In the News

The newest and handsomest building on the University of Minnesota campus is dedicated, without apologies, to coeducation’s leisure hours. Coffman Memorial Union is hedged about by many citadels of learning, and it is a refuge from every one of them. No legends in granite above its doors forbid the entrance of dull care, but thus far they have not been needed. In Minneapolis, high above the Mississippi River, which curves between steep banks a block away, this $2,000,000 structure contains the social and recreational nerve centers of a university which ranks, on the basis of full-time student enrollment, as the second largest in the country. Like all student unions, it serves as a campus clubhouse, as an escape from the classrooms, as a shelter for the undergraduate pursued textbook tedium. To a greater extent than some, it is an all-university meeting place, the focal point for student, alumni and faculty activities. No building anywhere better reveals the Union as the extraordinary institution it is, in all its modern streamlined splendor.  

The story of Coffman Memorial Union really begins more than thirty years ago, when the need for adequate recreational facilities on Minnesota’s campus was just being felt. In 1906, this need was met for the women students with the construction of Shevlin Hall. Seven years later, a sepulchral chemistry building was converted into a Men’s Union. But between 1920 and 1940, Minnesota’s student body more than doubled. In 1936, its late president, Lotus D. Coffman, began the work of translating the dream of a great all-university center into reality. Doctor Coffman died before the dream came true, but the building which is a memorial to him is in many respects one of the most remarkable that grace an American campus today. It is the Union idea transformed into glittering superlatives. 

When Coffman Memorial Union was opened last fall, the skeptics turned out in force. They surveyed its profusion of lounges and restaurants, noted the lavishness of its appointments, and were frankly disturbed. The conviction of these good people that the world was going to the dogs via the Minnesota campus was not lessened by the four gold-bronze columns which tower two stories high in the main lounge, or by the chartreuse velvet overdraperies which may be dimly seen across the magnificent distances of the ballroom. 

It may now be reported that these skeptics are gradually reconciling themselves to the Union, although the first sixty days had a slight touch of comic-opera daffiness about them which tended to confirm the worst fears. The students who insisted on dancing without shoes in its palatial ballroom startled editorial writers into action as far away as St. Louis. A blizzard filled its great halls and lounges with ski suits, parkas, galoshes, ear muffs, lumberjack boots and an informal igloo atmosphere. 

The students who first challenged the conventions by parking their shoes along the ballroom walls while dancing are back in their oxfords again, but only after a spirited controversy which rocked the campus. The boys and girls were impressed by a ballroom proportioned like the Mammoth Cave, yet the dour dictum of Emily Post said that ladies and gentlemen must wear shoes for dancing struck them as nonsense. In support of some of their convictions, some of them picketed the Union with plaintive signs, UNFAIR TO FEET and SAVE OUR SOLES. At the peak of the crisis, Bernie Bierman’s football huskies emerged in the role of picketers, but even such campus idols as All-American Urban Odson failed to sway the Union Board of Governors. The vulgarian practice of dancing sans shoes is now officially forbidden and in the vast reaches of the ballroom there is a decorous yielding to the worst.  

The men’s lounge on the second floor is a symphony of green and yellow tones, with wood of white oak, bleached and filled. The women’s lounge on the same floor soothes the eye with tones of faded violet rose, and mahogany finished like rosewood is used for the furniture. The alumni lounge manages to be fairly ostentatious with blue walls, deep blue carpetings and furnishings of blue, red and off-white. The faculty, too, is well provided for, and its lounges on the stratospheric levels of the Campus Club yield nothing to the others in beauty and appointments. (Left: Studying is the exception, dancing is not. Over protests, the Union forbade students to dance without shoes)

Lounging is shown by a student survey to rank next in favor to bowling as a Union activity, if such a sedentary skill is an activity. The seasoned lounger abounds on the campus, and in the Union finds a well upholstered paradise. At noon, the lounges overflow with earnest devotees of the art who appraise their regal surroundings with a meditative eye and settle weighty problems stemming from next season’s football outlook or yesterday’s blind date. Studying is not discouraged in the lounges, but if it were, it would not require many proctors to root the evil out. There is the university library, after all, for such unsocial goings on.

The satisfying of the appetites sharpened by the cold winter winds which sweep about the campus is a big business at the Union. It keeps two 40-gallon kettles a simmer and gives part-time employment to more than 100 students. In one month, the central kitchen served 123,000 meals, and an ordinary week may see Union patrons consuming 3,500 pounds of meat, two and one–half tons of potatoes, 10,000 bottles of milk and 600 gallons of ice cream. 

For undergraduates so inclined—and they are chiefly freshmen—there are non–dancing parties in the game room on Saturday nights. These affairs have an atmosphere of Halloween informality, and the blowing of ping-pong balls across a table in a test of lung power is considered prime sport. 

The concern which is shown for the social life of the dance-shy student is simply one reflection of the Union’s all-inclusiveness. The organization of dances and dinners which are held there are often resplendent affairs, but they by no means dominate the program of activities. In the Union, for example, the gawky youngster who feels he is lacking in the graces of the drawing room may enroll in a class stressing social skills. Here, the proper method of introducing his girlfriend will be disclosed to him, and the mysteries veiling the correct use of table silverware rolled back. 

The Union is the starting place for organized student hikes. It is a center where the community singer may find kindred souls to join him in mass harmonies. It offers a respite from the loneliness and boredom of Sunday afternoons, when a special effort is made to keep it socially alive with free concerts and movies. It is even a place where Betty Coed may receive free bowling and billiard instruction, if a sense of humility should convince her of the need. 

Roughly half of the undergraduates at Minnesota earn a portion of their way through school, some 300 of them at part-time work that is provided in the Union. An air of democratic good-fellowship pervades this super clubhouse, for all aristocratic dignity of its appointments. Fraternity and sorority lines, never too tightly drawn, are still further relaxed in the Union. Here the daughters of Lowry Hill socialites in Minneapolis bowl with South Dakota’s children of the soil, and here the son of the Mesabi Range miner shoots pool with the scions of St. Paul’s exclusive Summit Avenue. 

To the undergraduate who receives all of its many benefits for a quarterly fee of only three dollars, the Union is not so much an amazing institution as it is a simple necessity.  is is particularly the case with the thousands of students who commute daily to the university from their homes in the Twin Cities area, and who find in the Union a spare-time campus home. In schools where dormitory life predominates, the need for such a building is not so keenly felt; but for Minnesota, with its heavy preponderance of students living away from the campus, it fills a great social void. For Minnesota’s colossal clubhouse on the Mississippi, there are unquestionably colossal years ahead.