MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College plans to build a suite-style residence hall for 46 upperclass students that will be ready in fall 2005, relieving an on-campus housing crunch as enrollment continues to climb.

The new residence hall, projected to cost approximately $2 million, will be built near the college’s 10th Avenue apartments.

The proposed three-story building will feature six suites accommodating seven or eight students apiece. Each suite will have a kitchenette with a small refrigerator, sink, counter space and cupboards; students will take their regular meals in the campus dining halls. Each suite also will have three full bathrooms. The building will have a study room, a small office, a shared kitchen, a lounge, laundry facilities, an elevator and central air conditioning. A parking lot for 51 vehicles is planned nearby.

The facility was approved because of student demand for more personalized living spaces and their desire to abandon the traditional central-campus dorm for apartment-like quarters –- but without the responsibility of utility bills and garbage collection.

“It’s the way many colleges are going,” said John Harp, dean of students.

The new residence hall will be coed, but not within student rooms, and won’t be available to first-year students. Two resident assistants will live on site.

As a residential college, 93 percent of students live on campus in Cornell’s nine residence halls and two apartment complexes. During the 2003-2004 year, on-campus housing was at 98.5 percent capacity, which college officials feel restricts their ability to relocate students when, for example, renovations are needed. Cornell allows a percentage of upperclass students to live off-campus, but on-campus housing is considered more attractive, Harp notes, primarily because the college provides amenities such as convenient laundry and parking, and in the residence halls free cable television and Internet access through the campus network.

Cornell’s enrollment -– projected at 1,150 for classes beginning Aug. 30 –- has been climbing steadily over roughly the past five years and is the largest since fall 1995. Cornell’s last new residence hall construction was in 1966, when Rorem Hall was built.

MOUNT VERNON — For the 10th consecutive year, students, faculty and staff at Cornell College will contribute hundreds of hours of community service in a single day — Saturday, Aug. 28 — before opening the school year Monday.

Volunteers will work from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at approximately 25 sites around eastern Iowa.

Last year more than 400 participants donated over 1,500 hours during New Student Orientation Service Day. This is the largest single-day community service project Cornell organizes and serves as the kickoff for a year’s worth of service projects. More than three-fourths of Cornell’s 1,150 students participate in service projects annually.

“Cornell believes in the importance of service and engaging in the world outside the college, and Service Day introduces new students to that commitment,” said Jeff Ramsey, Cornell’s director of Leadership and Service. “A connection develops between the campus and the community. Through Service Day, faculty, staff, students and the community join together to create positive change.”

Several projects are listed below. In case of rain, outdoor activities may be changed or cancelled.
- Washing ambulances and fire trucks at the Lisbon-Mount Vernon Ambulance Service, 730 First St. East, Mount Vernon.
- Cleaning up trails, Palisades-Kepler State Park.
- Cleaning and painting at Southeast Linn Community Center, 108 S. Washington St., Lisbon.
- Cleaning the facilities, exercising dogs at the Cedar Valley Humane Society, 7411 Mount Vernon Rd. SE, Cedar Rapids.
- Rehabilitating houses and apartment buildings, working on community beautification through the MidAmerica Housing Partnership in Cedar Rapids. Primary work location: 1721 Fifth Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids.
- Cleaning up, washing windows at CSPS, 1103 Third St. SE, Cedar Rapids.
- Sorting donations and cleaning equipment at the American Red Cross, 6300 Rockwell Dr. NE, Cedar Rapids.
- Collecting litter and cleaning up trails at Lake Macbride, Solon.
- Cleaning up at Camp Courageous, Monticello

MOUNT VERNON - An exhibition of ink drawings, watercolors and oil paintings by Grant Wood contemporary Karl Mattern, who taught at Drake University and showed often at the Des Moines Art Center, opens Aug. 15 at Cornell College.

“Karl Mattern: Artist & Teacher,” featuring landscapes, self-portraits and genre-related imagery, continues through Sept. 22 in the Cole Library Gallery. A reception is Sunday, Aug. 29, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the gallery. Admission is free. For library hours, call (319) 895-4271 or go to www.cornellcollege.edu.

Born in Germany in 1892, Mattern immigrated to the United States and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Art Students League under the direction of George Bellows. Mattern joined the art faculty at the University of Kansas in 1925. During his time in Lawrence, his wife, Mary Lieberman Mattern, attended Iowa’s Stone City Colony and Art School, directed by Grant Wood and Marvin Cone, during the summers of 1932 and 1933.

Mattern left Kansas in 1948 to become an art professor at Drake where he taught until age 70. He taught painting and art history at Simpson College for a year before retiring.

The year Mattern arrived at Drake, the Des Moines Art Center opened and he served on its acquisitions committee. One-man exhibitions of his work were held there in 1948, 1951, 1954 and 1960, and a memorial exhibition was held in 1970.

“Well-informed about art’s changing styles, his own work became more abbreviated, more cursory about details. Having survived many epidemics of art fashions he mistrusted the instant flashes and almost instantaneous clashes that kept the scene newsworthy. Mattern followed no identifiable trends, but had gradually shifted the emphases in his own productions according to inimitable convictions,” wrote longtime friend and colleague Leonard Good in the memorial exhibition’s catalog essay.

The Cornell exhibition features works from the collection of Mary E. Kohl of Des Moines and lent by J. Richard Simon, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa. Works by Mattern are also in the collections of several Midwest museums including the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas.