Our Mission
To create a collegial faculty/student-driven learning and living community that supports a student’s personal, academic, and social success by creating a culture that fosters a strong sense of belonging, intellectual growth, life-long learning, an appreciation for diversity, and civil leadership.
Our Philosophy
Faculty
The essential conviction of the residential college is that for a university to have a transformative effect on the lives of young students, faculty must become the principal influences on students. The residential college will put faculty leadership at the heart of the freshman experience and through that develop a stable, challenging, and diverse social and intellectual environment.
Diversity
The residential college within WVU will be a cross section of the institution as a whole, and will contain the old, the young, the teacher, the student, the poetic, the prosaic, the bold, the shy, the clever, the plodding, the careless, the careful, the wealthy, the poor, the compassionate, the cold, the industrious, the lazy, the neurotic, the peaceful, the refined, the vulgar, the emotional, the analytical, the earnest, the satirical- and bring them all together in a small, stable, academically rich and vibrant social community.
Know each student
“Every good University should know its students.” Students will be known as individuals by their interests, their quirks, their talents, their fears, their families, their hopes, their ambitions, their successes, and their failures.
Nurture intellectual curiosity
This is the vision- At the dark of the moon a physics student will take out the small college telescope and will show an accounting student the rings of Saturn. A philosopher that night will come to understand why the starry vault above was one of the only two things that filled Immanuel Kant with awe, and a novelist watching the moons of Jupiter will see how Galileo shattered the crystal spheres. And perhaps in the college garden that night a troupe of theater students will give an impromptu reading from Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.
In order to accomplish our goals, three cornerstone programs, a faculty fellow freshman seminar series, two associate member seminars series, and a special interest group program linked to a mentoring program will be fully integrated into the student-driven community. Students will have to participate in these programs as part of the expectations of living in the community in addition to adhering to the residential college code of honor.