One big corporate break room?
East Quad.
Students moving into East Quad in the fall of 2005 made a disturbing discovery.
For many years, denizens of the quad had taken quiet pride in the Benzinger Library, a cozy retreat lined with shelves for good books, music, and movies.
Now, to their dismay, they discovered the Benzinger’s collection of hundreds of CDs and DVDs had been whisked away in their summer absence, and the “library” of old was now to be a “Community Learning Center” under the aegis of the U-M Housing Division.
In another dorm, this might have provoked little more than apathetic shrugs.
Not in East Quad, home to the Residential College, where the counter-culture ethos born in the 1960s retained a firm hold.
No sooner had the tale of the missing media spread through the dorm than a band of students declared themselves the Benzinger Library Cooperative (BLC).
“As a cooperative,” Ed Atkinson, an RC senior, told The Michigan Daily,“we are working together to reverse the crippling effects of University Housing’s imperialist policies aimed at destroying our historic library …
“They are dedicated to making East Quad one big corporate break room.”
The Benz is born
The library itself was an early milestone in the history of student-driven reforms at Michigan. It dated to the early 1950s, when students of the East Quad Council conceived a plan to build student-friendly facilities in the dorm’s basement — “a place to bring residents in all the houses of East Quad together.”They called their plan Operation Ransom. It included designs for a radio studio, a photo dark room, music practice rooms, and “the furnishing of a room for good [music] listening and good reading,” as the Council put it, invoking then-President Harlan Hatcher’s declaration “that students should, throughout their University residence, be immersed in the finest cultural expressions of our age.”
One of Operation Ransom’s leaders, and the lead designer of the new facilities, was a student named Chuck Benzinger, from Escanaba, Mich. Not long after his graduation (and acceptance into U-M’s Medical School), Benzinger died in an auto accident in 1954. When the library was completed the following year, students of the East Quad Council voted unanimously to name it in his honor. Libraries eventually followed in all the U-M residence halls.
East Quad’s pioneer library became — on most days — a comfortable, quiet retreat from hectic dorm life. Occasionally it hosted student performances and protest meetings. The library’s website reports that it was also a venue for romance, as one alumnus attested:
“I met my wife in the RC back in ’95. We both lived in EQ our freshman year, and she used to spend a lot of time in the Benzinger Library. I’d conspire to walk past the Benz dozens of times a day in an effort to accidentally-on-purpose run into her. So powerful was the Pavlovian conditioning of glimpsing her that when I was back in EQ a couple years ago I found myself craning to see into the Benz as I walked past, even though I knew perfectly well she was back at our house.”
Rumblings in the libraries
By the turn of the 21st century, residence hall libraries were supervised by graduate students in the School of Information. Rumblings began when those supervisors discovered they were being paid substantially less than other graduate student assistants. The librarians took steps to join the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), the union representing teaching assistants and other graduate students who worked for the University.In 2003, U-M housing officials made changes in all the dorm libraries — with the exception of the ones at Bursley Hall and East Quad — with the new entities taking the name “Community Learning Centers” (CLCs). The two remaining libraries were scheduled to undergo the change later, with the librarian positions to be extinguished.
According to a brief student-authored history of the Benzinger, this “shift met with outrage from GEO, which saw an unmistakable link between the librarians’ attempt to secure a pay increase with the decision to eliminate their positions entirely.”
But administrators, well accustomed to GEO outrage, made no change in their plans.
There matters stood at the Benz until the fall term of 2005, when returning students found their media collection missing.
At this, student bibliophiles — led by that scourge of imperialism, Ed Atkinson — took matters into their own hands.
Members of the hastily organized Benzinger Library Cooperative assembled a collection of their own books and music and made it available to their fellow students. Before long, the collective’s brave new holdings included some 40 magazines, 20 CDs, and a handful of videos, including C3P-Hoe (a film inspired by Star Wars),which likely would not have met President Hatcher’s standards for “the finest cultural expressions of our age.”
Even a dish of mints
According to the Benzinger history:“… they provided their own dish of complimentary mints, their own library system (the honor system, a good system, as systems go), and their very own ‘Statement of Understanding: East Quad Community Learning Center and Benzinger Library 2005/2006.’ That is correct, good people, they wrested their own measure of freedom from the generally unyielding hands of Housing itself.”
The Cooperative’s negotiations with Housing went approximately nowhere, but BLC volunteers just went on checking stuff out.
“Generally, we’re pretty fearless,” Atkinson told the Daily.“We’re running a library, and they can suck it.”
Dailycolumnist Elliott Mallen, a sympathizer, echoed an argument often voiced in the student reform movements of the 1950s and ’60s. “Cooperative organizations like the BLC and the East Quad Music Co-operative operate under the assumption that a dorm is a student’s home, and that every resident has the right to exercise a large degree of influence over it. Housing is adamantly opposed to this idea and is instead striving to make dorm life as stale as possible. … It’s not surprising … that residents striving for a little less authoritarianism in their lives flee to the student ghetto as soon as possible.”
In time, the activists got a good deal of the independence they wanted. When East Quad underwent a wholesale renovation in 2012-13, the Benz was downsized a bit and its configuration changed, and its daytime use was designated for teaching.
But in the evenings it reverts to its comfortable, old, bookish self, with the collection overseen by the students of the East Quad Book Co-op.
(Top image: Students make use of East Quad’s Benzinger Library in the 1970s. Credit: John C .Knox, Class of 1979. EQ Resident Fellow and former Michigan Daily photographer.)
Michael Smothers - 1974
We shut down Benzinger in the early ’70s to increase the ethnic diversity in its book collection. We checked out almost every book and stored them in our rooms or in the Abeng office. After we got concessions from administration, all the books were returned and they hired an African American librarian. Peaceful and effective protest.
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Daniel Herman - 1977
She was a wonderful librarian (and a really good boss). I wish I could remember her name. Do you?
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Jackie Young - 1986
Thank you for this article. I work at Arizona State University Libraries in Phoenix, and wish ASU students were as smart about using their influence as U of M students but I’m doing my part to educate them by passing along my Michigan experiences.
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Kirk Nims - 1971, 1980
One of original 220 in RC class one.
Benzinger used to have THE BEST sound system in East Quad.
We had many raucous dance parties in The Benz back then. Loud Rolling Stones, Beatles, other late 60s bands and all the dancing was lubricated with copious quantities of Boones Farm wines.
Good times!
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John Hagen - 1972
Kirk, I was about to post the same comment. To elaborate:
Students had keys to everything and there was no one over the age of 25 in East Quad after about 6 p.m. Someone would open up the library, someone else would open up the kitchen and get a metal food container or bowl that would be filled with libations, and the party would get rockin’. These were heady times, and the acrid odor of sweat and incense permeated the air. I imagine going there today, opening a book, and catching a whiff from between the pages.
Then some asshole stole the sound system, and it screeched to a halt. Kind of a synecdoche (a word I learned at RC) for the period.
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Daniel Kurtycz - Medical School 76
I used to work in Benzinger.in the time period of 1966-1968. I checked out books, managed the magazines and played Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel era music for the quarries that came in. It was a place of refuge from my dorm room in Green House, East Quad. I could actually find a place quiet enough to study.
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Therese Mageau - 1978
Benzinger was a real library in the 70s — had reference books like the OED. A real librarian ran it. And it was large enough to be a gathering place for the college. They held graduation there. With the new renovation of EQ, the library is a shadow of its former self. I was visiting the campus in the spring and went to a poetry reading there; the room was impossibly full because it is just too small now to accommodate a real crowd. I commend and applaud the RC guerrillas who are keeping it open as a cooperative, but I condemn the university that thought fit to diminish such an important educational resource.
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Therese Mageau - 1978
P.S. Photo by John Knox., class of 1979.
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Linda Knox - 1981
THANK YOU Therese Mageau for crediting a great student photographer from that era (full disclosure: I’m related). Michigan Today: why doesn’t the credit appear in the article?
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Deborah Holdship
The credit appears at the very end of the article in italics. Sorry it wasn’t there until Therese pointed it out. Terrible oversight on my part! Apologies to Mr. Knox. — Ed.
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John Knox - 1979
Accepted.
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John Knox - 1979
Thanks Therese!
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Erica Foley - 2004 - School of Information
And yet, still no help for those Residence Librarians from SI. Now library students are missing this amazing opportunity for paid, practical experience while earning their degrees. Shame.
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Stephen Tynan - 1983
Housing administration were always a bunch of unilateral tw*ts.
🙂
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John Knox - 1979
I believe you still have some overdue books from the Benzinger, no?
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Hildie Lipson - 1983
I used to check out LP’s from the Benzinger. To be able to check out jazz, blues, and musicians I had never heard of was revelatory for this girl from the suburbs. I don’t recall ever studying there but I loved having what I thought of as my “own” library right there in the dorm.
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Bonnie Miller - 68-69 studies then LOA
I painted the mural on the library wall over a thanksgiving break. That library was a great place to study and at night to boogie. I left mid-69 to be an artist -do metal sculpture- until I realized I’d never support myself. Years later I stopped by and noticed that room had become a classroom and a blackboard was in the middle of my mural. Years later another stop by -the wall was gone.
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John Hagen - 1972
In the foundation years of the RC, students painted murals on many of the walls in the basement. Many years later, I was in Detroit on business and rolled into RC for an hour on my way home to learn what had become of my alma mater. I was dismayed to see that the place had been “sanitized;” the mojo was long gone. My only consolation is that 1,000 years from now, some budding archeologist will uncover the “cave” paintings of a long vanished culture in the Athens of the Midwest.
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Francine Allen - 1988
Who says libraries are stodgy and strict??? certainly nobody who remembers the Benzinger library from way back when! New formats of materials (eg. DVDs, digital formats, etc.) are fine, but calling a library a draconian and Orwellian name like a “Community Learning Center” and with no input from current dorm residents? ugh!!! In my day, there was at least a semblance of the Benz, the Halfway Inn (is that still around?) and other East Quad amenities being reflective of the general free-spirited personalties of the East Quad residents. (Other dorms had other “flavors and personalities” so students at U-M had plenty of lifestyle-choices, plus, of course, non-dorm housing, on or off campus.)
I’m an RC alum, and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Library Science from Wayne State University, after which I spent twelve fulfilling years working in public libraries in low-income areas, trying to promote early literacy and community grassroots development. Sadly, funding for these libraries dried up last October, and I am currently unemployed, but I was heartened to read the above article about the Benzinger Library, and remember it fondly. I believe libraries and the people who support them affect creative and positive change.
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David Reibel - 1984
One year I was fortunate to work in Benzinger Library for my work-study financial aid. Whenever I closed up shop, we blasted the B-52’s Dance this Mess Around to get the blood flowing. The party usually continued at the Half-Ass or some other venue…. Great times!
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