Psychology Students, Faculty Bid Farewell to Alumni Memorial Hall

By Marcus Smith '27, Student Correspondent

While The University of Scranton community celebrates the opening of the new Robert S. ʼ68 and Marilyn A. Weiss Hall this semester, the students and faculty of the Psychology Department face a bittersweet farewell to their old facilities in Alumni Memorial Hall (AMH).

John C. Norcross, Ph.D, distinguished professor of psychology, praised the new facility, calling it a “major upgrade for students, faculty and education at The University of Scranton.”

AMH still has a purpose at the University, including serving as the headquarters for Technology Support, although the Psychology Department bid the facility a sentimental goodbye.

“It’s home,” Dr. Norcross, who was the interim chair of the department when it relocated from AMH, said. “It’s like when people return to smaller homes that are a little more modest than what they have now. You look at it and you whistle and say, ‘How do we all fit in here?’ We go back and say, ‘How do we ever do it?’”

According to Dr. Norcross, AMH is where the Psychology Department began to grow.

“Alumni Memorial Hall is where our faculty began to diversify in terms of adding specialties,” Dr. Norcross said.

Not only that, it also produced remarkable students.

“We were still able to regularly get our majors up into the 80th percentile compared to other psychology graduates on the standardized metrics,” he said.

Jill Warker, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, relocated into Weiss Hall at the beginning of the school year alongside the rest of the Psychology Department. But Dr. Warker still holds fond memories of seeing students daily in AMH.

“We would see students all the time. They would hang out and I regularly interacted with them. We were very cozy,” Dr. Warker said.

At the end of the spring semester of 2025, the Psychology Department held a gathering to say goodbye to its old facilities in AMH. Numerous alumni and retired professors returned to say goodbye and leave messages.

“We said we should have a reception inviting people to record their memories, take some photos and thus we started the memory wall,” Dr. Norcross said.

Dr. Norcross was the first to write on the wall.

“I was told I should be leading the charge,” he said.

The memory wall stands directly across from the stairs on the third floor of AMH where students and faculty wrote on it in colored markers.

“It is really nice when you go up the stairs, you see other people’s experiences of being in AMH and how fond they were of it,” Dr. Warker said.

While most of the messages are sentimental, some of them are humorous, as well, such as one note saying, “I’m NOT leaving. Come arrest me.”

The department left markers out for the rest of the semester, allowing people to add on to the wall.

The building opened in 1960 as the school library, according to records kept by the Weinberg Memorial Library, but later housed the Technology Support Center and Office of Planning and Institutional Effectiveness in addition to the Psychology Department.

AMH remains the home of Technology Support and also contains many offices and meeting spaces. The associate vice president of facilities management, James Caffrey, DBA, said the University is "currently evaluating the important role that Alumni Memorial Hall will play in the future for offices and departments."