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or 75 years there has been one place on the University of Texas campus where students can go to eat, meet, nap, dance, bowl, drink, skate, study, watch movies, see concerts, play pool, check email, make copies, hear speeches, and get coffee — the Texas Union. When it first opened its doors in 1933, the Union became the center of student life on campus, and it has remained so ever since. No structure on campus has a richer or more remarkable story than the Union. As students’ HQ for seven and a half decades, it has planned and housed a fair portion of the events that have defined campus life over the years, everything from concerts to war rallies to the elaborate and stunning Madrigal Dinner. It has fed many a mouth, hosted many a dance, and housed more student organization meetings than any other building on campus. More than once it has been at the epicenter of controversy. And the Union also has changed enormously, expanding and morphing as the University and student body have as well. Now the Texas Union stands poised for its next and perhaps most dramatic change yet, a long-awaited expansion into a second facility. On the eve of the Union’s 75th birthday (officially Nov. 23), the University will break ground on the Student Activities Center to be built next to Gregory Gymnasium, in the true geographic center of campus, and run by the Union Board of Directors.
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A Look Back and a Look Forward at the Hub of Student Life, now 75 years old b y T i m T al i af e r r o
42 The Alcalde November/December 2008
It’s hard to fathom that for the University’s first 50 years, there was no student center on campus. As originally conceived, the Texas Union was intended to encourage students to get involved with campus life and give them the guidance, money, and physical space to do so. Thus, throughout its history, the Union has been both an organization and a destination. It was and is one of the few buildings on campus where academics is not the priority and students have the most say about what goes on inside it. For many years the Texas Union has been a dichotomous presence on campus, simultaneously ubiquitous and localized, high profile and underground, stately and common, a building and a community. For many new students each fall, it appears to be just a building. Some know of its bowling alley, and others have heard of the famed Junior, a Wendy’s employee known for his fast and flashy cash-register prowess. But few know of its hand in student life, in and out of the building. In 2001, the Texas Union Council became the Student Activities Center, made up of 10 committees that students comprise, some better known than others. Mostly unknown, the Events CoSponsorship Committee divvies up $35,000 a semester to student organizations wanting to put on events. More in the spotlight, the Union-sponsored Distinguished Speaker Series has brought to campus Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Robert F. Kennedy, Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Thurgood Marshall, Truman Capote, Walter Cronkite, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Dalai Lama. Many know about the Cactus Cafe, where many musical greats
— including Lyle Lovett, Townes Van Zandt, Alison Krauss, Nanci Griffith, and Robert Earl Keen — have played, but few know that the Union bankrolls a host of musical and cultural events around campus. Some 17,000 students pass through the Union every day, but few have any inkling of its history. The University Union Project The seed that ultimately sprouted into a student union was planted all the way back in 1907. A lawyer and former regent named Thomas Watt Gregory, LLB 1885, took up the cause of building a men’s gymnasium on the campus. Gregory chaired an Ex-Students’ Association committee formed to raise the necessary $70,000. In 1912 Gregory left Texas to join newly elected president Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, having raised nearly half the sum. (As president of Princeton University, Wilson had been an early and vocal proponent of student unions, conceiving of them as places where students could become better citizens.) During Gregory’s absence the project sat. When he returned to Austin in 1924, he took up the gym effort once more. By then the fastexpanding campus needed more than just a men’s gym. A UT committee, made up in part of alumni, looked into the campus’ building needs and called for additional construction of a women’s gym, a big auditorium, and a student center. With shrewd foresight Gregory and the University decided to pool all four buildings into one capital campaign, and the University Union Project was born. With Gregory as the point man, the Texas Exes took responsibility for making it happen. Since oil had been discovered on lands owned by the University in 1924, it might have seemed like a fortuitous time for appealing to the board of regents for financial support. But while the Available University Fund was steadily growing, requests for money also were rising exponentially, and the board feared spending its new cash too fast. And it wasn’t as though the campus had no other building needs, especially after the Legislature approved the purchase of 135 acres of land adjacent to the original Forty Acres three years earlier. Classrooms and labs were in dire shortage, and suddenly there was much new space to build. Gregory and his supporters knew that selling the regents on a building meant exclusively for recreational and social activities was going to be tough. Nevertheless, they pitched to the regents an innovative financial arrangement whereby if the Texas Exes raised $400,000 the regents would match with $600,000, defraying part of the costs and placing the fundraising onus on alumni. “The Ex-Students’ Association,” wrote Gregory, “could render no greater service to the University than to assist in placing on the campus buildings around which the scattered threads of student life could be gathered.” The regents agreed to Gregory’s plan, and in early 1928 the Texas Exes initiated the fund drive with an extensive letterwriting campaign and an appeal to the “sons and daughters of Texas” to contribute. Contribute they did. Families across the state pledged gifts to be made in installments over years. When the stock market crashed in 1929 and the country slid into the Great Depression, November/December 2008 The Alcalde 43