The story of Watauga College’s move from storied East Hall to the newest, nicest residence hall at Appalachian State is an important one because woven into it is so much of the culture of Watauga College and its complicated relationship with ASU.
The story begins with a vice chancellor for student affairs, Dr. Greg Blimling. He was in his 10th year in this role, and was a restless, creative empire builder (which I say with the greatest of affection). The Division of Student Affairs he had built was full of experienced and capable professionals, and was known as an excellent place for student affairs professionals to work. I was fortunate enough to land at ASU in 1997, more specifically in the Center for Student Involvement and Leadership (CSIL). Dr. Blimling and I shared a love of higher education history and an interest in bridging the consistent gap between student affairs and academics. One way I tried to build that bridge was to teach a class, Women and Leadership, in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS).
IDS was, at the time, the home of Watauga College. Both were housed in East Hall, which is where I taught my class. While my class was open to all students, I did end up with a fair number of Wataugans in the class (who often took IDS classes), and because of the location of the classroom (in East’s basement), I interacted with, and got to know, several Watauga faculty, Associate Director David Huntley, then-director Cynthia Wood and IDS chair Richard Carp.
Dr. Blimling and I often talked about Watauga, its history at Appalachian, the idea of the “residential college” that began with Alexander Meiklejohn in the 1920s at the University of Wisconsin, and the ways that a true residential college was something of a lost art. Watauga, though--Watauga College was still there, over 25 years old, enrolling a class each year to be taught by some of the same faculty who had launched it in 1972.
In 2001, Cynthia Wood stepped down as director and I was hired into the role, a rare non-faculty member assuming a key leadership opportunity. I think what tipped the scale for the skeptical hiring committee was that my dissertation had been on counterculture students, so it was clear I had a soft spot in my heart for Watauga-like students predating my time at ASU. I also presented an interesting opportunity that Richard Carp saw and wanted to exploit: I was closely tied to Greg Blimling and the Division of Student Affairs which included Housing and Residence Life, and the relationship between Watauga and that department was fraught, to say the least. East Hall was shared by Wataugans and non-Wataugans, and Residence Life rode herd on the anti-authority Wataugans in a way that made it difficult to fully, positively, exploit the idea of a “residential college.” RAs, for example, were hired by Residence Life and were never recruited from the ranks of Wataugans (nor would Wataugans be likely to consider such a role).
A side story: I approached Rick Geis, then the Director of Residence Life, about hiring a Wataugan to be an RA in East Hall. “If I can recruit someone, and that person can get through your selection process, would you consider it?” Rick agreed. I did indeed recruit someone (can’t remember his name), one of the less “edgy” Wataugans but still someone who had credibility with his classmates. He agreed, mostly because the job offered a free room and a stipend, and he had significant financial need. He did make it through the process, not surprisingly. Residence Life, however, placed him in another hall, not East. The student came to me, quite upset that he had been misled. I went to Rick, who said “We will do what’s best for the department, and he would be a better fit in Cone Hall.” The student was in a bind because he had happily told his parents this job would significantly reduce the cost of staying at Appalachian. He couldn’t just back out of the opportunity. It also cost me some significant capital with the student and his friends who felt I had conned him into this opportunity without being fully transparent. But I was as surprised and disappointed as he was.
That story is fairly emblematic of the way that Residence Life treated Wataugans. I write this with some reluctance, as those staff members were my colleagues and friends. But the rift between a highly structured, rigid, behavior-focused department and the free-wheeling, risk-taking Wataugans was profound.
So it was quite a surprise when Dr. Blimling invited me to meet with him and told me that he was planning to offer a brand new residence hall to Watauga College. Dr. Blimling liked Watauga, and my appointment as its director had given him some new insights into its value as a true residential/academic entity. We had numerous conversations about its history, its iconoclastic faculty, its often-misbehaving students. Unlike many of his directors, who preferred more conventional students, Dr. Blimling was amused and sometimes impressed by the Wataugans he got to know. He recognized that they were among the smartest students on campus, and he was someone who valued intelligence over most other traits. He was a graduate of Indiana University and been impressed by the Collins Living-Learning Center, a residential program on the Bloomington campus founded, like Watauga, in 1972. He also spoke admiringly of the University of Michigan’s living/learning programs, and felt like ASU needed its own--one with a dedicated space to call home.
The new residence hall wasn’t built--it wasn’t even designed. But Dr. Blimling’s plan was to build a true residential college with classrooms in the residence hall, faculty offices nearby, a faculty-in-residence apartment and a true academic focus within the community. He thought Watauga, despite the fact that it was quite different from the rest of ASU, would be a good fit.
I wasn’t privy to the negotiations between Richard Carp and Greg Blimling that ultimately resulted in an agreement to move Watauga College and IDS (and its other programs--Women’s Studies and Sustainable Development) to what became known as the Living Learning Center, the LLC. I was downstream of what I’m sure were heated negotiations in various offices. Building a new residence hall was a big deal, and its occupancy plans a source of great interest among many on campus. The idea that a plum piece of real estate might be handed over to the scruffy, iconoclastic faculty and students of Watauga College was not popular with everyone on campus. But Greg Blimling was the one who made the final call, and that call was to move Watauga out of East and up the hill.
Planning and discussion began in earnest. I was often shown blueprints as the design emerged. Certain features, like the campanile (the tower), were Dr. Blimling’s effort to reflect some of the architectural features of Oxbridge residential colleges. A “great hall” was critical, as was a plan to have in-house dining to accommodate residents. At every turn, these discussions turned contentious. Appalachian’s Dining Services had no interest in opening a new facility serving just 300 students--it was cost- and staff-prohibitive. A “great hall” to be used only by LLC residents and faculty was too exclusive on a campus where space was limited. A faculty-in-residence apartment was also seen as a waste of vital room (and income-producing) space.
One interesting moment for me came when I was poring over blueprints for the Great Hall (which was necessary if Watauga was to continue its tradition of Chautauqua--and the faculty would have rioted if that wasn’t the case--because trekking down to Legends, the campus nightclub, was unfeasible). We had told the architects that the Great Hall had to seat 200 students. There would be, on average, 120 first-year students and about ten faculty in attendance each week, and occasionally second-year Wataugans would be invited to join Chautauqua or another of the community events envisioned. The blueprints I was staring at did indeed show almost 200 seats. And then I noticed the scale information on the blueprint’s border. The seats in the diagram were 10”x10”. The only way to fit this many people in the Great Hall was to put them on seats about the size of a piece of paper, shoulder-to-shoulder. I asked the architects if I was reading this correctly. Yes, they admitted. If a normal seat size was used, the number of seats would be about 90. The Great Hall, it turned out, wasn’t so great. They had shrunk its size to accommodate the site and the budget, but kept the same number of seats.
There were a lot of construction issues like this that arose during the design and building of the LLC. Then-Plemmons Student Union Director Dave Robertson, who had had a lot of campus construction experience himself, once told me that he visited worksites every single day during construction because it was common for impactful decisions to be made on the fly without any consultation with end users. I got myself a hardhat and started visiting the site as often as I could.
One of the most complicated issues for the new LLC was the question of who. Who would live there? Just Wataugans? There weren’t enough Wataugans to fill all 310 beds. We had increased the size of the first-year class through pretty intensive recruiting and were hoping we would have 150 incoming students. We surveyed current first-year students to see how many might be interested in moving to the LLC, and thought we’d get about 50. That left 110 beds to fill. The Housing Office, and Residential Life, were excited at the prospect of adding 110 beds to the general housing stock, but the Watauga faculty were rightfully concerned that diluting the residents with non-Wataugans would undermine the whole experiment. It would re-create all of the problems East Hall had presented. I was dispatched by the faculty to find us some already-established groups that would be a good fit with Watauga.
My partner in this effort was Joni Petschauer (incidentally a Watauga College alum) who oversaw the learning communities effort on the academic side of ASU. We didn’t have residential learning communities at that time, but were trying to establish those as part of an overall vision to improve ASU’s academic experience. Joni and I brainstormed and created a list of possible partners.
My first stop? The Honors Program. I met with then-director Conrad “Ozzie” Ostwalt to discuss the possibility of Honors moving from its current home (Coffey Hall) to the LLC. We had a lengthy discussion about logistics, something we had done before to try and answer the question, “Can a student be in both the Honors Program and Watauga?”, a topic for another day (the answer at the time was “sort of”). Shortly after we met, Ozzie got back to me. Thanks, but no thanks. A survey of his students indicated a strong preference to stay in the center of campus.
Joni and I worked down the list: international students. Teaching Fellows. ROTC. Athletes. Some of the newly-forming learning communities like Forensic Science. I made the rounds, shopping the opportunity for these program’s students to move to the premier residence hall on campus.
We were successful recruiting international students thanks to Bob White and Nancy Wells, but that wasn’t a sure number--maybe 15 or 20. Several other options fell through. The Teaching Fellows and ROTC were dicey. Culturally, these groups were about as opposite from Watauga College as any on campus. But we were running out of options, and if we didn’t present a plan to Housing for occupancy, the beds would be released to the general student population.
Joe Murphy was the director of the Teaching Fellows program, and we had some honest conversations about how this might work. In the end, we agreed that the mix of students would be beneficial to all involved, even if it was going to present some challenges. The Watauga faculty were skeptical, but in the end saw the potential and much preferred the 40 Teaching Fellows to the same number of random students who would have no investment in this great experiment. Teaching Fellows were good students, fairly well-behaved, and compliant with instructions. What could go wrong? ROTC students--that was a similar story, if a bit more extreme.
We still didn’t have enough students, but we were out of potential groups. While the LLC was going to be the nicest residence hall on campus, it felt too far from the main campus for most students, so potential groups and their leaders could not be convinced to join us up the hill. With time running out, our numbers stood at around 275 (150 new Wataugans, 50 returning Wataugans, 40 Teaching Fellows, 20 international students and a handful of ROTC members). That was when David Huntley and I went on a recruiting tear, selling Watauga to prospective students with phone calls, emails, real mail. We haunted the Admissions office, put the press on students at open houses, enlisted the considerable charm of some Watauga faculty (Bud Gerber, Jay Wentworth, Kay Smith, even grumpy old man Leighton Scott showed up to recruit), and brought in a class of 160. These same faculty used their influence to recruit current Wataugans to make the commitment to move to the LLC (instead of moving off campus where life was so much less regulated). We hit our 310 target with days to spare.
Another issue that provoked a lot of irritation with the Housing staff had to do with staffing the LLC. The assumption from that office had been that they would hire a hall director and an RA staff just like they would for any new residence hall. That was not how Watauga College saw it though, and fortunately, we still had our Vice Chancellor, Dr. Blimling, calling the shots. Once again, the Watauga faculty sent me with instructions to negotiate. It went something like this:
Lee: We don’t want RAs.
Dr. Blimling: The building has to be staffed.
Lee: We will staff it with our own students.
Dr. Blimling: Hmm. Maybe.
Lee: We also want to hire our own RD, someone with academic credentials who can contribute to the academic side of this experiment.
Dr. Blimling: That’s unlikely. You need someone with residence life experience and those people don’t usually have the kind of credentials that will impress your faculty colleagues.
Lee: I think we can find someone. If we can--if I can promise that we will find someone with actual residence life experience, will you let us run the search and make the hire?
I left his office with agreements on both counts, though I have no doubt that he took some heat from the Housing and Residence Life office about these. Part of the agreement was that we would make sure our student staff participated in the parts of RA training that Residence Life determined were essential to the health and safety of LLC residents. And I agreed that we would invite Residence Life to name a professional staff member to be on the search committee for our new RD.
Greg’s concerns about residence life experience versus academic credentials were reasonable. People with doctorates in academic disciplines tend to not have a background in managing a residence hall. I knew they were out there, though, and one of them approached me on a shuttle bus heading for a conference on living learning communities. It was Joe Gonzalez. We were, quite literally, on a bus. He introduced himself and said he had heard we were opening a new living learning center, a true residential college, and he would like to apply for the director’s job. He explained that he was finishing his Ph.D. in history and was part of the University of Michigan’s residential college program. He had housing experience! He had impressive credentials! And he was a very nice guy. I would have hired him on that shuttle bus, but instead we made him go through the process. We had one other candidate who came to campus, but Joe was clearly our top choice. He and his wife Theresa joined us the summer before the LLC opened, moving into the freshly-painted RD apartment on the lower level of the residence hall.
Our first faculty-in-residence arrived at the same time, Yoshiko Kato, who partnered with Jay Wentworth to teach a section of Origins and Migrations, the new centerpiece of the Watauga curriculum. Yoshiko’s first order of business was to find a car, and she had a passion for British-made Mini Coopers--the original ones. She found one and managed to get it to the LLC where it took up about half a parking space. Yoshiko also unexpectedly brought along her boyfriend Mike, someone she had met online but not in person until he arrived to move in with her.
We managed to add a new staff position as well, an administrative assistant, and David Huntley and I hired B.R. Hoffman, a lovely woman who brought her considerable talents to Watauga. She was a master gardener so helped establish the gardens, and she was an excellent quilter and recruited students to create squares for a quilt that was hung in the residence hall. B.R.’s creativity lent a great sense of style to the LLC.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. We also had to hire student staff to help Joe manage the building, but had to do so in the spring before Joe’s arrival. David and I created a basic job description, adding in some language from Residence Life, and shopped it around to Wataugans and Teaching Fellows. We managed to convince eight (I think that’s what we ended up with)--seven Wataugans and a Teaching Fellow to sign on. Knowing that we wanted to manage the building quite differently than other residence halls (for example, the Watauga faculty were keen on incorporating the ideas of restorative justice, self-governance and consensus), we decided to send the group on a weekend retreat to flesh out what would become the underlying values of the LLC staff. Joe wasn’t on campus yet, so I recruited a staff member I knew well--Andrew Miller, who worked in Outdoor Programs. Andrew was smart and organized, but more importantly, he had a disdain for authority and a keen appreciation for non-traditional approaches to student affairs. Andrew had been a student of mine in the College Student Personnel graduate program, so I was very familiar with his unconventional perspective. One of the tasks I gave Andrew was to lead the group in determining a name for their role. No RAs here! While RAs are a vital part of the overall residential experience at Appalachian, it felt important to establish that this was a new kind of student leader role.
By all accounts, the weekend was a positive one, full of fun and bonding. Andrew showed up at my office on Monday morning to proudly report that the team had indeed come up with a name for their role: “Learning Facilitators.” LFs. Pronounced “Elfs.” I wasn’t crazy about it, but I had promised Andrew that I would support whatever they came up with, so I made my peace with it pretty quickly and started referring to our student staff as elfs. Maybe elves. I wasn’t really sure.
Shortly after the retreat, I met with Dr. Blimling and reported on the progress the new staff was already making. “They want to call themselves ‘learning facilitators,’ which they abbreviate as LFs. Pronounced ‘elfs.’”
“Absolutely not,” Dr. Blimling quickly replied.
“But I told them they could call themselves whatever they wanted, as long as it made sense for how we envision this role, which is exactly that--facilitators of student learning.”
“Nope. Come up with something else. It’s not going to be ‘elfs’.” I asked why not. “Because I am having a hard enough time explaining the LLC and all of the other requests you have made to do things outside our normal processes, and I am not going to tell your skeptical colleagues across campus that the student staff will henceforth be called ‘elfs.’ Not happening. Case closed.”
Andrew and the student staff were not happy, and felt I had misled them, and I guess I had, but not out of a desire to do so. I just had run up against a non-negotiable and knew when to quit. The staff reconvened and decided to be “Community Guides,” or “CGs,” which over the first few weeks of the building’s opening became simply “Guides.”
One battle we did choose to fight was on the dining services front. As I mentioned, the Dining Services staff were not interested in opening a new facility in the LLC, but agreed to do so (I presume it was a battle fought several levels above me) for lunch only. We felt it was really important that the LLC provide a coffee and light breakfast option as well, given the distance to other campus facilities. Dining Services said absolutely not (a phrase we were getting used to hearing) because it would be a significant money-loser given the size of the likely customer base.
We asked if we could run it in-house, with students staffing it as volunteers, and Dining Services providing coffee, tea and pre-wrapped baked goods. The response from Dining Services (I can’t recall who) was skeptical. “Students are unreliable. They don’t show up and then you have a lot of angry people who are counting on them and can’t get their coffee.”
We countered that our students would be reliable, and that since they were living a few yards away from the Great Hall where food would be served, if someone didn’t show up, the unhappy faculty members would not hesitate to go across the lawn and knock on their door. Dining Services relented, offering to try it for a semester, and as expected, Watauga’s volunteer baristas had a perfect attendance record in their first semester, cementing the plan going forward.
Another glitch that we were not able to reconcile caused some serious consternation among the students, especially the incoming Guides. During the East Hall years, Wataugans became quite accustomed to leaving their room doors open all the time--whether they were in their rooms or off at class or elsewhere. Wataugans took pride in having trust in one another (especially if it meant not having to keep track of their room key). But in 2003, that was not an allowable habit. Fire codes were strict, and we were told in definitive terms that the LLC room doors would have automatic closers on them and that under no circumstances could they be propped open, even if a resident was present in the room. The Watauga faculty stewed about this, knowing that a sterile hallway full of closed doors was likely to undermine the sense of open and friendly community necessary for Watauga to thrive. At their behest, I pleaded for the room doors to have magnetic closers on them (a door could be propped open using a magnet, but if an alarm went off, the magnet would release and the door would close, shutting off whatever source of smoke or fire there might have been). Unfortunately, such a design change was prohibitively expensive and even if the cost was manageable, would have had to be incorporated into the preconstruction design. We were told that doors could never be propped and that students would be fined if their doors were found propped open. Of course, it would be the Guides enforcing this, so the faculty decided to let the problem work itself out without further interference from them. The students understood that doors found propped during a safety inspection would result in fines. They took it from there.
The timing of the LLC’s opening turned out to be a bigger problem. Like all campus construction projects, the opening of the LLC was delayed by various complications. The site was a challenge, carved as it was into the side of a mountain. The fact that there were two buildings with different codes (one was a residence hall with much stricter codes than the academic building), and with different contractors and crews also complicated things. We had planned to move everyone--faculty, staff and students--into both buildings in the fall of 2003, but while the residence hall was going to be completed on time, the academic building was not. There were many, many discussions about how best to sequence these moves, but in the end, it went like this: the faculty vacated their offices in East Hall (many dumpsters were involved) and moved to the residence hall where they occupied what would eventually be first floor student rooms. David Huntley and I shared the tower room on the third floor which provided great views of the construction site next door. Students stayed behind in East Hall for another semester.
It was a difficult semester because we had to borrow classrooms in various locations around campus, given that we did not have access to the many classrooms awaiting us in the LLC. We also continued to use Legends for Chautauqua which required a lot of schlepping down the hill by faculty. The Housing Office was not happy because the campus was already short of rooms, but this was one thing for which Watauga College could not be blamed.
The academic building was ready for its occupants by the start of spring semester 2004, and the faculty moved across the lawn and into their new, permanent offices. Housing did a great job preparing the residence hall for students to move in, and Watauga College finally said goodbye to beloved East Hall.
I wish I could say that it was all smooth sailing from that point on, but that would not be true. Many good things happened, but there continued to be challenges. A number of these stemmed from the 2004 departure of Greg Blimling in the wake of Chancellor Frank Borkowski’s own abrupt departure from ASU in 2003. Both Chancellor Borkowski and Vice Chancellor Blimling were supporters of the LLC. Provost Harvey Durham was named acting chancellor in 2003, just as the LLC was finally about to open, and he was most likely too busy to care much about what was going on with those crazy Wataugans up the hill. After a year, however, in 2004, Ken Peacock was named Chancellor after spending a year as interim Provost (he had been Dean of the Walker College of Business).
Peacock went on something of a “listening tour” of various departments and programs at Appalachian, ostensibly to learn more about the many people and places that made up the University. He accepted my invitation to tour the LLC, seemingly eager to see this beautiful new building up close. He came for a visit in early fall of 2004 and I met him at the entrance. He was enthusiastic about the building which was in a different league than any of ASU’s other residence halls. I could tell from his questions, though, that he was skeptical, or at least unaware, of the value of Watauga College (which made sense, given his previous role as Dean of the Business College, which had virtually no overlap with Watauga College in terms of students or faculty). He was unfamiliar with its storied history on campus and its importance in the national picture of residential colleges, but more than unfamiliar, he also seemed uninterested. Maybe it was just because I was a student of higher education history, or maybe I just felt a passion for Watauga that I assumed others would share, but by the time Chancellor Peacock drove away, I had a bad feeling. I felt like he was eyeing the LLC with other goals in mind, which made me very nervous.
I didn’t get to see that all play out up close, though. While I loved the role of Watauga College director, my place in the IDS department was becoming increasingly uncertain. I won’t go into details because they’re not relevant to the rest of this story. Suffice to say I was done in by a Machiavellian department chair and the kind of backstabbing politics not uncommon in academic departments across the land. My contract to direct Watauga College promised I would stay in the role through 2005-2006, but with Dr. Blimling out and a new Chancellor (Peacock), Provost (Stan Aeschleman) and Vice Chancellor for Student Development (Cindy Wallace), I had lost a lot of the job security I had enjoyed during my time at Appalachian and didn’t know what the future beyond 2006 held for me. I was recruited by a search firm to apply for a position I had considered several years earlier--Dean of Students at the University of Connecticut--and was ultimately hired by UConn in the spring of 2005 to begin in July. Leaving Joe and B.R., along with some of the Watauga faculty I was friendly with, was hard. Leaving Wataugans? That was crushing. I loved the student community and the many ways they helped me grow as a professional. We had some good times, we had some hard times. But like the faculty first realized during my interview in 2001, I had a soft spot in my heart for these authority-challenging, iconoclastic, smart and funny students and would have been glad to spend the remainder of my career as director of Watauga College. I did get some good articles out of the experience though, including serious ones (“Agatha’s Flag”) and less-serious, not-entirely-truthful ones (“Bazzled: A Tale in Twenty Emails”).
Not long after my departure, Watauga College did indeed come under siege by the senior administration. The name was changed to “Watauga Global Community,” and my understanding was that it was partly a desire to alter the mission of Watauga College and partly the fact that unlike the other academic “colleges” at Appalachian (e.g., the Walker College of Business), it was not a true “college” with the authority to grant degrees, or its own dean, so it should not claim the name “college.” Or maybe it was an effort to remain relevant to decision-makers who were always questioning Watauga’s right to space, students and faculty lines.Watauga’s placement, in the 1990s, as a program within a department (IDS) had already threatened its existence. Watauga College was always, and continued to be, a square peg being forced into the round holes of formal higher education structures (departments, colleges, 3-credit classes), and always required the protection of a champion near the most senior levels of the University. Watauga College was, of course, “an embarrassment to professional educators everywhere,” but honestly, the constant reorganizing and re-reorganizing of Appalachian’s various programs was pretty embarrassing too. I guess one positive thing that can be said is that the LLC was not turned over to Appalachian’s storied football program as several other facilities were during the Peacock era. The irony of this new name, “Watauga Global Community,” was that Watauga had always been, through its innovative curriculum (e.g. Civilizations East and West--the infamous “CEW” --as well as Origins and Migrations) a more globally-focused program than just about any other academic program at Appalachian State. And the addition of international students as residents of the LLC (and as students in various Watauga classes) further strengthened that aspect of Watauga College.
I was, of course, long gone by the time the “Global Community” name was jettisoned and Watauga College became “Watauga Residential College,” which, while bulky, was at least true to its history and purpose. I don’t know how much of our original, hard-fought victories continued (“Guides” instead of RAs, a hall director with academic credentials hired and supervised by the Watauga faculty, a volunteer-staffed breakfast operation), but I do know that our move from East to the LLC was done with our eyes trained on Watauga College’s history, culture and place in the Appalachian State community. It was--in perfect Watauga tradition--a lot of fun, a lot of pain, and absolutely a learning experience.
Lee Burdette Williams
May 2023