Knox Survival Guide

Welcome to the Knox Survival Guide, your portal to necessary information about "making it" at Knox College. Some of this you will learn during Freshman Orientation. Some of it you won't.

Overview

It would perhaps be most useful to get some basic bearing on where you are and why you are there, and who all these people are around you. It's good to be a quick study.

To start off with the most painfully obvious, Knox is a small liberal arts college located in Western Illinois, which is part of the Midwest. There are 1351 students. And you are stuck here for what may seem like an extraordinarily long time, about as long as a presidential administration. Added to them are several dozen members of the faculty and a number of staff, both administrative and rank-and-file. The town of Galesburg is home to 33,000 people and a fluctuating number of trains. The trains will undoubtedly be one of the first things you notice, and you will notice them several times an hour for several months, until you don't even notice them anymore. You know how they say that people can learn to live with anything? That is the Knox Experience. Apparently it was copy-edited out of the admission brochures.

This article makes much reference to cardinal directions to place items of interest. For those of you used to mountains and city skylines as reference points, just remember that Old Main faces north, towards downtown Galesburg.

Your Fellow Students

Origin

Of the 1351 students at Knox, maybe half come from the state of Illinois. The bulk of those come from Chicago and its various suburbs (mostly the suburbs). Generally, when meeting a person, you may as well cut to the chase and ask them what Chicago suburb they're from to save time. Those of you not from Chicago will soon learn the names and relative locations of all the suburbs. According to the Knox website, 14.1% of students live within 100 miles of Knox. This includes a number of Galesburg natives and non-traditional students with Galesburg residency, as well as students from Peoria, the Quad Cities, and the farms and small towns of western Illinois and eastern Iowa. The rest of the Illinois students come from places like Rockford, Carbondale, and other regions of northern, southern, and central Illinois. The local and non-Chicago Illinois students seem to comprise a remarkably large percentage of athletes and possibly the majority of Betas.

Beyond this, there are numerous students from surrounding states: Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri are the primary contributors. After Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City may be the best-represented cities at Knox. There are a number of students from rural areas of these states as well.

Outside of the four-state area, the majority of American-resident students are from various sizeable cities. While for the more local students academic or athletic reputation was a significant consideration, for the rest financial aid often took precedence. Distant but well-represented cities at Knox include Denver, Albuquerque, and Portland (Oregon). Beyond the seven states so far mentioned, there are thirty-nine more currently sending students to Knox. These students are sad and all alone in the world. Comfort them. Instruct them in the relative fashionableness of Chicagoland's area codes.

We mustn't forget also the substantial set of international students coming to Knox. These students have come looking for an American education, and are on the whole able to pay for it. Some question might be asked as to why they would choose, out of hundreds of schools, Knox, but as Knox has made a special effort to attract international students one can make some assumptions. Generally, the largest sources of international students seem to be tropical western Africa (especially Ghana and Nigeria), South Asia (especially Nepal), Southeast Asia (especially Vietnam), and eastern Asia (especially South Korea and Japan). There are several students from Europe, and one combination student and graduate teaching assistant from Germany each year. Many of the European students, as well as some of the others, are children of American diplomats or businesspeople.

Knox is said to be very diverse. If the American experience in diversity is a salad bowl, then we have thirty-eight types of dressing available. You are most likely a piece of iceberg lettuce, with a more than 50% chance of having been torn off a lettuce head named Chicago. Be proud.

Academics

Knox touts its distinction as the best liberal arts college in Illinois, a state that, to be fair, has a fairly weak history in the liberal arts. After all, the City of Big Shoulders, which back in Knox's time was a relatively uncultured creep of Midwestern industrial growth and centralization, required a meat-and-potatoes sort of higher education system, and there were certainly plenty of well-established schools further east for nancy English majors. Knox has, however, done fairly well for itself, placing somewhere in the seventies each year on the U.S. News and World Report rankings. It often garners good ratings in the Princeton Review, and is a perennial favorite of the book Colleges That Change Lives. Knox is quick to note whatever accolades it receives, and you can find them quoted here.

Quantitatively, 67% of Knox students were in the top quarter of their high school class, and 32% graduated in the top tenth. The middle of 50 percent of the ACT Composite score is 25-30; for the SAT (out of 1600), 1120-1360. Knox does not require the ACT or SAT anymore. This is because we are innovative. Remember this. We made Abraham Lincoln, too, as far as we're concerned.

These statistics, while good, aren't quite as impressive as some of the more famous schools – indeed, while many in Illinois or Missouri have heard of Knox, if you utter the name in California then people will think you're going to school in Tennessee. You will soon learn, if you have not already, that the official name of Knox outside of the Midwest is "Knox College, a small liberal arts school in western Illinois (not near Chicago)."

On the whole, the basic demographic at Knox is good students, with moderate achievements, generally with either a high personal concern either for community or a pressing practical concern for money. A larger than usual percentage are students whose work in high school was perhaps tempered by other concerns, usually social but sometimes associated with being batshit crazy. A fair number of intelligent underachievers add to the mix as well. Knox, while selective, is not that selective – it has been said that they have never rejected an IB diploma candidate, for instance, although IB candidates have been waitlisted. For reasons like this, Knox makes an excellent safety school for the high-school burnout.

Social

As just mentioned, students often think much of social matters, and as the middle students of high school who, perhaps, existed without some firm sort of group identification, the social scene at Knox is quite involved. It is made the more so given Knox's small size and isolation: just as water boils faster in a covered, confined space, Knox's drama percolates up all the time. The wide availability of drugs and alcohol doesn't help anybody calm down, either. For Anso majors, it can be quite the opportunity for some ad-hoc fieldwork, but of course few of them can resist being involved themselves.

On the whole, Knox's drama appears to be more intricate than that at many other schools. And, as everybody pretty much knows everybody with at most two degrees of separation, and sees them once or twice a day, there are a lot of opportunities from social intercourse. This is the sense of community of a small school, but also one of its strangest phenomena. The rumor mill is especially large, and it is not unheard of for faculty to get entangled in it as well (they, apparently, need their sex too). Attempts have been made to catalogue the network of romantic and sexual relationships on campus, but the complexity and rapid changes have gotten the better of them.

The Greek System

For first-years especially, the social scene is largely centered on the Greek system. After the first year, those who do join a Greek organization keep more within that organization and those that do not join any will coalesce their own social channels, but until then there is significant room for maneuver. The fraternities are most prominent on the party scene, because they have residential houses. The sororities only have nonresidential houses, so they don't hold as many parties, instead attending the fraternity parties. The sororities are also larger and contain a larger variety of people within them than do the men's fraternities, making their identity somewhat more difficult to define. Recruitment for these organizations begins in Winter Term.

Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE, pronounced like the wood teak) is an early favorite, as they offer free beer for the fall term to draw in students. Their intentions for doing this are debatable, and speculation has ranged from innocuous meet-and-greet to part of a plan to take control of Student Senate (at which, in whatever case, they are generally fairly successful, although not as much thus far for the 2007-2008 school year). Their house is located on South St., nest to the Wilson House.

Beta Theta Pi (Beta) focuses primarily on attracting football players and other athletes. Their house is on South St. between TKE and Alumni Hall.

Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI) attracts a lot of baseball players, a significant number of African international students, and sundry others. Their house is on the southwest corner of Cedar and Tompkins streets.

Sigma Nu (SNu) caters largely to the less obviously fraternity-material students (the geek contingent), and tend to be as focused on video games or theatre as on anything else. Their house is located on West St., near the Service Ramp in the Quads. That house is technically temporary, as it has been for about forty years (see also Alumni Hall)

Sigma Chi, the newest fraternity (and, thus far, sadly lacking in a whimsical abbreviation) grew out of the Ultimate Frisbee team. Its members are fond of nudity. Their house used to be a very prominent crackhouse until the occupants were arrested and one fraternity member's family purchased the house, remodeled it, and gave it to the school. It is located on the southwest corner of West and Knox streets.

Delta Delta Delta (Tri-Delt) is one of the sororities. They maintain their Lodge on Academy St., behind SMC.

Pi Beta Phi (Pi Phi) also maintains a house (the Bungalow) on Academy, just north of the Tri-Delt Lodge. This fraternity has somewhat more activists and dedicated feminists than Tri-Delt.

Kappa Kappa Gamma (Kappa, KKG, and Kappa-Gam are some abbreviations, although none has become standard yet) is the newest sorority on campus (formerly, they were TSO colony, and they are at least loosely associated with the O2C girls of the 2004-2005 school year). They do not, as yet, have a house.

ATP is a sorority colony on campus. Originally branded as the female SNu, they have backed away from that identity, although their social ties to SNu are various and unmistakable.

Suites

The other major locus of social organization is the suite system. Upperclassmen generally get to pick with whom they are living, if they have any preference in the matter, but first-years are simply thrown together based on survey answers. Given the pressure-cooker social atmosphere, few people end up living with their first-year roommates, for instance, for any additional time. Some first-year suites end up becoming destinations, and others are simply bedrooms. Some suites have perennial reputations, Seymour 3B being the most infamous. Each freshman suite or group of suites comes with a Knox-issue Resident Advisor (RA), who will range in quality and willingness to overlook suite members' actions and possessions.

Your Room

First-years are housed in residence halls, usually two to a room. Students may request a single, but it costs several hundred dollars. Generally demand is too low to fill them with paying students, so some first-years will be thrown into them at no cost. First-year singles are located in Five-Name. There are also one or two triples in Seymour Hall. Sometimes, due to dropouts, roommate moves, or the like, one might end up living alone in a standard room. This is called a double-single.

Seymour Hall

Seymour Hall houses about 80 male first-years. There is one suite on the second floor of Seymour on the north side of the building (Seymour 2), and two suites on the third floor: Seymour 3A above Seymour 2, and Seymour 3B perpendicular to 3A, over the Oak Room. The suites are accessible by a spiral staircase above the Grab-n-Go Cart between the Campus Life Office and Founders, and by the stairwell on the west side of Seymour, which leads down to the section of Seymour basement with the mailroom and the bookstore. These suites are the least secure on campus, as they are in a building that is open 24 hours a day, and the doors to them are usually propped (although Campus Safety unprops them on its rounds). The rooms are large, if not particularly nice looking. The closets are large enough to fit the standard-issue dresser in them. There is a single common area for all three suites, at the eastern end of 3A; it is hardly ever used, and usually is cannibalized for its furniture. There are vending machines on the third floor. Laundry facilities are in each of the bathrooms, of which there is one on each floor. The roof of Seymour is accessible from windows in the bathroom and several of the rooms, but fines for being out there can be significant if caught.

Seymour suites have unparalleled easy access to campus, as they are right upstairs from the eateries, the main computer lab, and the mailroom. On winter days, one need not leave the building except for class. These suites are generally the least well-kept of all on campus, and the suites often incur high repair fees at the end of the year for their various drunken indiscretions. 3B is perennially the worst of the three in this sense, and has a long history of alcohol and drugs beyond the normal levels. The squalor is part of the ambience. Those with a heightened sense of hygiene will find life in Seymour to be very hard on them.

Post Hall

First-year Post is an all-female area of six suites, with about 100 girls. These suites are on the north side of the building, along West St.; there are also four upperclass suites in the east wing of the building, and upperclassmen living in Post Basement (the rooms of which were installed to alleviate overcrowding during the 2006-2007 school year) and may be fondly referred to as Post Dungeon. Kitchens and laundry rooms are available in the basements, and the C-Store convenience store is in Post Lobby, along with a big-screen TV (generally controlled by the Gaming Information Network or other video-game players). There are stairwells between each suite

Each suite is two stories tall, with a common area on the lower floor, an internal staircase to the balcony, and two small bathrooms on each floor. Each suite has 16 to 18 students, making for a very small bathroom-to-student ratio – Post suites are likely the cleanest on campus. They also have very nice views of campus, with the huge suite window. Then again, this makes it very easy for Campus Safety to break up unregistered parties. Post suites are numbered from one to ten: Post 1 is the lower northernmost suite, Post 2 the suite above it, and so on, to Post 10, the upper-level suite farthest out on the east wing. Only Post 1-6 hold first-years.

Sellew-Raub

Sellew-Raub is located in the Quads, and is largely made up of first-year housing, although the amount of upperclass housing changes from year to year. It runs east-west, between Five-Name and Four-Name. The Service Ramp is at its western end. There are six suites on three floors, each with 10 to 12 students. On each floor, one suite is Raub and one Sellew. As with Seymour, these are designated by floor (e.g. Raub 2, Sellew 1). There is a common area in each suite, and one bathroom separated in two parts for each floor. Sellew and Raub each have a stairwell. Laundry facilities are available in the basement, but no kitchen. Sellew-Raub is co-ed by floor. It is typical Quads and pretty unremarkable.

Conger-Neal

Conger-Neal is pretty much the same as Sellew-Raub, and is located along West St. north of the Service Ramp. Most of the occupants are upperclassmen, but usually at least one suite is made over to first-years. The basement is the third-scariest on campus, after Aux Gym and GDH.

Five-Name

Five-Name is the large L-shaped building rounding the northeast corner of West and Knox streets. It contains five suites. Campbell and Elder are the two suites of the north wing, and Neifert and Sherwin are on the east wing. Furrow is in the bend, and houses primarily upperclassmen. The basements also have a few rooms, but these are usually given to upperclassmen as well, although many believe them to be the worst housing on campus. The basements are not linked. Each wing essentially has a double suite on each floor, with a shared hallway separated by a door that is usually open, and bathrooms at either end. The building is co-ed. There is a combination kitchen/laundry room in Neifert Basement, along with the Roger Taylor Lounge. If the Student Health Center is ever built, it will sit on the outside corner of the building; until then it is the Counseling Center. Five-Name suites are numbered by floor, starting in the basement (Neifert or Elder 1, although usually they are referred to as Neifert or Elder Basement, with the actual first floor being numbered 2, and so forth). Five-Name is far away from everything.

I-House

If you are an international student, you may end up in the International House, which this year will be entirely first-years due to problems with the 2006-2007 occupants. It is a house. Congratulations.

The Campus

Knox strives for a parklike setting. It used to strive for a tree-lined sort of parklike, and then Dutch Elm Disease happened, so now it strives to evoke more of a prairie thing. In the summer and early fall it is very green, what with the well-kept lawns. The small nature patch east of the quads is what the land used to look like. One can imagine that in the future, when deer become sentient and take over the world, there will be a small patch of manicured lawn west of the quads at Deer-Knox (undoubtedly refounded by gazelle-slavery abolitionists) that will be visited by Human Studies classes.

On the northeast quarter of campus are most of the academic buildings on campus. Old Main is the old one, with the belltower. Seymour Hall is the one with all the stuff in it, in the center. You eat at it. GDH, the Aux Gym, and the Old Jail are around, along with administrative buildings outside of the campus proper. Alumni Hall is the one that doesn't even have stairs to its doors. To the west is the gray building that looks kind of like a scale model of itself, which is Seymour Library (not to be confused with Seymour Hall – Knox may have few wealthy alumni, but those it has are sometimes suitably generous). TKE and Beta, as well as the Wilson House, are nearby. North of South St. are the apartments, which are home mostly to seniors and some juniors, as well as the Naked House and the Jazz House. West of South West St. (confusing? Just wait) is SMC, the large building that suggests a swastika, and behind that the sorority houses, another house, and the Human Rights Center. On the eastern side of the campus is CFA, and in the southeast corner the Memorial Gym. The Quads are essentially the southwest corner, including the Old Quads (Four-Name, Conger-Neal, etc.) and the New Quads (Five-Name). Post Hall is just north of these, and a number of campus houses, including I-House, the Old Phi Delt House, SNu, Sigma Chi, and Yellow House are strung out along West St. from Berrien St. on the north end to First St. at the southern end. The Steam Pipe Network connects many of the campus buildings. Here, look at a map of campus.

Elevators on campus are about as common as Republicans in Chicago city government (see? Even if you're not from Chicago you pick up fast on these things). BLADU, the now-defunct humor magazine, had a feature in its early years called "This Month's Event that Disabled Students Can't Attend" or something to that effect. If you're wheelchair-bound, you might have done well to visit first.

Old Main

Knox's signature building. It's on the letterhead. The school makes a big deal about it being the only remaining site of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Abraham Lincoln climbed through a window to get to the debating platform – He'd "been through college," he said. You may have sat in his chair as a prospie. If Knox knew exactly where he had walked while on campus, they would surely mark it off as the Lincoln Trail, litter it with interpretive signage, and all but worship it. More prosaically, as it were, it holds the English and Philosophy departments, as well as some key administrative offices on the first floor, including the office of the Dean of the College, the President's Office, the Business Office, the Office of Student Development, the Dean of Students, and so on. Major meeting rooms in Old Main are the Alumni Room (if you can't have a hall you might as well get part of one) on the first floor in the northwest corner, and the Common Room along the southern side of the second floor.

Alumni Hall

Alumni Hall is kind of like a classic car – it's old, and really beautiful, but it's been neglected for forty years. Its owner always talks about restoring it, but doesn't have the balls to do it any time soon, so the car rusts out on the driveway, looking pretty stupid to anybody who drives by. At some point the owner goes and asks his friend, the former CEO of Gillette, who once landed his helicopter in the owner's backyard, whether he would be willing to give him several million dollars to restore the car and name it James Kilts Alumni Classic Car, to which this lugubrious CEO, already glorified to no end in the owner's admission brochures, will reply, "I don't do buildings." And here the analogy falls apart.

If you ever get a chance to go inside (usually when the Trustees come – the open it up to try to get them to feel bad and give money), go. It's very nice. Otherwise, it stands empty, and glows sodium-orange at night.

Seymour Union

Where to begin?

Seymour Union, also known as Seymour Hall, has three floors and a basement. The second and third floors are entirely all-male residence hall. If the right doors and windows are open, sometimes marijuana smoke wafts down to the first floor. On the first floor are three different eatery options. Along the south side of the building is the Hard Knox Café, known as The Caf, the buffet-style option, and the most well-used (if not the most popular) one on campus. Just north of it is the Oak Room, which is single-pass and has less variety but is often better quality. Across the hall from the Caf is the Gizmo, the snack bar/fast food sort of place, which is open all day and is a major gathering spot. Next to it just outside the building is the Gizmo Patio, which is very popular for socializing and studying in warmer weather and smoking even in the winter. The windowed hallway from the Caf and Gizmo past the Oak Room to the north side of the building is known as the Gallery. This is where tabling happens. Often the school will bring traveling merchants in the Gallery to hawk their wares, most notably the poster sale, the book fair, and most often a woman who sells clothes and woven items.

The Gallery ends and a new perpendicular hallway takes its place for the north side of the building. The northeast corner of Seymour is taken up with Founders, the main computer lab. It has mostly Windows computers (but a few Macs), as well as a tricked-out laser printer. It is open 23 ½ hours a day (closed from 5-5:30 AM for computer maintenance). Across the hall from Founders is the Campus Life Office, where Craig Southern (the housing guy) and Cindy Wickliffe (the campus events organization lady, and the sender of campuswide e-mails that you're not supposed to respond to) work. The building foyer on the north side also has change machines and an ATM. The change machines are broken almost as often as not. You will get used to it. Be nice to the Gizmo people, because if you are they might give you change even though they're not supposed to.

Further west along the hall is the Carl Sandburg Study Lounge, which is basically the only study lounge open 24 hours a day. It is especially popular with international students. Next to that is the Publications Office, where staff for The Knox Student and Catch work. A hallway branches off to the west stairwell, which heads toward the mailroom, and after that there is Ferris Lounge and the Lincoln Room, which are sometimes used for meetings, a number of smaller rooms off a hallway, and Steve Farris' office (Steve is the Director of Dining Services). The Loading Dock is on the west side of the building, and receives shipments for Dining Services.

There are actually three separate basements in Seymour, at least as far as student accessibility is concerned. Students can only get into two, unless they work for Dining Services, which uses the third section for storage. One section, on the northwest side of the building, contains the mailroom and bookstore. The other section is accessible from a stairwell near the Gizmo. At the landing there is the Union Board office, and some other club office space. At the bottom are two bathrooms, the Student Senate office, and Wallace Lounge. Currently, Wallace Lounge is largely off-limits due to flooding last winter, and there are plans to put another eatery down there. The left side, which has windows, is/was the game room, and had some pool and ping pong tables, the equipment for which was usually broken. The windowless right side used to be a bowling alley, but more recently has been an unpleasant lounge area that few used. At the back of Wallace Lounge is the old BLADU office, which is now used by the Free Store. This is the only public building open 24 hours a day.

Seymour Library

Seymour Library is in the top 2% of college libraries nationwide, they say. However, they don't quote this rank like they do for ranks associated with financial aid or the radio station, so it's a little suspect. All in all, however, it's a lovely library for a school of this size. Jobs at the library are among the most coveted on campus. It contains the main copy machines for public use, a number of computers (including laptops you can check out at the front desk), and a few dozen or so books, too. The study carrels are numerous and generally fairly quiet, although may of the red swivel chairs squeak horribly. The catalog is online, and accessible here. You can check out movies too – the VHS library is larger, but they continually acquire new DVDs for professors' class needs. The Special Collections and Archives room has a lot of very interesting old things. The major meeting areas in the library are the Muelder Reading Room (much, much better known as the Red Room, because of the red carpet), and a number of smaller rooms arrayed next to it, including the Bookfellows Room, Finley Room, and Cassidy Room. On the third floor above this area are Honors offices, for seniors who are doing an Honors Project. On the first floor, the study room at the east side of the building arrayed with glass-block windows is often referred to as the Fishbowl.

Reserves for classes are available at the front desk. Smaller reserves are in manila envelopes and listed by a file number, which you have to look up in the catalog. The rest are by call number. There are also open reserves, which are located on the first floor, between the periodicals and the DVD shelf. There is only one bathroom in the entire building, off the foyer. There are two stairwells, one at the front and the other at the back, running just to the right of the Fishbowl.

If you want science books, those are available at the Kresge Library in SMC (another donation behemoth, that Kresge was). There is also a Music Library in CFA.

SMC

Officially known as the Sharvy G. Umbeck Science and Mathematics Center, it is called SMC because many of Knox's benefactors (in this case a former college president) do not have pretty-sounding names. We can't all be Seymours or Kresges, after all. It contains offices and classrooms for all the sciences, including psychology, mathematics, and computer science. Its basement is creepy, and contains the Computer Center and two computer labs, Stellyes and Caterpillar. The Office of Advancement is located in the E wing. The Kresge Science-Mathematics Library is in the center of the second floor. The building has four wings, lettered B through E, with the core being A. The A-wing contains two large lecture pits seating over 100, one of which is the meeting place for Student Senate. There are six stairwells, two in the core and four on the edge of each wing.

SMC is not really shaped like a swastika, but it kind of looks like it. Perhaps they will make additions.

GDH

Officially known as George Davis Hall, this was the science building before SMC was built in 1970, and currently houses a number of departments, including all the social sciences, modern languages, and Educational Studies. The radio station, WVKC, is located on the fourth floor, accessed from the eastern stairwell. It contains the Centel computer lab on the first floor, which contains special workstations for use with foreign language instruction. The basement is the second scariest on campus, although it is sometimes locked. There is a 19th-century X-ray machine down there.

Old Jail

The Old Jail, just east of GDH, contains faculty offices. It also holds the Lincoln Studies Center and the Underground Railroad Freedom Station, as well as an actual jail in the back. The jail is multilevel and quite impressive.

CFA

Officially known as Ford Center for the Fine Arts. This holds the Art, Theatre and Dance, and Music departments. The main venue is the Harbach Theatre, which is the mainstage for theatre productions and is across the lobby corridor from the Office of Admission. Kresge Recital Hall is used more often for speakers and musical performances, and for First-Year Orientation. It's on the south side of the main lobby. In the basement by the eastern stairwell is the Studio Theatre, used for smaller, usually student-directed, shows. The south wing of CFA is the music wing, and contains offices, recital halls, practice rooms, and the Music Library on the second floor. On the north side of the lobby is the main art exhibition space, around an obviously curved wall. Inside this wall is the Round Room, which would be the coolest room on campus if the seating weren't quite as unnecessarily cramped. The Office of Financial Aid sits above the Office of Admission on the second floor.

Memorial Gym

The Memorial Gym holds most of the important athletic facilities on campus. It is tucked behind CFA and the track. Inside is a basketball court on the first floor. In the basement there is a woefully small natatorium (pool). This used to be easy to break into, but then they changed the lock. On the second floor there are offices for low-seniority faculty, as well as the headquarters of the Black Studies Program. The new-looking, floor-to-ceiling windowed section is the E. & L. Andrew Fitness Center.

Some other facilities, specifically for dance, are located in the Auxiliary Gym, between CFA and GDH.

Other Places on Campus

In addition to the buildings described above, there are numerous other, smaller places on campus that are worth noting.

In terms of classroom and meeting space, there are several other areas. One, the Compass Room, is a meeting and class room located on the second floor in the center of the Townhouses, which are upperclass housing on the northeast corner of South and Cedar streets. On class schedules it will show up as 251E in reference to the building's address, 251 South West St., and the letter E as coming after Townhouses A through D. It has a kitchen. Another, the Wilson House, is sometimes used for classes, and is located next to TKE. It also has a kitchen. There is also the Center for Intercultural Life, a small house adjoined to Simonds Hall (part of Four-Name). The Center for Teaching and Learning is used for tutoring and other functions, and is on West St., south of the parking lot.

Major named lawns include the South Lawn (south of Old Main) and Post Lawn (between Post and Seymour). There are tennis courts just east of the Quads, and a track east of those. On the other side of Knox St. there is a soccer field and the Knox Bowl, a football field with a manmade hill all around it. There is a hole cut in the chain-link fence that Campus Safety allows to remain unrepaired. Pot smoking and sledding are popular Knox Bowl activities. Getting caught in there incurs reference to the Office of Student Development.

The main convenience store for campus is the 24-hour Quick Sam's Convenience Convenient (seriously, that's what the sign says) at the corner of South and Academy. Unlike the C-Store, they sell cigarettes and alcohol.

Faculty

The faculty are probably the best thing going at Knox. Many of Knox's professors are recent Ph.D. graduates who teach at Knox for a few years before moving to greener pastures, but the tenured faculty are none the worse for staying (perhaps, in fact, they are better for it). Those who do stay are generally extremely committed to the teaching-college niche of Knox, as well as the slightly odd nature of the Knox and Galesburg community. Some of them just really like the house they bought, and/or don't want to sell it at a loss in Galesburg's anemic real estate market. Students have a lot of contact with professors generally; some too little, some too much.

A lot of Knox's professors are married to each other, which is another reason they get tenure. Some of them are obvious, like Robin Metz and Elizabeth Carlin-Metz, or the Finebergs. Some of them are less so, like Nancy Eberhardt and Steve Cohn. You probably shouldn't badmouth one to the other.

Generally, professors get fired if they meet two criteria:

• They have sex with students
• They buy students alcohol

Sometimes a reprieve is granted for extremely popular professors. This is all unofficial, of course.

The overwhelming majority of students get invited to a professor's house at least once. Knox ensures this by having the first-year advisors invite their advisees over for dinner during First-year Orientation. Nick and Sunshine Regiacorte serve really good pasta. Some of the other professors can't cook and do takeout or something. But it's the thought that counts, and now when the Office of Admission recalculates the number for the admission brochures you'll have to say that you went to a professor's house once.