Telluride House
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Telluride House

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Telluride House

The Telluride House, formally the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association (CBTA), and commonly referred to as just "Telluride", is a highly selective residential community of Cornell University students and faculty. Founded in 1910 by American industrialist L. L. Nunn, the house grants room and board scholarships to a number of undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty members affiliated with the university's various colleges and programs. A fully residential intellectual society, the Telluride House takes as its pillars democratic self-governance, communal living and intellectual inquiry. Students granted the house's scholarship are known as Telluride Scholars.

The Telluride House is considered the first program of the educational non-profit Telluride Association, which was founded a year after the house was built and was first led by the Smithsonian Institution’s fourth Secretary Charles Doolittle Walcott. Nunn went on to found Deep Springs College in 1917. The Telluride Association founded and maintained other branches thereafter, two of which—at Cornell University and at the University of Michigan—are still active. The Association also runs free selective programs for high school students, including the Telluride Association Summer Program.

In its more than a century of operation, the house's membership has included some of Cornell's most notable alumni and faculty members. Located in the university's West Campus, the Telluride House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Lucien Lucius Nunn was an American industrialist and entrepreneur involved in the early electrification of the mining industry. To staff the power plants he built, including ones in Colorado and the Olmsted Station Powerhouse in Provo, Utah, Nunn created an early work study program, which he named 'Telluride Institute' after his city of residence of Telluride, Colorado. In the Institute, Nunn's students were trained in engineering and the liberal arts. Upon completion of their institute program, the student workers were sent to various academic institutions on a scholarship from Nunn to further their education. Many of these students went on to study at Cornell University's engineering programs. On Cornell University's campus in Ithaca, Nunn built the Telluride House as a scholarship residence "for bright young men", many of whom have passed through Nunn's Telluride Institute.

The house's initial purpose, as described by Cornell historian Morris Bishop was "to grant [the students] release from all material concern, a background of culture, the responsibility of managing their own household, and the opportunity to live and learn from resident faculty members and eminent visitors [to the university]". The house started electing members from disciplines outside engineering within years of its founding. With a solely male membership for its first half century of existence, the house would start electing female members to its residential scholarship in the 1960s, starting with U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins as a resident faculty fellow in 1960, Laura Wolfowitz (the elder sister of American politician and academic Paul Wolfowitz, himself a house member) as a house member in 1962, and literary theorist and postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak as a house member in 1963.

The Telluride House is located on Cornell University's West Campus, directly downhill from Willard Straight Hall, and houses Telluride scholars as well as the Telluride Association's main office. It has been described as an "Arts and Crafts style mansion" outfitted with "expensive Mission style and Stickley furniture", with "high ceilings" and "large windows overlooking sloping lawns". A 1980s project of the Telluride Association renovated the House and furnished it in accordance with its original architectural style.

In 2011, the Telluride House building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Students and faculty members of Cornell University are invited to apply to the Telluride House in a yearly process known as 'preferment'. Preferment, like other house matters, is decided on democratically by house members. However, faculty members of the house cannot vote. Telluride House members also contribute to the Association's work, through reading and evaluating applications for Telluride programs, such as the Telluride Association Summer Program.

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