Audio/Visual- The Living Room of the Campus

Final Profile Piece- The Living Room of the Campus

Intended publication: The Index

The Living Room of the Campus

If you were to follow the red brick paved road of Academy St, turn up the fork and drive past the fork on the left-hand side of the road with the Kalamazoo College sign surrounded by blooming flowers and drive past Hoben Hall, you would see the impressive building standing right in front of you known as the Hicks Center. Like many of the buildings on the campus of Kalamazoo College, Hicks Center is a long rectangular building with a red brick façade, white windows and a grey roof. What distinguishes Hicks from the other buildings on campus however, is not the sleek black windows that cover the front of the building, but the four tall while columns that hold up a part of the roof that juts out in which a large white K symbol is placed directly in the middle. Underneath the K sign is the name Weimer K. Hicks. If you look on a map you can see that Hicks is strategically placed far back on campus, pass the quad and closer to Lovell Street.

As a building that houses the Mail Center, Cafeteria or Dining Hall, Student Resource Center, security and Student Development offices, organization rooms and a Union Desk, at any given time during business hours there is a constant stream of students, faculty, administrators and professionals going in and out of the building, and the inside functions well for lots of movement. When you walk passed the tall black windows and into the building, it isn’t difficult to be amazed by the open design of the internal structure of the building. Every level is an open space. You could stand on the main floor of the atrium and only have to look down to see the Mail Center on the bottom floor, or look up to view students entering the Dining Hall. However, while there is a constant flow of activity within, the impression that many K students give when describing Hicks is that it is a place for them to escape the craziness of an academy life, and just wind down by grabbing a sandwich at Jazzman’s café, listening to music being played by Union Desk attendants over the loud speakers, play pool in the game room or socialize with friends in the movie room. When K students give tours of the campus and they make a stop in Hicks they often speak of it as the “living room” of the campus. Students go to Hicks to eat, sleep, do homework and hang out or talk with friends, all of the key components of a college student’s daily existence.

The Hick Center was named after Weimer K. Hicks, who served as President of Kalamazoo College (from 1953-1971) for eighteen years. Hicks’s legacy to the school in which he served as President comes from the fact that he was very instrumental in the development of the “K” plan as a permanent fixture within the school-wide curriculum. The “K” plan continues to be extremely important and serves as the groundwork for a true liberal arts education at the college. The original “K” plan created by Hicks stressed that students gain more awareness of the world around them by spending a term doing an internship and at least more than one term studying abroad. When entering Kalamazoo College students first matriculate as first-years, they are bombarded with symbols of the successes of the “K” plan, study abroad or study away testimonies, service learning projects or internships that previous students have participated in, and an introduction to the Senior Individualized Thesis (SIP) project that they will have to stress about in three years even before being made fully aware of what it actually is. As described on the Kalamazoo College website, the “K” plan is specifically geared towards getting the full breath of a liberal arts education and is highly individualized for each student in order for them to become more self aware of the world around and them and envision their own possibilities for becoming an enlightened person by the time they graduate. Hicks’s implementing of the “K” plan forever changed Kalamazoo College’s reputation as an undergraduate institution to one that heavily focused on integrating an international education into the curriculum. It is no surprise that the top academic administrator whose namesake Hicks is named after was the pioneer who heralded in the introduction of the “K” plan.

On any day during the week you can walk past the meeting rooms on the second floor of the building and observe one of the many student organizations meeting. Student Commission, Student Activities and the Index all have permanent offices in Hicks. On Tuesday’s an informational movie or documentary is shown via a partnership with one of the student organizations or student advocacy groups who want people on campus to engage in issues or support a cause. Recently, the gay alliance group Kaleidoscope played the iconic movie depicting drag ball culture Paris is Burning to eager audiences. Some days free food is given out at indoor music concerts, or there are free massage days or public speakers and important dinners or events are often held in the banquet hall. Overall, you could say that Hicks’s multiple functions as a student center makes it just as much as a part of the “K” plan as the academic curriculums or study abroad programs. Of all the buildings on campus, Hicks is definitely a liberal space.