Student Activities Center Will Give Groups Offices

Over four years in the making, a Student Activities Center at 54 Dunster Street will provide offices and rooms for undergraduate organizations, Provost Buck announced last night.

Official approval of the Center came yesterday afternoon when the Corporation accepted Provost Buck's plans for turning the second and third floors of 54 Dunster Street into offices for student activities. The newly-created Financial Aid Center will occupy the first floor of the brick building, which is located near Lowell House and Kirkland House.

Most of the College's 66 undergraduate organizations already have "adequate meeting places," the Provost said yesterday. "But there has been a need for meeting and office space centrally located to serve as many as possible of the College's extracurricular activities. The Student Activities Center will meet this need."

Initial money for the Center will come out of the University's unrestricted funds. There is no provision for a theatre or auditorium, not only because this would be too costly during a time when the College is concentrating its fund-raising efforts on scholarships and undergraduate instruction, but also because a theatre located so near the Houses would be inaccessible to outside traffic.

Under present arrangements, the Unicurred, such as telephone and secretarial expenses.

Which undergraduate organizations will be welcomed into the Activities Center depends largely on the report of a special Student Council committee set up versity will bear full maintenance costs of the building while the organizations will pay for whatever office bills are last night to study the problem and mal recommendations to Dean Bender and Associate Dean Watson. Several room may be shared by more than one organization and Watson may move his office to the Center.

The Council group expects to report the end of April, and in the meantime workmen will make plans for remodeling the upstairs rooms so that they will be ready for occupancy in the fall.

At present the upstairs floors an divided into several apartments which will he vacated by the tenants over the summer. Since 1947 the Alumni Bulletin maintained quarters at 54 Dunster Street but this fall the Bulletin moved into Wadsworth House, where alumni activities are now centered.

The idea of a Student Activities Center originated in June of 1945 when a Student Council investigation first proposed such a center as a World War II memorial Until 1945 such activities as the Liberal Union, the Network, and the Album were housed in Shepherd Hall, a wooden-frame building on Holyoke Street. Shepherd Hall was razed in the summer of 1945. The drive for an Activities Center gained impetus in 1947 when an Alumni Committee under Senator Leverett Saltonstall '14 began deliberations toward selection of the University's war memorial.

In November 1947 a preliminary report favored a combined scholarship and plaque as the memorial. But for seven months, starting in March, 1948, a Student Activities Center and auditorium in Memorial Hall appeared to have a strong chance of winning the Saltonstall committee's approval. In October, however, the committee's final recommendation tossed out SAC and the auditorium as too costly and without permanent value