A strong sense of honors community is a fundamentally important characteristic of a vibrant honors program or college. In fact, I am fond of saying that “community, community, community” are the three most important characteristics of a strong honors program. The idea of community does not appear, however, in the National Collegiate Honors Council’s “Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors College” or the “Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program.” Perhaps that absence is because this characteristic, regardless of how it is expressed, would be difficult to verify

Falk, Barry

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Chapters from NCHC Monographs Series National Collegiate Honors Council
2015
Building Honors Community through Honors
Housing
Barry Falk
Virginia Commonwealth University
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193
chapter 14
Building Honors Community through 
Honors Housing
Barry Falk
Virginia Commonwealth University
A strong sense of honors community is a fundamentally impor-tant characteristic of a vibrant honors program or college. 
In fact, I am fond of saying that “community, community, com-
munity” are the three most important characteristics of a strong 
honors program. The idea of community does not appear, however, 
in the National Collegiate Honors Council’s “Basic Characteristics 
of a Fully Developed Honors College” or the “Basic Characteris-
tics of a Fully Developed Honors Program.” Perhaps that absence is 
because this characteristic, regardless of how it is expressed, would 
be difficult to verify.
A strong sense of community among honors students enhances 
the honors academic experience, inside and outside of the class-
room. In class, the camaraderie that is engendered by being part of 
the honors community fosters greater comfort, engagement, and 
respect, both among the students and between the students and the 
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instructor. Community facilitates student interaction outside of the 
classroom. Honors students frequently share common concerns 
and dreams about a variety of things—from grades, to course and 
major selections, to plans for life and career after college. Commu-
nity among honors students provides an enhanced support system 
for students. And a strong honors community can help provide 
these students with a strong lifetime support network.
In a small honors program, a sense of honors community can 
develop through common experiences such as honors classes and 
social events, elements that routinely bring the entire group of 
honors students together (or at least those within the same cohort). 
In a large program, however, honors students will not routinely 
encounter each other over and over again in classes or in social 
settings. In fact, honors social events in large programs probably 
will not be successful if the only link honors students have to one 
another is through honors classes. While honors classroom expe-
riences will likely lead to important and long-lasting friendships 
among small groups of honors students, they are not likely to lead 
to a strong sense of honors community within the program or col-
lege overall.
The honors program at James Madison University (JMU) is 
large. Its entering freshman class has over 200 students and the pro-
gram’s total enrollment is over 900, including students who enter 
the program sometime after the first semester of the freshman year. 
Total undergraduate enrollment at JMU is slightly over 18,000. 
These honors students typically take one honors class a semester 
until they begin the capstone project in the second semester of the 
junior year. With honors classes capped at 20 students and with the 
capstone project being largely independent work, the honors aca-
demic experience at JMU is not conducive to the development of a 
strong sense of honors community.
I arrived at James Madison University as Honors Program 
Director in the summer of 2007 to find a strong academic pro-
gram but one without a strong sense of community. My priority 
in developing an honors community was to create an honors resi-
dential hall that would anchor that community. My vision was that 
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Building Honors Community through Honors Housing
entering honors students would arrive on campus early for honors 
orientation activities. The camaraderie developed in these activities 
would be supported and cemented by a common living experience. 
These students would eat meals together, walk together to their 
honors classes, study together in the residence hall’s study areas, 
plan common social activities, attend cultural activities together, 
and form their own intramural sports teams. The vision was not to 
isolate them from the rest of campus but rather to have honors pro-
vide one community among a number of communities with which 
these students could engage. It would, however, be their first com-
munity experience on campus.
For some number of years, the honors program had a learn-
ing community that housed about 20 entering freshmen. These 
students were distributed randomly throughout a residence hall 
that also housed several other non-honors learning communities. 
Roommate pairings deliberately mixed roommates from the vari-
ous learning communities. Soon after I arrived, I met with the Vice 
President for Student Affairs and told him that instead of just an 
honors learning community, a dedicated honors residence hall was 
a key priority for me. His response: “We don’t do themed housing 
at JMU. We do learning communities.” Two years later, in the fall of 
2009, the entering honors class occupied the new Honors Learning 
and Living Center, one of two wings in a brand new 400-bed resi-
dence hall, Shenandoah Hall.
How did this happen?
While the Vice President of Student Affairs vehemently opposed 
the notion of dedicated honors housing, the director of the Office 
of Residential Life bought into the vision advocated by the honors 
program. Honors housing played a critical role in that vision. As 
the Director of the Office of Residential Life explained to one of her 
associates on campus: “This train is leaving the station and we need 
to be on it!”
Enhancement of honors community among the students was 
perceived to be the main benefit to creating dedicated honors hous-
ing on campus, but honors housing for freshmen also was expected 
to serve as a valuable recruiting tool for the university overall. The 
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JMU Honors Program provides little scholarship support to its 
students. Honors housing does not substitute for the lack of schol-
arships, but for some number of students, it is an enticement to be 
in the program that is of low cost to the university. Honors-bound 
high school seniors often note that they want to be in the JMU 
Honors Program so they can live in Shenandoah. For some students, 
of course, being forced to live in a hall full of other honors students 
constitutes an equally good reason not to join the program. Honors 
housing is optional for entering freshmen partly for this reason and 
partly for more practical reasons that will be addressed below.
Although generally supportive of the concept of honors hous-
ing, the Director of the Office of Residential Life was concerned that 
making an exception for honors would open the door to requests 
from the Department of Music, the Department of Chemistry, and 
other units that might want their students housed together. The 
logic behind the argument that honors is substantially different 
from these other units was sufficient to prevent Residential Life 
from extending dedicated housing to other units. It did articulate a 
willingness, however, to consider making exceptions in the future if 
the experiment with honors was successful. In fact, based upon the 
success with honors housing, the Office of Residential Life enthu-
siastically opened another themed residence hall in 2011, this one 
dedicated to the creative arts.
Ideally, I would have liked to see the honors residence hall 
include honors students from each class so that upper-level students 
could mentor less experienced ones. With 400 beds in the residence 
hall, it seemed like the space should have been sufficient to accom-
modate this plan. But on-campus housing at JMU is so limited that, 
other than residence hall advisors, only first- and second-year stu-
dents can live in the residence hall. Even though many second-year 
students prefer to live off campus, not every second-year student 
who wants to can live in a residence hall. Although space in the B 
wing of the residence hall could accommodate up to 200 second-
year honors students, only about 100 second-year honors students 
made this choice. Many second-year honors students who move 
off campus continue to room with other honors students who lived 
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Building Honors Community through Honors Housing
with them in the residence hall the preceding year. The honors pro-
gram is exploring the possibility of working with private landlords 
to create off-campus private honors housing for upperclassmen.
The A wing in Shenandoah Hall accommodates up to 200 stu-
dents, almost entirely in double rooms. Honors freshmen are given 
priority for these rooms. Most of the resident hall advisors in this 
wing are honors students, and the honors program works with the 
Office of Residential Life in their selection; a faculty-in-residence 
is housed there as well. Although requiring entering honors stu-
dents to live in Shenandoah Hall would have been consistent with 
the desire to have the residence hall enhance the honors com-
munity, allowing entering students to opt out of honors housing 
avoided the problem of not being able to accommodate all of the 
entering students’ housing preferences, especially since the target 
freshman class size is also about 200. This flexibility also provides 
an option to those students who are attracted to other aspects of 
the program but who prefer to live somewhere other than the 
honors residence hall.
Generally 170 entering students choose the honors housing 
option each year, and usually 10 of these entering honors students 
who prefer specific non-honors roommates are accommodated 
on a space-available basis. The university’s housing office allo-
cates the remaining 20 spots to other freshmen. First-year students 
covet Shenandoah Hall for its amenities (central air conditioning, 
for example, and its proximity to the university’s newest and best 
dining hall); for providing academic high achievers the opportu-
nity to live in a community with like-minded students; and because 
it offers a ready-made community for entering students. Parents of 
prospective students find it reassuring that their children will live 
in a community of honors students rather than a random collection 
of freshmen. Honors housing has become an important recruiting 
tool for the honors program.
The Office of Residential Life has been extremely pleased at 
how this experiment has worked. The dorm is vibrant and relatively 
trouble free (even so, the Director of Residential Life will occasion-
ally remind me that “not all honors students are angels!”). The study 
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areas in Shenandoah are used more heavily than those anywhere else 
on campus, and the retention rate for the residence hall is relatively 
high by JMU standards. Faculty members who teach honors classes 
have noticed and commented on the benefits of having honors stu-
dents living and studying together. Group work and learning occur 
more easily and naturally. Students come to class more prepared 
and will often respond to an instructor’s question or comment with 
the reply that they were “just talking about that in Shenandoah last 
night.”
The residence hall has contributed to the sense of honors com-
munity at JMU in other ways besides academic achievement. The 
day after freshmen arrive, the honors program hosts a series of 
morning orientation activities including icebreaking and team-
building activities, all followed by lunch. Rather than dispersing 
in many directions after eating, thereby diluting the community-
building effects of the morning activities, students now return en 
masse to Shenandoah for the afternoon, reinforcing these effects. 
Social events planned by Shenandoah’s students for the group are 
not simply residence hall events but are, by the nature of Shenan-
doah, honors events, too. Honors information and group advising 
sessions are routinely offered in the residence hall because of its 
convenience for so many of the students in the honors program. 
Both the honors program director and the program’s academic 
advisor spend time each week in a small office in Shenandoah.
Had circumstances been different, my preference would have 
been to house the honors administrative offices in the residence 
hall because Hillcrest House, the honors administrative building 
that was once the President’s home, is located on the other side 
of campus. Hillcrest House is a wonderful, spacious, and elegant 
facility, one that includes several student lounge and work areas, 
conference rooms, and a computer lab, in addition to the staff 
offices. Even though I would have left that facility had space and 
planning allowed the honors offices to be moved to the residence 
hall, Hillcrest students are now using Hillcrest much more than 
they did before the honors wings in Shenandoah were established. 
Students who live in Shenandoah use Hillcrest as their base for 
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Building Honors Community through Honors Housing
work or sleep when they are on the other side of campus. Other 
students just like to hang out at Hillcrest, even venturing over from 
the residence halls in groups.
Maintaining an honors residence has created two new chal-
lenges. The first is relatively minor. Honors administrators and staff 
have to work with the Office of Residence Life to keep track of those 
entering honors students who do not want to live in Shenandoah 
Hall as well as the non-honors roommate preferences among those 
who do. Further, the honors program must ensure that freshmen 
understand the process they must follow to reserve their spot in the 
hall for their sophomore year; occasionally the honors staff must 
deal with the student or parent who is unhappy about the outcome 
of this process. The larger challenge is accounting for the fact that 
while 250–300 honors students are living in Shenandoah at any 
one time, another 600–700 students are not. Many of these honors 
students will have never lived in honors housing. Maintaining 
and developing a sense of community among students who are no 
longer living in, or who have never lived in, Shenandoah remains 
difficult. For example, the tendency to hold many informational 
events in Shenandoah sometimes has the unintended consequence 
of isolating non-residents or privileging the residents.
Despite these challenges and the various operational limitations, 
the JMU Honors Program has clearly benefitted from the addition 
of an honors residence hall. The honors residence hall has fostered 
honors community, helped recruitment efforts, strengthened the 
relationship with Student Affairs, enhanced both the students’ and 
faculty’s academic experiences, and made contacting and advising 
students more efficient. Exit interviews and surveys now indicate 
that living in the honors residence hall is one of the most rewarding 
elements of the JMU honors experience.
After their first or second year in Shenandoah, JMU honors stu-
dents, like other upperclassmen at JMU, must move off campus into 
private apartments or houses. This obligation continues the prac-
tice that developed at JMU when, during rapid enrollment growth, 
on-campus housing was not an option for third- and fourth-year 
students. While these honors students often move into off-campus 
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Falk
housing with other honors students, they are dispersed widely 
across the many off-campus housing options that are available to 
them. One consequence of this situation is that third- and fourth-
year honors students become more isolated from one another as 
they pursue their majors and their capstone projects. Although the 
strong sense of honors community that developed during the first 
two years weakens considerably for this group as a result, new ini-
tiatives on campus may improve this situation.
The university is now building its first apartment-style hous-
ing, exclusively for upperclassmen, on the perimeter of campus. 
The honors program has been offered the first shot at these units. It 
is also working with the university on a plan in which the university 
would lease and manage a private apartment building to provide 
off-campus rental units to a community of honors students. These 
steps will help the honors program maintain the strong, vibrant 
community created by honors housing through all four years of the 
honors experience at JMU.


Building Honors Community through
Honors Housing

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