Myers Hall

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Myers Hall, with the Quad in the foreground

Myers Hall is a co-ed dormitory at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Myers is a part of the Myers Community, which also includes Soule Hall, Rutherford Hall and Mary Lyndon Hall. All four dormitories are arranged around the Myers Quad. Myers is located in proximity to UGA Food Service's Snelling and Oglethorpe Dining Halls, as well as the South Campus Parking Deck.

1 Student life
2 Services and Amenities
3 Frisbee League
4 Quidditch League
5 History
- 5.1 Controversial Display
6 External links

[edit] Student life

Myers is home to over 400 students. Approximately half are first-year students in the Honors Program, who get top priority for slots in the dorm. The building has four floors, each divided into north, central and south ends, and is roughly in the shape of a "C". The third and fourth floors are continuous, whereas the first floor's north and south ends are divided by a large lobby. The second floor is mostly continuous, with a balcony overlooking the lobby in the center, commonly known as the Nook or the mezzanine. The third floor is the only floor with a true "central" division - the area between the two suites.

The second and third floors have two six-person suites each, with the fourth floor having two similar five person suites, and the first floor had two four-person suites. The first and fourth floors are co-ed, and the second and third floors are all female and all male, respectively. The latter two are home to the Honors Program residents.

The Myers Community Council often sponsors Myers Community events for holidays, student events such as elections, and campus-wide events such as sporting events.

[edit] Services and Amenities

Myers's greatest advantage to its residents may be its central location on campus. It is in proximity to Oglethorpe House Dining Hall, Snelling Dining Hall, the Physics, Biology and Chemistry Buildings, Forestry, Ecology, Pharmacy, Marine Sciences, Stegeman Coliseum, Boyd Graduate Studies Center, Sanford Stadium and the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. It is also located on the expansive Myers Quad, a haven for students looking to take in the sun or throw a frisbee. The quad also has wireless internet to allow students to enjoy the great outdoors while working on a paper or surfing the web.

Myers Hall was completely gutted and redesigned in 2003, so all the facilities are relatively new. Before the renovation, the facility was not completely air conditioned (some offices did have window units, but student rooms did not). Each floor has a kitchen and a laundry room, as well as several study and meeting rooms and public and private bathrooms. The facility has won several awards for its architectural design, adapting the original structure to twenty-first century needs.

[edit] Frisbee League

Started in 1997, the Myers Community sponsors an Ultimate league, which consists of between seven and ten teams dependent upon the semester. Games are played once a week, and the four teams with the fewest losses enter into a bracket-style tournament during the last few weeks of each semester.

[edit] Quidditch League

The Myers Community and Quad is also home to a start-up quidditch league, which is loosely based on the sport of the same name from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of books. It began in 2007 with 60 members divided into four teams, and can be found as a Facebook group listed as UGA Quidditch. Games are announced on the Facebook group and usually take place on Sunday afternoon.

[edit] History

This section does not cite any references or sources. (October 2007)
Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Myers Hall was built in 1954 and named for Jennie Belle Myers, longtime house mother at nearby Soule Hall. It gained its greatest notoriety in 1961, when Charlayne Hunter-Gault, UGA's first black female student, lived in a private apartment there. On her third day on campus, the Georgia basketball team lost a close game to rival Georgia Tech, a game played at UGA's Coliseum just steps away from Myers. Subsequently, a race riot broke out near the dorm. Police were called and reportedly used tear gas and fire hoses to quell the crowd. Hunter was removed from school due to safety concerns, but the decision was quickly overturned.

[edit] Controversial Display

The desegregation issue again reared its head in early 2005, when University Housing unveiled a museum-style display in the Myers lobby that chronicled the civil rights struggle in Georgia higher education. The campus NAACP chapter and others protested the use of a racial slur on the exhibit and called for its removal, setting off a firestorm across the campus and state. Hunter-Gault herself weighed in with a letter to The Red and Black, UGA's student newspaper, in support of the slur's historical value on the display. In the end, the exhibit was redesigned to remove the phrase, and to include Hunter-Gault's letter to the editor.

There is now a plaque commemorating the historic process of desegregating the University of Georgia.