
and women’s varsity swimming and diving
and men’s and women’s varsity fencing.
Athletics
and Recreation
Athletics at
Lawrence are seen as part of a student’s
total education. Through intercollegiate sports,
club sports, and
a broad intramural and recreation program, the university offers opportunities
to compete or
just have fun for
both men and women.
The varsity athletic teams are members of the Midwest Conference (MWC) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Division III (NCAA III). Hockey is in the Midwest Collegiate Hockey Association, and wrestling is in the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Lawrence offers 13 varsity sports for men, ten for women, and numerous club sports, intramural sports, and activities for both.
Many students participate in intramural and recreation programs. These activities provide physical fitness and the joy of competition without the time commitment and discipline required at the varsity level.
Student
publications
Students have full control and responsibility
for the weekly campus newspaper, The
Lawrentian, for
Ariel, a largely
pictorial yearbook;
for Tropos, a
magazine of original poetry, fiction, and visual
art; and for One Minute Left, a newspaper
that provides a liberal perspective. All student
publications share production and meeting space
in Mursell
House.
Music
Music pervades life at Lawrence for both the
casual listener and the ardent performer. There
are weekly
student and
faculty recitals
and
frequent concerts
by Lawrence ensembles, including the Jazz Ensemble,
the Symphony Orchestra, the Concert Choir, and
the Wind Ensemble,
which
are free and open to
the public.
According to their interests and abilities, students have a chance to sing opera, play in a concert band, or perform their own jazz compositions. Lawrence ensembles come under the auspices of the Conservatory of Music, but membership is open to all students by audition, and nearly all musical groups include members from the college.
Theatre
Every year, numerous dramatic and musical productions enable
interested students to try their hand at
acting, set designing,
or even playwriting.
Three major
plays
are performed annually. The selection has
ranged from Greek classics to contemporary experimental
plays,
from Shakespeare
to the Theatre
of the
Absurd. In recent
years, productions have included Molière’s The
Learned Ladies, Leo Tolstoy's Anna
Karenina, Little Eva Takes a Trip by
Rebecca Gilman, and Brian Friel's Translations.
Popular musical offerings have
included Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate,
Little Shop of Horrors, and Sweeney
Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by
Stephen Sondheim. The Conservatory Opera
has recently performed Hansel and Gretel by
Englebert Humperdinck, Francis Poulenc's
Les Mamelles de Tirésias, The
Consul by
Giancarlo Menotti, and Gilbert and Sullivan's
Mikado. Major productions are
supplemented by numerous student-directed
one-act plays and special projects.
Film
The Classic Film Club offers classic
American and international films. Additional
film series are sponsored by academic departments, the campus activities
office,
or as part of special
programs.
Lectures
See Speakers and Other Campus Visitors.
Lawrence University Community Council
The Lawrence University Community Council (LUCC)
governs most non-academic matters. Since
1968, students and
faculty have
successfully worked
together on social and other noncurricular
issues. The council’s
structure reflects the community. It
has a student president and vice president,
14
student representatives, and four faculty
representatives. LUCC offices are located
in Mursell
House.
The LUCC concept of government demands more than the usual amount of cooperation, interest, and involvement by students and faculty. The council constantly reviews its legislation in an attempt to keep policies up-to-date, and it strives to meet the challenges of new community issues as they arise.
Volunteer and community
service
Volunteer opportunities play an important
role in educating students for
lives of service
and community
responsibility.
The Volunteer
and Community
Service
Center, located in Raymond
House, is committed to helping
Lawrentians identify,
participate
in, and reflect
upon service
opportunities.
Staffed primarily by students,
the office maintains resource files and
a volunteer
database,
sponsors both one-time and long-term
volunteer experiences, and facilitates
the activities
of student organizations
dedicated to service. The
Volunteer and Community Service
Center values
the holistic development
of volunteers,
supporting students in their service
endeavors from preparation to evaluation.
Service projects and volunteer placements address at-risk youth, seniors, environmental issues, social justice, education, literacy, the arts, and a variety of other populations and topics.
Campus
organizations
Students participate in more
than 100 organizations, including
various
governance
committees,
athletic and recreational
clubs, academic
societies, fraternities
and sororities, and religious
organizations. More information
about campus organizations
can be obtained
from the
Campus Activities Office.
Students form organizations around interests ranging from hobbies and avocational activities to social issues and cultural awareness. A number of academic departments sponsor clubs. Each group plans programs that can be shared with the larger campus community. Meetings are open to the entire student body.
About 20 percent of the student body participates in a fraternity or sorority. Lawrence is host to three sorority and five fraternity chapters, each representing a national or international organization. Sororities include Delta Gamma, Kappa Alpha Theta, and Kappa Kappa Gamma. Fraternities include Beta Theta Pi, Delta Tau Delta, Phi Delta Theta, Phi Kappa Tau, and Sigma Phi Epsilon.