Orange Coast College celebrates renovated Garrison Honors Center

Orange Coast College officials, city leaders and students congregated at the Costa Mesa campus Wednesday afternoon for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the opening of the newly renovated Garrison Honors Center.

David Grant, president of the Coast Community College District board, credited the late Tom Garrison, a marine sciences professor and leader of the honors program for 12 years, for initiating the move to establish a hub for honor students.

The program, centrally located on campus, is intended primarily to help students transfer to a four-year university while providing “opportunities for students to distinguish themselves academically,” according to the college.

“I’m grateful to come into a place that’s like a second home,” said Carmen Chavez, president of academic honor society Alpha Gamma Sigma.

Orange Coast College has 16 honor societies in specific disciplines, in addition to a campus-wide honors program in which students can take challenging courses. There also is an honor student council, said Teresa Scarbrough, office coordinator for the honors program.

Any student is eligible to participate in honors classes and societies.

Grant told how he and Garrison pitched the idea of an honors center to the academic senate in the early 1990s, but senators frowned on promoting “elitism” among students.

But the pitch succeeded when they went “armed with students” who listed the potential benefits, Grant said.

Still, work remained to seek out faculty to take on the challenge of modifying their curriculum, he said.

Scarbrough said she met Garrison when she was a student in 1999 and took his “life-changing” honors marine science class.

At the time, there were only five honor societies throughout the campus, she said, and students knew about them only if they were invited in.

Garrison eventually asked Scarbrough to become the first paid employee of the honors program, and she worked in a tiny office she described as a “converted closet with barely any ventilation.”

“Now we have a real home,” she said. “We’ve moved up from that tiny little office with spiders … back in the day.”

In addition to Scarbrough, the honors program has one part-time employee and two part-time federal work study students, with a third coming onboard soon, Scarbrough said.

Priscella.Vega@latimes.com

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