Generations of Colby graduates recall the intense and cordial relations among students and faculty members, in and out of the classroom, as one of the best things about their four years in Waterville. A couple of programs are making it easier than ever for students to pick a professor's brain at lunchtime or to dissect a book over dinner. To call either last year's residence hall reading initiative or the "Take a Professor to Lunch" program formal is misleading. In the first, you could find biology professor Paul Greenwood sitting on the floor in the Averill lounge surrounded by eight pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream and two dozen sticky students arguing about who gets the last scoop of Cherry Garcia and whether Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is a bilious technophobe or a conscientious prophet of human self-destruction. "Take a Professor to Lunch" might find a student splitting a piece of chocolate cake with English professor Elisa Narin van Court in the Spa and laughing at Chaucer's naughty puns or listening to writer James Finney Boylan ponder why a novel he hadn't finished yet had become hot property in Hollywood. These moments, singular though they may be, are typical of the student-faculty interaction fostered by the two programs established by Robert LaFleur, who is returning to teaching history full time after organizing programs as associate dean of students part time last year. The residence hall reading program could be advertised as a series of informal chats over dinner with professors who get to discuss their favorite books, whether in their academic discipline or not. "Classes" meet in residence hall lounges, dinners are delivered by dining services and discussions, freewheeling as they can be, swirl around a single book. Students get one non-graded credit if they participate in all six sessions. Book choices last spring were as logical as John O'Hara scholar Charles Bassett teaching O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra and anthropologist Jeffrey Anderson, an expert on Native Americans, teaching Vine Deloria's God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Others were as incongruent as Tom Longstaff (religious studies) teaching Bill Gates's The Road Ahead and Paul Greenwood teaching Vonnegut's Galapagos. LaFleur, an Asian history scholar who taught his all-time favorite book, Madame Bovary, said he conceived the dinner-and-books program as a way to offer the faculty's "greatest hits." He said he posed the question to the faculty, "If the world were to end or you were to retire at the end of this semester, what book would you teach?" The residence hall program was a follow-up to "Take a Professor to Lunch," which allows students to arrange meetings with faculty members at meal times. Susan LaFleur, who inherited responsibility for administering both programs as assistant dean of students when Rob returned to full-time teaching, said students were taking 25 to 30 professors to lunch each week last spring. Rob LaFleur, who came from the University of Chicago in 1994, says Colby nurtures close student-faculty relationships, bucking the trend in higher education that has diminished contact between students and their teachers as publishing demands have increased and teaching assistants have proliferated. Having seven faculty members and their partners living in Colby residence halls and 44 others with formal ties to one of the residential Commons puts Colby at the forefront among its peer institutions in terms of student-faculty interaction, and the book discussion and lunch with a professor programs push the College further ahead, according to the LaFleurs, who did an informal survey of NESCAC schools and other colleges. "When I was in admissions," LaFleur said, "the question I was asked most was, `What is the relationship between students and the faculty here?' Our goal is to make Colby the best place in the country for relationships outside the classroom." Response to the inaugural residence hall reading program this spring was extremely favorable, expressed both in the eagerness of faculty and students to take part and in their evaluations, Susan LaFleur said. Plans are under way for another round next fall with only minor changes--dinner menus are being refined and subject matter expanded to other media. Rob LaFleur's idea of "the greatest hits" gets a boost, too--among other offerings in the works, Professor of Music Paul Machlin will spend six nights playing and talking about the music of The Beatles.