What’s New, Again
I’m always excited for ACUI’s annual “What’s New” edition in The Bulletin. By sharing new ideas, new programs, and new services, college union professionals are essentially sharing new creative ideas and best practices. In fact, we’ve been asking what’s new in college unions since the Association was founded. When Case Western, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio State, Purdue, and Wisconsin sat down together in 1914, they wanted to know what each was doing on their campuses to advance campus community. They wanted to learn from each other, and 112 years later, we’re still asking, and subsequently finding, new ways to improve our college unions and create a sense of belonging for students. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Post World War I, in 1920, delegates from 21 schools visited the University of Michigan for the Association’s annual convention. The architects of the Michigan Union noted that the design of a college union needed to be forward thinking, indicating that a building frozen in an old style would “chain the living institution to the dead past,” instead of letting it grow into whatever its students needed. Sound familiar? A “what’s new” issue I consistently hear today was also raised at this earliest of meetings: What campuses were doing to generate new revenue? Sources mentioned included the restaurant and cafeteria, soda bar, cigar and candy store, billiards, lodgings, bowling alley, and barber shop. Operas and vaudeville shows were also noted as money-makers at the time.
Following World War II, the GI Bill sent veterans to college by the millions, which catapulted the building of new college unions. Porter Butts documented more than 60 new union buildings under construction in just a few years, most of them built as war memorials. There is no doubt as buildings were being built that lots of “what’s new” questions were being asked, trying to make the best and most current options available to students.
The 1960s brought the Higher Education Act of 1965 and a new wave of students onto campus, just as the civil rights movement and Vietnam reshaped what those students expected from their college experience—and from their college union. The Bulletin covered it in real time, noting changes for professional staff in doing their job. “Because of the problems of sit-ins, demonstrations, etc.,” one 1968 article reported, “union directors have more, even day to day, contact with the dean’s office, the disciplinary office, security officers, the university president,” adding that students were “demanding and receiving a greater voice in the operation of our union buildings” and “becoming less inclined to take advice from union administrators.”
Across time one of the most frequent areas to ask “what’s new” is with technology. Look at any union floor plan across the decades, and you can watch technology rewrite the building, room by room. Assembly halls built for lectures and concerts doubled as movie theaters once films became a campus fixture in the middle decades of the 20th century. By the 1990s, unions were wiring their buildings with ethernet and building computer labs, until 1999 when Carnegie Mellon became the United States’ first campus-wide wireless network. Wireless became a necessity, and unions were moving as quickly as possible to add Wi-Fi access points. And banks of phone booths lined the college union halls for decades until cell phones made them obsolete in the early 2000s. In the 2010s, bulletin boards were retired at many unions, replaced with display monitors to announce meetings, events, and campus programs. And game room arcades that once ate quarters by the roll gave way to today’s eSports spaces. Technology will continue to advance, and we will continue to ask “what’s new” as we strive to meet student needs through state-of-the-art technology.
So, what’s new today? Besides what you will read about in this issue, what comes to mind for me is the Centennial Blueprint, a project being led by the Wisconsin Union in partnership with ACUI. The goal of the initiative is to define, validate, and advocate for the enduring touchstones and evolving roles of the college union, culminating in a professional toolkit that ensures the relevancy, sustainability, and impact of college unions into the next century. It is hoped that they will guide our efforts to remain relevant, student-centered, inclusive, and aligned with our evolving institutional and societal context.
As college union professionals, we must regularly ask “what’s new” to avoid being stagnant, to remain forward-looking, and to provide the best programs and services to support student engagement and success. At the same time, we reflect on the foundations of why unions exist, the role of the college union, and, as with the Centennial Blueprint project, deliberately ask what should define a college union for the next 100 years. We need to embrace what’s new while remaining centered on our values and what’s always been the case for advancing campus community.
