“The opportunity to share a meal, participate in a stimulating discussion in the house professor’s apartment or join them kayaking creates opportunities for informal mentoring, unique learning opportunities and building confidence,” says Ethan Stephenson, director of faculty living-learning programs in the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, which oversees all resident faculty.
“And faculty who serve as house professor-deans get to see the student experience outside of the formal learning spaces,” he says, “which gives them important insights that often inform their teaching and advising.”
Feeling the semester’s rhythms
Jackson says his understanding and appreciation of the undergraduate experience grew “immeasurably” during his residency.
“You really get to see and feel the rhythms of the semester,” says Jackson, who has lived with his family – partner Kary, teenaged children Oliver and Lucia, dogs Cash, Charlie and Francis, and cat, Pi – at Keeton since July 2015. “You can almost feel when prelim season starts, or when there’s some big assignment or problem due in one of the big undergraduate courses. You feel the excitement of the launch of the fall semester, and the release as people come up on the end of the spring semester.
“I feel like I have a fundamentally different sense of the place,” he says, “from what I had before in my regular faculty role.”
The West Campus system opened in 2004 with Alice Cook House; over the next five years, it expanded to include five houses with more than 1,500 students. The leadership of each house and the shared leadership of the house system resides in five residential HPDs, who are tenured Cornell faculty.
In addition to Jackson, current house professor-deans are:
- Hans Bethe House: Andrew Hicks, associate professor of music in the College of Arts and Sciences;
- Flora Rose House: Rosemary Avery, professor of policy analysis and management in the College of Human Ecology;
- Carl Becker House: Neema Kudva, associate professor in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning and associate dean of the faculty; and
- Alice Cook House: Shorna Allred, associate professor of natural resources and the environment in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Each HPD runs their house in collaboration with the house assistant dean, a student affairs professional who oversees day-to-day operations. Undergraduate and graduate staff live on the student floors; each house has a dining room and a house office.
A total of 30 faculty, staff and community members are appointed by the HPD as house fellows, who participate in events, meals and informal mentoring of residents.
Inspiring, humbling
Jackson says a healthy curiosity about his surroundings served him well as a professor-dean living alongside 300 undergraduates.
“There’s the interdisciplinary curiosity across areas of work, which you get from interactions with students and house fellows,” he says. “Then there’s the range of experiences involved – the [students’] different backgrounds, and different ways of interpreting and reacting to events in the world. These include the hard ones, which we’ve had a few of these past few years.
“It’s been inspiring and somewhat humbling to watch the students navigate these, both individually and collectively,” he says.
Jackson tried to help students find a balance between their studies and everything else that makes college life memorable.
“These six years have made me appreciate how hard our students work – and how much better it might be if we could all help them to work slightly less hard from time to time, and to take a break,” he says. “There’s so much to experience at the university beyond the books. The world will still be waiting when they come back.”