The Vassar Chronicles | College Center built to encourage campus activity

Jon Cruz Columnist

The early 1970s were a time of change. Vassar College was not exempt from the rapidly changing attitudes of the country.

The College’s move towards welcoming men to the campus in 1969 is perhaps the most obvious change, as well as a dramatic first step in what became a widespread movement towards co-education. Nationwide, however, there were a number of great changes on campuses beyond letting men and women learn together.

The overarching theme of these changes was student involvement.

At Vassar, this larger movement manifested itself in many ways. Residents began to assert themselves as active players, rather than passive followers, particularly concerning policies in academic and residential life. For the first time, students gained influence over academic policy and—increasingly—over faculty positions and tenure. Most importantly, perhaps, or at least most visibly, the Student Government Association (forerunner to the Vassar Student Organization) gained increasing influence over campus life during this time period. The organization’s more important role was reflected in its acquisition of a large office suite in a new structure on campus named the College Center.

The College Center was conceptualized as a new hub for campus activity; in particular, the College hoped to restore Main Building as the focus of campus life. Certainly, with mailboxes and the campus bookstore, the old building was well-traversed. The decentralization of the campus—the library and chapel had long since moved from the building, and the creation of other dorms and classroom buildings in the late nineteenth century had shifted the building away from an academic focus—and the existence of a Students’ Building, however, had caused Main to lose a lot of its luster as a campus hangout.

However, as noted in a previous column, the Students’ Building had lost its place as a campus icon after Vassar went co-ed, because the building was hastily—and sloppily—converted into a dining center, with the two story interior and beautiful Adams plaster ceiling obscured by the kitchen and relatively small, modern dining rooms. Suddenly, the building that had served as a location for campus dances, musical performances, and late-night studying was no longer available. A new space was needed.

That new space was the College Center, constructed in 1974 and opened with great fanfare. Billed as a tasteful rebirth of the back end of Main, the building foresaw campus planning that was instituted years later under Fran Fergusson’s watch—that is, the reconstruction of Vassar’s “backyard”—while avoiding the perceived problem that has plagued some of Vassar’s other “additions” or annexes to existing buildings: the construction was tasteful and largely uncontroversial.

In fact, the building’s design—in which a modern structure was wrapped around the old building, allowing a playful use of glass and brick to complement the original building while turning its exterior into a beautiful interior—won a major award from the American Institute of Architects, which praised the architects and the College specifically for the depth of the project.

The construction of the College Center was not without precedent nationally, of course; the movement towards more active catering to students was complemented by the increasing construction of student unions on campuses across the country. The College Center was not advertised as such a building, however, and rightfully so: outside businesses were not welcomed, and there were few specialized spaces in the building for general campus entertainment. For example, there was no interior bowling alley, or pool hall, though original plans call for (and back issues of The Miscellany News refer to) a game room in what is now the building’s multipurpose room.

More importantly, the College Center was conceived of as a central gathering space for the college community itself, not the students exclusively, which was an important distinction from the endowed student unions that increasingly dotted campuses during the time. Of course, while its name indicated that it was not designed only for students (and the fact that its dining areas were open to faculty and staff contributed to this inclusiveness), the majority of its functions were geared towards the college’s youngest members.

One space not delineated specifically for pupils, of course, was the new home of the Retreat. An alternative from the recently centralized dining center on campus, the Retreat’s model has remained surprisingly steady over the years, with a generous helping of short order grill options, a sandwich selection, and a collection of soups, drinks, and the like. The Retreat of the newly-liberated 1970s, however, held an important distinction from the Retreat of today: students could (and often did!) purchase six-packs of beer, right on campus.

Students were also able to purchase beer and other drinks in the Mug, another new addition to campus with the construction of the College Center. The Mug, however, was not seen as a mere dance space and bar, however; like other areas in the building, including the Retreat, it was seen as an open area accessible to all members of the community and available for use by those members. Today, many performances and shows are still held in the space, but are no longer the primary function of the spot.

Before one assumes that the ability to buy beer led to a rowdier College Center, it is important to keep one thing in mind: curfews. Only a few years prior to the construction of the building, students lived under relatively strict curfews. When the school went co-ed, curfews were made later, but only for seniors. (These older students were permitted to return to campus by 2:30 a.m. on any given night of the week.) It took the arrival of men, however, for the College to abolish limits and heterosexist rules against overnight visits from members of the opposite gender, and eventually, to abolish restrictive curfews all together.

Though curfews were removed, the mentality of an early close to the evening on campus carried through when the new building opened: the center was closed by ten on some nights of the week, and on midnight on the weekends. Worse yet, the Retreat closed at 4:30 on Friday afternoons and did not reopen until Monday morning. It seemed to some as though the college was defeating the purpose of its own building by preventing the structure from turning into an actual hub of activity, a nexus of campus life. Instead, the building was shut off at the very hours in which it was most desired. (One can imagine, then, that the Mug was indeed far from the dancing scene one might find today.)

The administration’s rationale? An understandable one: the bottom line.

Indeed, the College felt hiring additional security officers was too costly a measure and, without such officers, was worried that students would be left unprotected in a large building late at night. Thus, the school decided to keep the building closed.

Of course, this eventually changed; officers were hired and students had access to the building that they had so long desired. These new officers—who made late night use of the Mug, the VSA offices, and the College Center itself possible—were part of a larger tradition of security and the maintenance of order on campus, a subject that I will touch upon in my next column, as I explore Vassar’s transformation from an institution whose order was kept by a lady principal and a staff of dedicated assistants to an institution with a full, modern campus security force.