Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). Public Affairs Residential College

Dates

• Existence: 1991    

Biography

The Public Affairs Residential College (PARC), is one of Northwestern University’s ten residential colleges. The residential colleges are a Northwestern on-campus housing model where students live together in an on-campus housing facility that hosts social and academic events.

Each residential college is unified by a single or multiple themes, and headed by a faculty member who serves as the Faculty Chair. Chairs and student officers recruit faculty and staff members for the college’s fellow programs, which supports faculty presence through meals in the college, informal presentations known as “firesides”, and outings around campus and Chicago. In addition, fellows routinely lead small credit-bearing seminars reserved for college members and mentor residents as research assistants through a specially funded program (“Housing Options” website, Northwestern Student Affairs Residential Services. Accessed July 18, 2023).

PARC was founded in 1991, making it the most recently-established residential college. It originally occupied the residential unit at 1838 Chicago Avenue, and was relocated to 650 Emerson Street, known as the North Mid-Quads (NMQ), during the 2015-2016 academic year. (Public Affairs Residential College website, “history”. Accessed July 18, 2023).

Under the guidance of Faculty Chair Keith Woodhouse, the focus of the residential college has expanded to include public affairs of all sorts, from the more standard social and political debate to almost every other subject imaginable – such as Faculty fellow Daniel Immerwahr’s 2020 fireside chat “We’re the Good Guys, Right?: Marvel Movies and the Anxieties of Empire”.

Members of PARC are sometimes referred to as “PARCers” (pronounced “parkers”), and their mascot is a porcupine called the “PARCupine”. PARC is occasionally colloquially referred to as NMQ, which refers to the dorm the college occupies.

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