When the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) was founded in 1914, it brought with it the beginning of an era which fostered and promoted diversity, integrity, community and innovation across college campuses.
It was an association which was founded by a group of students who wanted to make a change. They saw an opportunity to advance every aspect of higher education by implementing one simple idea: creating a place where students from different majors, different organizations on campus and different backgrounds of life could share their ideas with one another for the purpose of creating a better university.
These students’ efforts led to some of the greatest revolutions in higher education history. You can thank them for the Chick-fil-A on campus, your CarolinaCard, the theater in Russell Houseand the new Leadership and Service Center. You should pretty much just thank them for Russell House itself.
For more than 50 years,Russell House has coincided with the goals laid forth by the ACUI and has been the catalyst for student development that affects all groups on campus. It has been a home for Gamecocks during their years in college and has provided new Carolinians a place to go outside of their dorms or traditional classroom settings with the hope of learning more about themselves. Russell House has been so many different things for so many different people: a place of employment, a place to build relationships, a place to congregate for student organizations, a place to have a cup of coffee on a cold day or a place where you can sit and relax between classes.
Yet something happens once we leave campus after our freshman year. When we come back to Carolina and move into our brand new apartments with newer recreation centers, free printing, cafes, retail stores and a multitude of other amenities, we soon forget about Russell House. We have less need for Russell House when we can get all of the services it offers from a newer and more convenient location. We find that Russell House has seemingly been left behind in terms of what it offers students by the countless developments springing up all over campus.
But these developments leave out one critical facet which greatly hurts how they operate, something that Russell House has the power to capitalize on: the input of students.
We’ve seen it with The Hub,and we’ll soon see it with other developers who fail to satisfy the needs of the very students they rely on. The ideas, the wants and the desires of students are overlooked and replaced with balance sheets of maximizing profits and minimizing loss. These places are not home, at least not like Russell House has been since we arrived here as high school seniors for our campus tour.
So here’s a challenge.
Let’s make a change. Let’s leave a legacy. Let’s create an ecosystem of Carolinians, by Carolinians and for Carolinians.
Students change. Needs change. We must change. Russell House must change. It is not sufficient to catch up to what other schools are doing or what real-estate developments across campus are doing. We must go beyond what others have done. We must push ourselves to meet future needs. We must push ourselves to provide for future wants. We must push ourselves to create something educationally, economically, socially and environmentally unique which will never truly be finished but can continually be refined and redeveloped as our university manifests itself into the premiere location for learning, inside and outside of the classroom, in the future.
Our current student union should be transformed into a union of students dedicated to their own collective advancement — a community of students in control of a system which directly benefits them, where students, teachers and the community can go to learn, create and discover. This should be a place where people can find their most authentic selves. It should put the students first and truly promote interaction and engagement. It should give students a stake in the success of the University of South Carolina, their peers and themselves.