1. In the paragraph that begins "The Planning Committee had consulted broadly … " Jim R. reports correctly that schematic drawings, etc., for the new Residential College across the river had been submitted. Yes. But there was much more than that in hand. Associate Dean Burton Thuma, who was the active Chairman of the Planning Committee, had taken very seriously the task of designing a physical plant that would properly accommodate the intellectual activities of the Residential College we were designing. Responding to the very many inputs of the members of the Planning Committee, Dean Thuma built actual physical models of the buildings we had envisaged, along with their placement on the site, along the shore of the Huron River, on which they were to be situated. The Planning Committee knew exactly how (in their view) the new College was to be physically realized.
2. Bids for the new College were invited. When those bids came in the evident costs of the project as envisioned was far beyond what the University could, or would, provide. Vice President Wilbur Pierpont, our chief financial officer, a devoted servant of the University and earnest advocate of undergraduate education, made it clear to the members of the Planning Committee, long before the College opened, that buildings of that size, kind and quality were too costly, not likely ever to be constructed. Therefore, when the permanent home of the Residential College was being seriously discussed, the preference of some members of the Planning Committee for a site closer to the heart of the campus was very greatly reinforced by the recognition that, were we not to open the Residential College in some residence hall on central campus, we would probably not be opening it at all. The move to East Quad (in retrospect very wise indeed !) was a product of both preference and practical necessity.
3. The history Dean Robertson correctly reports gives a very brief account of the nature and conduct of the Representative Assembly (of which half the members were elected students), which governed the Residential College in its very early years. The Director, Dean Robertson, had the authority to veto any of its decisions but never did so. Some of the decisions of this body were quite remarkable and worthy of note:
a) The RC Representative Assembly put an end to curfew hours for women (which were then universal in other dormitories) in the Residential College. The rest of the University soon followed suit.
b) When the time approached [during the year 68/69] at which comprehensive examinations for sophomores were to be administered (as the Planning Committee had originally determined) the Representative Assembly, after very lengthy debate, cancelled all such exams, for that and future years.
c) Repeatedly the Representative Assembly faced the question, presented by some discontented students, whether the proficiency requirement in a second language (which included passing a course taught in that language, as the Planning committee had originally determined) were to be retained. Again and again the Representative Assembly (undergraduate students constituting half of it) insisted upon the retention of that requirement in the Residential College. It is a requirement that remains in force nearly 50 years later, and probably helps to account for the remarkable success of RC students at various campuses of the University of Michigan in Europe.
In view of the remarkable and widely renowned success in the teaching of languages in the Residential College, I think that this chapter in our history deserves note. On the Planning Committee, the enthusiasm and pedagogical wisdom of Professor Michel Benamou, of happy memory, in defending this very stiff foreign language expectation has had, one may surely say, a great deal to do with our long-term success as a College.
4. Finally, I think a history of the Residential College would not be complete if it did not contain the names of the eleven members of Planning Committee, all of whom worked assiduously for more than two years to devise the plans, curricular and physical, for the new college, and to justify them. The written essence of these plans were presented to the parent college, the College of LS&A, in the form of a substantial book which came to be known as "The Blue Book."
The members of the Planning committee were as follows:
Burton Thuma, Associate Dean of the College of LS&A, Chairman
Michel Benamou, Professor of Romance Languages (deceased)
Carl Cohen, Associate Professor of Philosophy, scribe
John Eady, Professor of Classics (later at MSU)
Stanford Ericson, Professor of Psychology
Alan Gaylord, Associate Professor of English (now at Dartmouth)
Steven Kaplan, Associate Professor of Psychology
Theodore Newcomb, Professor of Psychology (deceased)
Bradford Perkins, Professor of History (deceased)
Albert Sussman, Professor of Biological Sciences (deceased)
Ellis Wunsch, Lecturer in English (deceased)
Ex officio, William Haber, Professor of Economics and Dean of the College of LS&A. (deceased)
