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National Collegiate Honors Council
Monographs: Chapters
National Collegiate Honors Council
2015
The Genesis of Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State The Genesis of Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State
University University
Mark Jacobs
Arizona State University
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83
chapter 4
The Genesis of Barrett, the Honors College
at Arizona State University
Mark Jacobs
Arizona State University
T
he honors college at Arizona State University (ASU) had
its roots in the distributed honors programs in departments
and schools that began in 1958 as ASU became a university by a
statewide popular vote. It started as an honors college when it was
created in 1988 by order of the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR),
the only honors college in the state established in this way. e
founding dean of what was at rst called the ASU University
Honors College was Ted Humphrey, who had earlier directed the
university honors program. Professor Humphrey had very specic
ideas about what the nature of honors education and honors living
communities should be, and—along with the design of a yearlong,
rst-year course teaching critical thinking and writing called “e
Human Event”—Humphrey negotiated a living space for about 170
honors students in a separate building near the center of the ASU
Tempe campus called McClintock Hall. e rst honors students
From: Housing Honors, edited by Linda Frost, Lisa W. Kay, and Rachael Poe. National Collegiate Honors
Council Monograph Series (Lincoln, NE: 2015). Copyright © 2015 by National Collegiate Honors Council.
www.ncnchonors.org
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moved into their 80 rooms in McClintock in 1988 at the same time
the honors college was formed, so it was a residential college from
its inception. e students shared the 33,000 square feet with three
classrooms and six oces for honors college sta.
As the ASU University Honors College grew, plans were made
to move to an entire city block south of the McClintock Hall site,
a block that contained seven buildings with about 420 beds. is
move occurred in 1992. e buildings had previously been entirely
residential halls, but one was converted into oces for the honors
college sta and faculty as well as three classrooms; modications
were made to another building to create ve other classrooms dedi-
cated to honors classes. In 1994, two entirely new residential halls
housing 400 more students were added to this so-called “Center
Complex,” bringing the bed number to 820 and the square footage
devoted to the ASU University Honors College to 197,000 square
feet. When Craig and Barbara Barrett endowed the College with
a $10 million gi in 1999–2000, it became the “Craig and Bar-
bara Barrett Honors College.” Barrett Honors College at this time
comprised the city block of Center Complex, housed 820 honors
students, and served them with 8 classrooms and oces for 8 ded-
icated honors faculty and 18 sta and administrators. e entire
complex was arranged around a small courtyard with palm trees.
In 2003, I was hired as the new dean of Barrett Honors College.
e search rm found me at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania
where I had been for over two decades, serving as Professor and
Chair of Biology and Associate Provost of the College. e then new
President of ASU, Michael Crow, apparently instructed the search
rm to look at administrators in such private liberal arts colleges as
Swarthmore to see if there might be a person interested in coming
to ASU and transforming the already well-developed honors college
into something that had not existed before: an entity with the qual-
ity of a private residential college but interfacing seamlessly with
the resources and excitement of one of the nation’s largest research
universities. at prospect was attractive, and when I visited and
found the honors students at Barrett easily as good as Swarthmore
students, I was happy to take the job.
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In one of my rst conversations with President Crow before I
even moved out to Arizona, we discussed the possibility of build-
ing a new honors campus. We actually pondered whether it would
be a good idea to build it at a site separate from the Tempe ASU
campus, in a way following the model of the University of Mary-
land system with St. Mary’s College at a dierent location than the
College Park main campus. We decided that since, next to a special
residential community, the most powerful selling point to a pro-
spective honors student would be the availability of the curricular
and research resources of the main university, we should plan to
build the new campus on the Tempe campus of ASU.
I spent my rst several years at ASU and Barrett working
with an absolutely wonderful and dedicated sta and faculty to
change Barrett “from the inside out.” We needed to require honors
advising and make it much more thorough, greatly increase the
number and quality of honors courses and contracts that were
oered each semester throughout the Tempe ASU campus, and
expand the honors college on the other three ASU campuses in
the Phoenix Valley. Student programming needed to have a much
greater presence to even begin to approach the quality of a private
residential college, and the honors faculty needed to be expanded
to incorporate more academic areas, which would diversify the
approaches taken in teaching e Human Event classes. We also
needed to le with the Arizona Board of Regents to have a special
honors fee that would generate the income to expand programs in
these exciting ways.
What these rst years of work produced was, in fact, a high
quality honors college that was beginning to have many of the char-
acteristics of a top private residential college. Still, nothing had yet
been done to address the residence part of that name. Luckily, and
with the total and undying support of ASU’s president, provost, and
chief nancial ocer, the way was cleared by 2005 to start imag-
ining the place and scope of a new honors campus on the Tempe
campus. e infrastructure of Barrett had changed; now it was time
to change the physical structure.
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A site on the southeast corner of the Tempe campus was selected
as a good one, meeting the tests of size (9 acres with the ability to
support residence halls with approximately 1,700 beds); location
(still within the main rectangle of the Tempe campus, a short walk
or bike ride from any part of that campus); and availability for con-
struction (mostly a parking lot, but with a small university visitor
information building that could be moved also on the site). Two
obstacles to construction did exist, however: the site housed the
ASU Police Headquarters as well as a private tavern that had been
a student watering hole for years. e ASU Police were, I think,
delighted to move from their old “Quonset hut” building to an
entirely new building, but extensive negotiations were necessary
before the private owner of the tavern nally agreed to sell.
An RFP was issued by ASU, and, in that wonderful pre-recession
era of 2005–2006, 12 groups bid on the chance to construct the new
Barrett Honors College and a set of apartments across the avenue
that could also be revenue-producing. When I expressed surprise
to the business manager of one of the bidding groups that so many
bids had come in, he told me that Tempe was “the largest student
housing market in the nation” at that time and thus an attractive
place to build housing and be assured of high occupancy.
When a group was selected—one put together by American
Campus Communities (ACC) from Austin, Texas—the real work
began. A “Barrett Users Group,” or BUG, was formed with the folks
from ACC, ASU Facilities, ASU Residential Life, ASU’s University
Architect and Planning Oce, and ASU’s Finance Oce. e ACC
people on the BUG included their nance specialists, their engi-
neers, their residential life experts, and the architectural team that
they selected with major input from ASU. e Barrett representa-
tives on the committee consisted of several honors students, the
Assistant Dean for Student Services, Barrett Honors faculty mem-
bers, Barrett’s Business Manager, the Vice Dean, and me. is core
Users Group—an amalgamation of people who grew extremely
close over the next four years and ended up thoroughly enjoying
each other and their joint mission—was the group that envisioned,
planned, and built the new Barrett Honors campus at Tempe. e
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committee planned and discussed for two years, roughly 2005
to 2007, before breaking ground at the site in the fall of 2007. It
then took two more years to build the entire 9-acre campus, which
opened in the fall of 2009.
e BUG members have already spoken about this collabora-
tion at several national meetings, not only of the National Collegiate
Honors Council, but also separate organizations to which the archi-
tects, the builders, and the residential life specialists respectively
belonged. e purpose of these presentations was to communicate
how wonderfully and cooperatively this whole process occurred.
ACC was incredibly generous all along with their architects: a rm
from Princeton, New Jersey, and a rm from Phoenix, Arizona,
were paid by ACC and worked together on the project, but they
also worked seamlessly, on a daily basis, with the ASU and Barrett
members of BUG. is willingness to share, so to speak, meant that
the Barrett sta had a chance to work with national-class architects
to design and build the college campus of their dreams. I believe
that as ACC got to know the people from ASU and Barrett better
and better, they began to trust our judgment in a way that let us
keep generating ideas that the architects and ACC willingly incor-
porated into the plans. e result: the privilege of building a $140
million, just-for-honors campus without having to raise a dollar.
e nancial arrangement is this: the land is leased to ACC, they
pay to build the college, and they collect and keep the rent for a set
number of years. Functionally, it meant that a person like me was
able to design and build a whole college in a way that I had thought
about and dreamed of for years, but without having to do the 10
years of development work that would ordinarily be required to
even have a chance of raising that kind of money. Of course, none
of this would have happened had President Michael Crow not been
willing to make such a nancial deal in order to obtain an amazing
new honors college campus.
In talking with the architects at the earliest stages, I had sev-
eral strong beliefs and aims that arose from my own experience in
higher education. When I was growing up, I spent time on Prince-
ton University’s campus. I saw the benet of suite arrangements for
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a group of students, particularly when they had a shared living area:
it seemed to be an important factor in keeping older students happy
and on campus at a time when the siren call to move to o-campus
apartments was so powerful in part because the only on-campus
option was a single-room space, shared with a roommate or not.
erefore I wanted from the start to oer four choices of rooms,
with one of the choices being a four-person suite that included a
living area and kitchenette along with a bathroom. Suites like this
can woo the juniors and seniors—whose presence is so important
to a four-year residential college—to remain on campus. Further-
more, I wanted to have no bathrooms down the hall as so many
dorms in my era had, especially since that complicates mixed-gen-
der hallways. us every room or suite at the new Barrett campus
comes with a bathroom for its denizens.
Both as an undergraduate participating in the House system
at Harvard and on sabbatical in Cambridge, UK, at Clare Hall, I
witnessed rsthand the amazing power that a central dining hall
can have to bring people together. At both places, at least three
years of undergraduates and sta and faculty would dine together
in unassigned seating at each meal to encourage random encoun-
ters with dierent interesting people. at Harvard and Yale with
their houses and colleges adopted the college system from Oxford
and Cambridge is not surprising. Because I wanted that dynamic
interaction at Barrett, the campus featured a central dining com-
plex with smaller rooms (like the small dining rooms at Harvard’s
houses) that could handle 12 to 25 people in an enclosed and quieter
space for students to use when they wished to entertain someone
for dinner such as a speaker who had just held forth in the late
aernoon. Another desirable space was for a Refectory, a room
seating 125–150 in which a meal could be served to a group that
was assembled to hear a special dinner speaker. is Refectory was
modeled directly on the dining hall of New College Oxford, which
was built in the 1300s; I actually brought a picture of New Col-
lege’s Refectory back with me from a trip to England to show the
architects for Barrett. To encourage the students to use the dining
complex, no rooms at Barrett included full kitchens, and all of the
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students were required to buy a meal plan at the dining center. I
will point out that Harvard Houses and Cambridge Colleges each
have in the range of 300 to 500 students, while Barrett at Tempe
has 1,700 students in residence, and many more who are members
of the honors college in Tempe but who live o campus. I would
have been worried about whether a single dining complex could
serve that much larger a group, but my experience at Swarthmore
College—a college of around 1,400 students with only one dining
hall complex—reassured me that it would work. e architect from
Princeton even drove to Philadelphia to look at the dining hall at
Swarthmore and agreed.
Another important design component was having the grassy
courtyards and quiet, contemplative spaces that I had so loved as an
undergraduate and that I had experienced also as a faculty member
on sabbatical. Even though they had to place most of the 1,700 beds
and bedrooms along the edges of the campus to accommodate so
large a number of students on only 9 acres, the architects did their
best to include as many courtyards of diering sizes and atmo-
spheres as possible. ey succeeded: the Barrett campus includes
ve courtyards, and the largest one matches the dimensions of the
main quads at a Harvard House or a Cambridge College.
Having a sustainable living community was important to the
honors students. To support that wish, the honors college took
out a loan of $1.25 million from ASU, which is being paid back
over time, to add to the funds ACC was using to build the campus.
With this loan two of the eight residential hall buildings on the new
campus were equipped to recycle greywater, to monitor individ-
ual room and hall energy, and to support a green roof complete
with organic garden and meeting spaces for the community. Called
“SHAB” or Sustainability House at Barrett, this facility is the only
undergraduate sustainable living community at the moment on any
ASU campus.
e campus was designed so that whenever students exited the
honors complex to venture forth onto the “Big ASU” campus, the
Barrett students would walk directly past both the honors faculty
oces and the advising and deans oces should they need the
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services of any of those people. I had always found that the remote
nature of both faculty oces and student services oces in the
institutions I had attended discouraged undergraduates from con-
tacting those people to seek their advice or assistance.
Other details reected the preferences I developed throughout
my academic journey: I had always loved the warm, sandstone-
colored arched columns at Stanford where I did my PhD, so we
asked the architects to incorporate columns around a courtyard
at Barrett, christened the Academic Court, with bougainvillea
vines planted alongside each one to grow up and over the bypass-
ing students in arches. I always hated having to go down into dank
basements of dorms in college to do my laundry: thus the laundry
rooms are located on the top oors of the seven-story buildings,
next to big lounges with great views of the Phoenix Valley. Students
have a pleasant place to read and wait for laundry. ACC felt that
having a tness center in any building they were constructing was
necessary in order to attract students; thus Barrett got one. ACC
even included an art budget of $50,000 to provide wall art in public
spaces and student residential hall lounges. ACC agreed to the
request to use that budget line to induce ASU and Barrett Fine Arts
majors to provide art for all of those spaces. e result is that all of
the art on the walls at the Barrett campus—photography, painting,
and textiles—comes from the ASU student art community; each
work is framed and labeled with a plaque stating the name of the
artist. Finally, the food service provider for all of ASU is Aramark,
and they were asked as a part of their bid to receive the contract
for the whole university to serve the Barrett campus in a special
way. As a result, the meal plan cost is slightly higher for Barrett
students, but the dining hall oers fresh produce from within a
125-mile radius whenever possible, sushi, and lobster nights. Stu-
dents have nine stations to choose from, including one with a pizza
oven. In fact, the dining facilities just won the Phoenix Times’ award
for “Best Educational Food” in the Valley.
e nal result is a 544,000 square-foot campus for honors
students, with 26 faculty oces and a whole suite of oces for advi-
sors, deans, student services, business, admissions, recruiting and
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national scholarship advising, events, website design, data analy-
sis, and IT. Aer 10 years of development and the realization of a
vision, I feel that Barrett has produced what I hope will be a new
way of doing college at large public universities in this country, a
way that emulates the high quality of any private college or uni-
versity, but that can also give bright students a best-of-both-worlds
educational experience: the community and support of a top pri-
vate residential college coupled with the vast resources of a major
public university.
