I would like to have been a fly on the wall when the course on Beyoncé Knowles was proposed at the University of Victoria in Canada. On further thought, there may not have been as much of an uproar as one would think because I understand that there was a course titled Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame offered at the University of South Carolina, Skidmore College is offering a course on Miley Cyrus, and Keanu Reeves has been the subject of college courses since 1994.
If the idea is not completely out of the realm of what is going on throughout higher education, then, what does it all mean? I think it means that there is credence to the following comment about higher education:
“The 19th century belonged to the university president; the 20th century belonged to the faculty; and the 21st century belongs to the student.”
Bernard Shapiro, then head of McGill University, and Ann Dawsett Johnston declared this summation in Maclean’s, a Canadian weekly magazine, in 1998. We may be coming to an understanding of the pronouncement now.
Some of the most innovative educational practices are clearly adapting to students rather than the other way around, and it’s not all about pop culture, but pop culture may be a large part of it if this is what is important to your students. Getting students’ attention and motivating them to want to learn what we think is important should be done “by any means necessary.”
I highly recommend an article by José Antonio Bowen in the spring 2014 edition of AAC&U’s Liberal Education, titled, “The Teaching Naked Cycle: Technology is a Tool, but Psychology is the New Pedagogy” that gets to the heart of engagement and student success.
Faculty, in collaboration with student affairs, have access to students in ways that can locate the “entry points” to what is important to students.
and her survival was a kind of war itself. While she was struggling for life in a freezing room in a boarding house sleeping in the top drawer of a tall chest of drawers that served as her baby crib, personnel in college unions in the U.S. were concerned about the survival of the founding vision of their being.
and the radio.
They were concerned about college unions losing their purpose as a gathering place when automobiles became commonplace for the masses.
because they had faced challenges before and they had adapted.
college unions continued to move beyond the debate societies
1914 Speaking of the good and acknowledging the bad, for the U.S., there were two significant occurrences 100 years ago. It was the tragic beginning of the first World War, and, for the good, we celebrate, here, the triumph of seven students in that same year.
ACUI is one of the few international professional associations that has a student member on its Board of Trustees.
Unions stood as Memorials to those who had given their lives for their country and for those who survived and were entering colleges as veterans, unions adapted to their needs by providing amenities similar to the canteens of which soldiers were familiar. They also provided recreation facilities for their leisure time.
The Great Depression, 1929-1939 began to level the playing field for students in regard to class. The distinctions began to fade because students of this era had a common goal– moving beyond the devastation of this long and deep depression.
because just as our recent history demonstrates,
many students were behaving as if a college education was a private good rather than a public good.
By the mid-1950s, college union personnel championed the goal of developing whole persons as well as intellect.
Unions came into their own with this confirmation from the federal government that unions were, indeed, educational facilities.
The 1960s. The little girl who slept in a drawer and whose grandparents were near descendants of slaves began to read about an unknown world that she would like to discover. It was in her junior year of high school that a door-to-door salesman knocked on her door, and she helped him sell her mother the World Book Encyclopedias 
that her mother paid for with a few dollars a month for years to come.
This was one perspective.
Civil Rights, 
was another perspective.
with a scholarship in hand headed to the university where she faced the biggest challenge of her life. She was like a fly in buttermilk on this white campus because she never sat in a class where she was not “the only.”
took the floor and strongly encouraged his brothers and sisters in the struggle to get involved in the campus.
was so grateful for the opportunity to go to college, wanted to realize the full promise of a college education. So she said, “Yes,” 
when she was assigned the task of becoming involved with student activities.
This little meeting of a handful of black students was the first time she had set foot in the union. And, now, she is supposed to just make a cold call on the staff in the union and say what?
She lived off campus in a small house with six other black girls who were also beginning college and feeling like flies in buttermilk. The rent was $28.00 a month.
The little girl with the big dreams spent a lot of time on campus because there was no place to study in the little house. When she came to campus, she went to the buildings where her classes were held, to the library, and to her job as a switchboard operator 
for the college and back to the little house on Second Street.
was streaming through the glass wall on the right side of the ballroom. The staff’s office was just off the ballroom. The staff was welcoming as if they had been awaiting her arrival. She was so nervous she didn’t really hear what they said to her.
She was so careful with every detail. She used the catalogue to select the films; she ordered the films; she ordered the tickets; she made sure there was someone at the ticket window to sell tickets; she was accountable for all the cash, and she had to make sure that the films were mailed back on time. She wanted to make sure that the tickets sold and cash reconciled because she did not want to be accused of cheating or stealing.
and Marian Anderson. 
The attendance for these brilliant performers was small, but the experience for the girl was large.
Working with staff in the union in the 1960s was the most significant period of growth in the life of this little girl who slept in a drawer for her crib and her great grandfather who she met before he died at 105 had been a slave.
Because of her coming of age experiences with the union, she set working at a college as a goal. Community colleges 
were the innovations in higher education in the 1970s, all sparkling new and overflowing with students who were more diverse than the college leaders ever expected.
and ongoing student activism. Unions hosted open discussions on all issues. They became one of the most important teaching and learning sites on college and university campuses.
and often being forcibly removed from unions and offices. Unions adapted by providing meeting spaces for student groups such as the Black Student Union 
and other groups and continued to host dialogues and teach-ins.
“willing to buck tradition and welcome women, ethnic minorities, and those with various sexual orientations long before many of the sister associations.” (Marsha Herman-Betzen, incomparable Executive Director, ACUI, 2014)
the black students who all fashioned themselves as civil rights activists, 
students shouting for divestment 
in South Africa, and the women 
who were never again going to wear a bra or high-heeled shoes, union staff had their hands full.
when black students were part of any contention on campus, and the disruption usually occurred in the union. She would have to hold her breath as she walked through the union because the vapors from pot 
would have given her a contact high. The staff in the union was so accustomed to weed being smoked in the union that they just smiled and enjoyed it.
These were not the only issues union staff were dealing with. The college administration began to put more and more pressure on the unions to generate revenue. 
Union purists, on the one hand, were torn between upholding the basic assumptions of the union’s existence as the meeting ground and a place for students to learn important interpersonal skills and practice citizenship, and, on the other hand, using the building as a convenience for service needs that would generate revenue.
The decade of the 1980s, saw educators in unions providing programs that would counter high tech with high touch.
They worked to bring a humanizing aspect to students’ lives. Students were numbing themselves by abusing alcohol and the concept of multicultural was broadened beyond race and gender to include able-body bias and LGBT students.
It was tough love and bitter medicine, but as educators committed to helping students develop cross cultural understanding and increase their interpersonal skills, this was an obligation. The beauty of what unions did was that all students, faculty, and staff participated in the sensitivity awareness campaigns.
Perhaps because their skills had been tested to their limits and because more graduate students were going into student personnel programs, the 1990s was a period of extreme professional development where union and all personnel in student affairs were accepting and announcing the fact that they were, indeed, educators in the cocurriculum. They were experiential educators.
inarguably one of the largest and most respected associations for student affairs world- wide.
they needed in order to hone their skills in touching the lives of so many students.
The assumptions were on each end of the continuum from being the greatest generation since Tom Brokaw’s greatest generation to the worst generation. What union staff experienced from the students they were already seeing was a greater demand for convenience, service, and more variety in social experiences.
By the 2000s, new buildings were coming on line and the philosophical concept of the union was being challenged by centers 
that were popping up throughout the campus. Because the unions had been so successful in its auxiliaries, there was increasing competition for student dollars from quarters within and beyond the campus.
Holding onto the idea of serving the entire campus and serving as a gathering place for healthy exchange through dialogue, the educators in the union are preparing to adapt and innovate in a manner that reflect the changing models of higher education.
for college unions, and she is very optimistic. College Unions did not allow the advent of the telephone, radio, and automobile to make them obsolete and neither will online learning, social media, and the increasing appeal of interactive entertainment make their role irrelevant.
Like beacons in the night, unions remain the locus of community whether they are tangible buildings or whether they float on the strength and ether of the very human urge to connect and to satisfy the need for community, the idea, concept and purpose of college unions will thrive, flourish, and remain vital to colleges and universities.
unions do not stand still. Like time- pieces, unions adapt to the way the college community wants to access them. The early debate societies preferred pocket watches, 
the boomers loved their wrist watches, 
the Gen Xers didn’t care what time it was, no watches, 
and the millennials prefer their cell phones.
the steady forward movement of the college unions that embody the spirit of community and learning. 
At this place for this momentous occasion, we honor and celebrate all that has come before, and we enthusiastically anticipate what lies ahead!
Gwen Dungy 