One big corporate break room?

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 21^st 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.)