Campus Life and Activities
Eckerd College maintains a regular series of on-campus events for the benefit and enjoyment of campus and community. The music, theatre, and art programs are active in staging concerts, dramatic productions, and artistic shows, respectively, throughout the academic year. On-campus speakers have included the late nobel laureate in economics, Milton Friedman, the late Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, Jimmy Carter, Michael Collins, Anderson Cooper, Jared Diamond, Gerald Ford, Stephen Jay Gould, Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Stephen King, Henry Kissinger, Richard Leakey, Dennis Lehane, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, William Proxmire, Paul Rusesabagina, Helmut Schmidt, Peter Singer, James Van Allen, Elie Wiesel, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Over fifty different clubs and organized activities are available for Eckerd College students, funded and authorized by Eckerd's student government, the Eckerd College Organization of Students (ECOS). ECOS has an operating budget of nearly a half-million dollars that it distributes to student-run clubs and organizations. Among these clubs and organizations are Eckerd's student newspaper, "The Current," which can be found online at theonlinecurrent.com, a radio station (WECX), an on-campus television station, a student programming board, Palmetto Productions, sports clubs, cultural clubs, and various academic-related clubs, such as those for anthropology (The Bipedal Society), art, biology, chemistry, philosophy, law, and foreign languages.
Among the service clubs are campus chapters of Amnesty International, Circle K, and Habitat for Humanity. The Alliance for Concerned Individuals was founded in the spring of 2003 as the non-partisan successor to an anti-war club, entitled EC Iraq Awareness, to promote activism and awareness on campus. Eckerd College also hosts the EC Coalition for Community Justice, a group seeking to raise campus housekeepers' wages.
Eckerd's Waterfront Program is a center of watersport activities, such as sailing team, skiing, kayaking, and fishing. An award-winning student group, Eckerd College Search and Rescue (EC-SAR), assists the U.S. Coast Guard in rescue operations throughout the Tampa Bay area.
In 2008, Eckerd was ranked as #7 on a list of "Top 20 Wired Colleges", according to the Princeton Review and PC Magazine. In 2006, Eckerd was ranked #18. The 2008 and 2006 rankings are to be contrasted with Eckerd's performance in 2003, when it made it no further than #350.
About 80% of Eckerd students live in on-campus dormitories that are either co-educational or all-female; there are no all-male dorms. Eckerd College has eleven dormitory complexes, each with a name from the Greek alphabet. Among these, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Kappa, and Iota complexes offer traditional dorm-style housing. Omega and Nu complexes house upperclassmen, and are organized around suites on each floor. An on-campus hotel facility was recently converted for student use, and is now called Sigma complex. The newest dorm complex, Iota, opened on September 30, 2006.
A long-standing, unusual feature of Eckerd College is that a few residence halls are set aside as "pet dorms" for students wishing to bring small animals to campus. Other special residence halls include "Wellness Houses", that promote healthy living, and service-learning dormitories, for students interested in monthly community service projects. Smoking is not permitted inside Eckerd College dormitories.
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