Repository: UIHistories Project: UIS Long Range Plan - 1970 (Sangamon State Univ) [PAGE 17]

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all into one building and calling this a "student union". The segregation of « • ? • communal activities in one building requires a complicated structure isolated from other academic and educational traffic, and so large that u tends to institutionalize the simple amenities of bowling, buying a book, getting a cup of coffee or sitting for a haircut. The most cursory exploration of a campus with such a facility finds students seeking out the same activities off the campus, and it could be argued that they are thus renewing associations with the kind of community life that they miss in the campus confines. With these values in mind, this plan states that there will be no student union building at Sangamon State University. The facilities usually concentrated there will be dispersed in town-like variety, convenience and scale at various places about the academic center and in other areas of the campus. The educationally sound purpose of this is to encourage informal associations of students and teachers, impromptu conversation while the iron is still hot from classroom discussion, and constructive inter-disciplinary mixes. The automobile is very explicitly to be reckoned with in the planning of a campus to which a large proportion of students will travel each day in their own cars or by public transportation, and which plans active programs of continuing education. The problem is not only to lay out trafficways and parking lots to accommodate the vehicles, but to provide commuting students with a sense of physical place on the campus The long, often desolate hours between widely spaced class sessions, when the commuting student has no place to go but to his automobile for study and rest drain his energy and zeal. Quiet places for uninterrupted concentration are provided throughout the campus to meet the need for working faciliSes and the scattered coffee shops and recreation ™ U ^ L agreeable diversion fro^stS? and S b o S t o r ? * " "