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Finding Freedom Summer Newsletter

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Beyond Our Borders
Compass Magazine, College of Arts and Science
http://www.cas.muohio.edu/compass/

By: Jackie Irmen

With its sleek lines and circular designs, the Center for American and World Cultures will elicit a sense of modern, global awareness when it reopens in a renovated MacMillan Hall this August.

A $5 million renovation transformed the old campus infirmary into a haven for international and minority studies and student activities. The building will provide space for the International Studies, Black World Studies, Latin American Studies, Women’s Studies, American Studies and Jewish Studies programs.

Mary Jane Berman, the center’s director, said the project was designed with the dual purpose of creating both an intellectual and a physical site for discussion and debate. The new center will be a “clearinghouse” of research, education and programming for both faculty and students, Berman said.

“MacMillan will be a place where race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religious variability, ableness, sexuality and language will be confronted,” she said.

MacMillan will welcome visitors into a global community in grandiose style. Mosaic floors, a circular staircase and a large skylight highlight the building’s front entrance. The first level is dedicated to the Women’s Center, assorted academic offices, a reception area, and an office for Berman.

A multi-media auditorium is on the second floor along with the study abroad offices. While the first and second floors are academic, the lower level is devoted to student activity.

The student activity offices will include traditional organizations as well as those that are newer to the campus, said Steve Ransom, director of Student Activities. Among them will be the Miami University Student Foundation, Recensio yearbook, The Miami Student, the Black Student Action Society, Spectrum, the Association for Latin American Students, the Indian Student Association, the Association for Women Students and the Asian American Association.

According to its Web site, “the mission of the Center for American and World Cultures is to promote positive intergroup relations among students, faculty, and staff on campus and ultimately to improve the climate for diversity on campus.”

Berman hopes to achieve this purpose through her programming. Since she was hired in July 2002, Berman has tallied a great number of successes, including bringing in a distinguished set of lecturers and updating the center’s Web presence. Currently, she is working to solidify the center’s curriculum for the upcoming school year.

“All programming will be addressed through an interdisciplinary lens,” Berman said.

In addition to another lecture series, next year the center will host monthly brown bag seminars, exhibits, an East Asia Conference and an American Studies Conference. It will also organize and coordinate a Hispanic Heritage Month, a new initiative.

The call for a multicultural center on campus grew from both student concerns and the university’s desire to provide its students with a place that would prepare them for the globalization of the world at large. Plans for the center began before incidents of hate crime on campus in March 1997, when two hate calls were left on the voice mail of a first-year African American student. But that incident hastened the project’s progress, Ransom said.

Associate Provost Joe Cox said the Center for American and World Cultures will “advance the stated mission of the university by affording increased educational opportunity for all Miami students in the area of non-dominant cultures.”

MacMillan, which had been used as a temporary location for departments whose facilities were under rehabilitation, was chosen as the new site for the center because of its central location. Historically, Miami was divided by discipline, with Shriver Center, the Bonham House and the Joyner House of Continuing Education comprising the “student services sector” of campus.

Cox said it made sense to place the Center for American and World Cultures amidst other buildings with similar purposes.

Cox has been with the project from its inception. He was responsible for commissioning funds for the new project and heads the ad-hoc committee that has been monitoring its progress.

Drew Eastmead, editor of The Miami Student, is excited to return the paper’s office to MacMillan.

“The location will mean a lot more interaction with the writers and staff and faster Internet technology for the paper,” he said.

Jeanne Hey, director of Miami’s International Studies program, said she also felt that her program’s move to MacMillan will be beneficial.

The move will give all disciplines a chance to “coordinate our programs more closely and benefit from each others’ expertise,” she said.

The center will open this fall with a grand opening event in the spring of 2004.