Telluride House

, Telluride House founder. 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 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. == Building ==

, Uris Library and Barnes Hall. 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. == Membership ==

Students and faculty members of Cornell University are invited to apply to the Telluride House in a yearly process known as 'preferment'. 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. British Jamaican artist and art historian Petrine Archer-Straw, classicist Martin Bernal, physicist Carl M. Bender, philosopher and classicist Allan Bloom, former United States Congressman and President of the World Bank Barber Conable, author Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt, Nigerian academic Michael Echeruo, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics Richard Feynman, political scientist and political economist Francis Fukuyama, American political theorist William Galston, multiple Tony- winning director and producer and founding artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum Gordon Davidson, British philosopher Paul Grice, UCLA philosopher Barbara Herman, conservative politician and diplomat Alan Keyes, European intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra, former New York City Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy, University of Maryland, College Park president Wallace Loh, NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel, chemist, peace activist and Nobel Chemistry and Peace Prize laureate Linus Pauling, American classical musician Martin Pearlman, United States Secretary of Labor and the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet Frances Perkins, Cornell philosopher, dean and vice-president George Holland Sabine, gender and queer studies theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, American anthropologist Clare Selgin Wolfowitz, political scientist Stephen Sestanovich, literary theorist and postcolonial and gender studies scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Czech economist and politician Jan Švejnar, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics Steven Weinberg, Former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, World Bank president, diplomat and academic Paul Wolfowitz, journalist and writer William T. Vollmann, and biophysicist and virologist Robley C. Williams. File:Richard_Feynman_Nobel.jpg|Richard FeynmanTheoretical physicist and Nobel Prize laureate File:Francis_Fukuyama_2005.jpg|Francis FukuyamaPolitical scientist and author of The End of History and the Last Man File:Perkins USNR.jpg|Frances PerkinsUnited States Secretary of Labor and first female member of the Cabinet of the United States File:Eve_Kosofsky_Sedgwick_by_David_Shankbone.jpg|Eve Kosofsky SedgwickGender studies, queer theory, and critical theory scholar File:Gayatri_Spivak_on_Subversive_Festival.jpg|Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakLiterary theorist and postcolonial scholar File:Paul_Wolfowitz.jpg|Paul WolfowitzPolitician, diplomat, academic, and former President of the World Bank == Reputation ==

(the House's first female resident), Abram Shulsky, George Sabine, Carl M. Bender, and Robley Williams. The Telluride House has been variously described as an organization "so peculiar in purpose and practice", an "unusually rich and intense academic experience", That the house was home to so many neoconservatives in the 1970s has led to it being dubbed "a designated breeding ground for conservative intellectuals in their larval state". Frances Perkins, the longest serving U.S. Secretary of Labor and the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet, was elected to the house in 1960, where she resided until her death in 1965. Perkins reportedly described her happiness at her invitation to the house to her friends saying, "I felt like a bride on my wedding night." She was heavily involved in the house's self-governance process, attended weekly house meetings, tended the house garden, and befriended fellow house faculty member Allan Bloom. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick met her husband Hal Sedgwick at the Telluride House. In her time at Cornell, women had only recently been allowed to join the Telluride House and it still had a predominantly male membership. As a result, the Telluride House was reportedly "a strongly masculine environment", and "proved a rich vein of experience for Sedgwick to mine in her explorations of homosociality", a term she popularized. Unlike Perkins and Feynman, writer William T. Vollmann had an unfavourable view of house life and his experiences there in the early 1980s. He described house culture as "elitist", "inbred" and "vanguardist", and criticized house members' use of ingroup jargon, such as "III" or "Informal Intellectual Interchange". == See also ==