Miamian Fall '08 - The Evolution of Student Life

The 18-year-old math major walks up Slant Walk during the crisp fall evening, past the red bricks of Elliott and Stoddard to King Library. He’s listening to Coldplay on his iPod while he texts a buddy on his cell phone, his laptop in a backpack slung over his shoulder.

Oblivious to the history and autumn beauty surrounding him, he pulls open one of the main doors to the library and a gust of wind greets him, as if the building needs to vent a bit of the intensity inside.

In the lobby, he turns right and heads downstairs, following the buzz of conversation to the open study space known as King Café. Scanning the crowd, he spots the classmates he’s joining to hammer out a project. It’s 1 a.m. on a Thursday morning and every table is full with laptop-laden students collaborating on assignments.

With its nearly round-the-clock accessibility and group study space, King Library is the current hub of student activity on Oxford’s campus. Ironically, the library is too popular these days. It can’t begin to handle the crowds it’s attracting. And therein lies the problem, a good problem, but a problem nonetheless.

The same was true a few generations ago when Alumni Hall, the main library at the time, was “fast becoming a week-night rendezvous, with consequent deterioration of the atmosphere conducive to study,” according to an Oct. 8, 1946, Miami Student editorial.

With the end of World War II, enrollment hit a record high at 4,500, and Miami students, who had been lobbying for a permanent student union center since 1940, started demanding it.

A World War II barrack served as a stopgap measure. The 100-by-30-foot structure with Navy mess tables made over into booths was erected near today’s Laws Hall and became known as the Redskin Reservation. In the meantime, students and alumni continued to raise funds for a permanent structure.

Ever since colonial days, college students have rallied classmates to create organizations and accompanying spaces so that they could enjoy extracurricular activities.

One person knowledgeable about such happenings is Barbara Jones, Miami’s new vice president for Student Affairs. A self-proclaimed history nut, she says the idea of student unions, perhaps better known today as student centers, began in the early 1800s at Cambridge and Oxford — the one in England. The first was literally a “union” of three debating societies.

By the 1830s, the concept crossed the ocean to U.S. colleges where students had few informal places to gather, eat, and discuss topics of the day.

“So the students put their resources together and built a building,” Jones said. “The universities didn’t own them. The students created the student unions, they created the glee clubs, the student press, the theater and put on plays.”

At Miami, the first two student organizations started only a year after classes began. Located on the third floor of Old Main (the site of today’s Harrison Hall), the Erodelphian and the Union met on Friday evenings to vigorously debate feminism, slavery, and various kinds of social and economic progress.

While these two literary societies received the administration’s blessing, fraternities were another matter. Concerned about giving students too much power to organize, some faculty fought against the then secret Greek societies.

The battle over fraternities and autonomy came to a head at Miami with the 1848 snowball rebellion when students, many of them fraternity members, filled Old Main with snow. Furious, President Erasmus MacMaster expelled most of the student body. When the board discovered enrollment had dropped precipitously, Dr. MacMaster “resigned.”

“What was really significant about the rebellion was it meant that after 1849, Miami life would include organizations founded, created, and operated by students as an official part of university life,” said Curt Ellison, professor of history and American studies. Ellison is the coordinating editor of the soon-to-be-released history book Miami University, 1809-2009: Bicentennial Perspectives.

While working on the book, he concluded that one of the few continuities throughout the eras has been student life, with students often starting organizations despite a lack of resources and facilities, as was the case with the bicycle club, the football club, nine baseball clubs, the Miami Student newspaper, and many others.

Today Miami’s student organizations top 350 with more than 70 percent of the students saying they participate in at least one activity.

It’s doubtful anybody attending the 1957 dedication of the University Center imagined students would ever create that many organizations. Then again, they also never imagined enrollment would grow to almost 16,000, nearly 2.5 times the enrollment in the 1950s.

For many years, the University Center, today known as the Shriver Center, catered to the smaller student body exactly as planned, Ellison said. A “student social center and student activity building,” it contained lounges, a ballroom, a bookstore, recreational areas with pool tables and bowling alley, a snack bar and restaurant, the Zebra Room with its striped booths for studying, meeting rooms, and a dozen or so offices for student organizations.

However, because the university lacked enough other facilities for conferences and meetings, the dedication of the building solely to student functions eroded. The bowling alley and Zebra Room are long gone; few comfortable, casual seating areas remain; and an inadequate number of student offices are tucked away on the third floor.

While enrollment has grown, students’ interests and needs have evolved as well.

Observing the evolution firsthand is Susan Mosley-Howard, associate vice president for Student Affairs and longtime dean of students. She came to Miami in 1983 to teach in educational psychology.

“They’ve changed in the way they interact, intellectually and socially. There’s no longer this time-bound interaction, no longer this ‘we interact in class and then you go to the library and you do your research and then you go home.’ I just responded to an e-mail that one of my students sent me at midnight.”

Because students are up at 3 in the morning having all kinds of discussions, they need a place that is open 24/7 where they can meet with each other, do their work, eat, socialize, and enjoy some recreation.

“That’s why King Café is so popular,” Mosley-Howard explained. “Our library is being used as a proxy for a student center and that is not the appropriate venue.”

So, on the cusp of the university’s 200th anniversary, Miami is launching a public fundraising effort for a Bicentennial Student Center (BSC).

Plans locate it where Rowan, Gaskill, and Culler are today. This will place it across the street from Shriver Center, which will continue to host university and community events. There are intentions to greatly expand the bookstore in Shriver, although no amount of remodeling would allow Shriver to serve the competing and growing needs of the students, faculty, staff, and community, Mosley-Howard explained.

Intended to complement Shriver’s facilities, the BSC as it is currently proposed will be a 200,000+ square-foot building following in the campus’s red-brick, Georgian tradition. It will hold offices and meeting places for the student organizations now scattered around campus. Other features will include group study rooms, up-to-date technology, and a 600-seat theater, plus food and recreation spaces.

What excites Student Body President Mike Scott the most is the way the center, which is being referred to as the “family room” of the Oxford campus, will encourage face-to-face interaction, something today’s plugged-in students miss out on as they walk around campus with iPods in their ears and cell phones in their hands.

Scott, a political science senior from Dublin, Ohio, envisions the new student center as the “heart of social interaction.” He could see Associated Student Government across the hall from the Miami Student or the College Republicans and Democrats sharing coffee and issues.

Focusing on the center as the Bicentennial’s top project, President David Hodge echoes Scott’s observations.

“The very first time I raised the question with a group of students as to what they would like to see in a new student center, the No. 1 thing they said? Study space. That blew my socks off. They don’t think we have enough study space, especially informal and collaborative spaces. Even King Library is bursting at the seams.

“Here students will be working on class projects. They’ll also be working together on their co-curricular activities, their clubs, their organizations. There will be so much going on in so many different dimensions of their lives — food, entertainment, student groups, study areas.”

Hodge envisions the BSC as the focal point for the student 24/7 experience, the place on campus that everything else swirls around.

When Mosley-Howard toured several colleges with her son last year, virtually every campus they visited had a relatively new student center.

“Adolescents and their parents are savvy consumers,” she said. “My 17-year-old was bowled over by these new student centers. And as a parent, you know what that said to me? This university is saying students matter. They are our primary focus.”

Scott is Miami’s ninth consecutive student body president to ask for a student center, demonstrating an ongoing concern among students.

With sophomores required to live on campus beginning next fall, the need for a center becomes more pressing to Scott, who sits on the BSC’s planning committee.

He realizes that he won’t be on campus if the BSC opens in 2014 as projected. Still, he wants to help build something that benefits Miami’s next generation of students, just as past generations cultivated Miami for him.

“College is a very dynamic thing. It is always changing and always should be changing, and that’s what we’re looking at with the new student center.”

For more about the Bicentennial Student Center, go to www.muohio.edu/bsc.

Donna Boen ’83 MTSC ’96 is the editor of Miamian. Photos from Miami University Libraries.