The John V. Roach Honors College Frog Camp Returns in Munich
Whatever you imagine when you hear the phrase “face lit up,” that is what Landon Peugh’s looked like as he described touring Neuschwanstein Castle during Frog Camp in Munich this July with TCU’s John V. Roach Honors College.
“The music room was my favorite part,” said Peugh, an incoming first-year student from Arlington, Texas, majoring in music education. He plays bassoon in TCU’s concert band and alto sax in the marching band.
This is not just a story about cool things done during Frog Camp, TCU’s iconic riff on first-year student orientation. This is a story about stories: the ones we tell and the ones we forget, and what happens when we return.
“I have so many alumni say to me, ‘I remember my Frog Camp, traveling with the chancellor,’” said Ron Pitcock, the Wassenich Family Dean of Roach Honors College. “This gets back to the core memory piece. These students are creating these at TCU, and they haven’t even taken a class yet.”
Pitcock’s scholarly background is in rhetoric and literature, and he teaches a class in cultural memory. That means he has spent a lot of time with the question: “What do we remember?” And maybe just as importantly, “what do we forget?” Only recently, though, did he think about this as it relates to institutional memory and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Pitcock has students for whom 9/11 is a story they have only read. He knows the lockdowns, cancellations and chaos during Covid will fade as well. What also risks being forgotten are things that were meant to go away only temporarily but that never came back. Things like the Honors Frog Camp.
The Roach Honors College had been doing a Frog Camp abroad for years. Trips to London;
Rome; Seville, Spain; Paris; and Berlin produced core memories for a decade of incoming
Frogs. Then Covid happened and those trips were canceled. Soon four years had passed.
TCU Chancellor Emeritus Victor J. Boschini, Jr., honestly can’t remember why he brought
up Honors Frog Camp. He was speaking to honors students in the spring, and somehow
one of the previous trips came up, just a casual comment dropped into the conversation.
“A student jumped in and said, ‘Wait, what is that? We want that,’” Pitcock recalls. “They had no knowledge of an Honors Frog Camp.”
Boschini remembers saying: “Wait, we don’t do that anymore? Let’s bring it back.”
Pitcock sat on it a whole month, waiting for the opportunity to remind Boschini of those last four words. That reminder was not needed. Boschini already had been working to bring back this Horned Frog tradition.
Like every leader, regardless of industry, in the Covid era, Boschini had to make choices, and others were made for him. This was something he could do, something he could bring back.
“How can a student have a better start to their four years than this?” Boschini asked. “These student experiences are pride points for me, one of the best things we do, and it needed to come back.”
The John V. Roach Honors College is a unique place at TCU. All of its students are majoring in something different but coming together in honors. This Frog Camp was designed, according to Pitcock, “to create an intense academic experience and a community connection that comes back to the residence hall.” They achieved this and more in Munich.
The itinerary is designed by Pitcock and is intentional. The late evenings are filled with what they call “night adventures.” In Munich, there was one night in particular that stood out for all 25 first-year students, the four upperclassmen, four faculty and staff, one dean and one chancellor emeritus. They went to the White Rose Memorial at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and learned about siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, and how they were executed for distributing pamphlets urging resistance to the Nazis.
Peugh said nobody returned from Munich not impacted by what they did and learned. He knows this because that group now sees one other regularly in Milton Daniel Hall, the residence hall where many Roach Honors students live, and Frog Camp helped calm his nerves about finding his people.
“It’s given me an advantage before classes even start,” Peugh said.
And now it’s part of his TCU story.