Education: A More Perfect Union

The hub of the U.S. campus today is neither lab, library, gym nor classroom, but a huge fun house called the student union that blends the looks of a USO. a Howard Johnson’s and the old Havana Hilton with the dreams of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Claiming a vague kinship with Britain’s Oxbridge Unions, and aided by generous Government loans, student unions have multiplied seven-fold since World War II to more than 600 now, with at least 200 more under way.

To form a more perfect union, Stanford this week opened its $2.6 million Tresidder Memorial Union, a handsome hacienda that does wonders for the university’s architecture, which is mostly a blend of Early Southern Pacific and Neo-Romanesque. “Our motto is coffee and culture,” glows Director Chester A. Berry, 46. Just for a start. Berry will soon launch “Project Da Vinci”—stuffing Tresidder with Leonardo’s notebooks, reproductions of his sketches and 35 working models of his inventions.

Bears & Beauties. Tresidder will indeed be a cultural filling-station, boasting a first-rate bookstore, a circulating art library, rooms for chess, reading and music. The question is whether minds can meet above the din of a nine-table ping-pong room, a ten-table billiard room, a 375-seat cafeteria and the crash of pins in the 14-lane bowling alley ($150.000 for automatic pinsetters alone).

Student unions across the U.S. can hardly get along these days without big parking garages, rifle ranges, theaters, ballrooms, beauty and barber shops. Last year 240,000 visitors jammed the University of Minnesota’s massive center to do everything from making mosaics to hearing lunchtime chamber music by the Minneapolis Symphony. Bowlers at Ohio State’s union play 200,000 games a year; its cafeterias serve 800,000 meals. The University of California’s six-level center at Berkeley is a $6.7 million crazy quilt that wags call “Jack Tar East” after a garish San Francisco hotel; it will soon become a four-building center housing 150 student clubs, a 2,000-seat auditorium, a hushed “meditation room” and a raucous snack bar inevitably called “Bear’s Lair.” New York University’s ten-story, $5,000,000 center offers diners a view of Washington Square; Tulane’s $3,000,000 “living room” has an Olympic-sized swimming pool with poolside snack service.

In round-the-clock operation, Purdue’s Memorial Union complex runs twin dance halls, 16 bowling alleys, banquet facilities for 1,500. It has 254 hotel rooms—and grosses $1,743,000 a year. The till fills with regular proceeds and student fees that average about $4 a semester. To handle such business, N.Y.U. last year launched a two-year graduate course in “college union management.”

Thundering Waste? Critics call student unions a “frill” that now costs U.S. campuses more than $61.2 million a year—the price of 4,080 more Harvard professors.”It’s a thundering waste to buy bowling alleys,” grumbles one Stanford professor, “when you have a library like a smalltown public high school’s.” Yet with the notable exception of the Ivy League schools, which shun them, student unions grow increasingly popular. The union is the one place where students can meet informally with profs who usually see only a blur of faces in classes of 500 to 2,000. Berkeley’s Director Forrest Tregea calls his union “a home away from home,” where 25,000 students “can identify and not feel as if they are part of an IBM machine.” Says Tregea valiantly: “If you can agree that education is more than development of the intellect, we run an educational service.”