My first impression of Williams Hall was that it was the building that none of my friends knew the location of, until I pointed it out on our Walmart run, waiting at the bus stop across the street. Its proximity was the sore thumb in my schedule.
Yet, I liked coming early to my classes. Sitting at the tables near the entrance, my attention was split between my laptop and the TVs playing old short films and broadcasts. It was an archive reduced to white noise to anyone who has been in the building long enough, but guaranteed Williams was never quiet.
Williams Hall had a rich history as a former radio station — WMUB FM — which was the bridge between college radio hosts and Cincinnati. Kathleen Kollman, a visiting assistant professor who specializes in media representation, says she loved tuning into Mama Jazz, a regionally famous DJ.
“Having lived in the Miami Valley most of my life, I actually remember listening to Mama Jazz’s show in the late 1990s,” Kollman said.
This last semester at Williams is her last at Miami, adding to the bittersweetness. Ron Becker, professor of media and communication, said WMUB was still active on the second floor when he came to Miami in 2004.
Comparisons between Williams and Bachelor Hall were inevitable. Bachelor is much larger and freshly renovated, but also completely empty. When I took a tour of the building, my peers were awed at state-of-the-art equipment and gaping open space, I couldn’t help but notice it was completely bare of any sort of history.
Andrew Peck, associate professor of strategic communication, had a similar feeling.
“There’s a way in which [Williams] feels lived in; it has this sense of tradition to it, even if you don’t know the traditions specifically,” Peck said. “I’m sure Bachelor will develop its own over time, but it’s an adjustment.”
I sat in Peck’s sparse office, already emptied in anticipation of the move, as he tried to explain his stories of thin walls and bee infestations.
“It’s about twice as big as my office is going to be in Bachelor,” Peck said.
Williams is not a massive building, but it is one of the few that is designated for one department. As a result, a sort of camaraderie developed in the small space among students and faculty alike.
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Even for more recently hired professors in the department, like Emmanuel Gbede, a visiting associate professor in media and communication who started last semester, there was still a sense of familiarity associated with Williams.
“For me, it wasn’t too different from where I was coming from,” said Gbede, who earned his MFA credentials from Ohio University’s film program.
Peck said something similar, comparing Williams to Vilas Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Dingy, a little from a bygone era.”
But as the conversation shifted towards how the building functioned as a community space, Gbede admitted the department’s compartmentalized environment helped him integrate himself with his fellow colleagues.
“And the bond is here, like we don’t have to send an email,” Gbede said. “We don’t have to call each other. We can just walk, knock, talk and there we go.”
Potentially, the accessibility and tailored space get lost as the Department of Media, Journalism and Film (MJF) enters Bachelor along with the departments of English, history and philosophy. There’s the clear benefit of allowing these departments to more openly communicate and collaborate, but the ache of Williams’ exclusivity still lingered.
The last few weeks have been strange. Williams is still bustling with activity, arguably more than ever. Its faculty and students have already seen the writing on the wall, and as a result, decided to leave their own.
A departmental email was sent out April 22, confirming the building was free to be “graffitied.” Students wrote their favorite movie quotes, names of their best friends, modified hallway signs and complained of the building’s terrible AC. It was a lot of work for something that was eventually coming down, but when has that ever been a bad thing? Students may scribe “good riddance,” but they had memories impossible to rid of.
In 2020, the decision of MJF moving to Bachelor was finalized. There’s nothing surprising about Williams being torn down, much like there was nothing surprising about it slowly becoming a genuine relic of a time when the mass media industry was just getting its legs. Then, there was a novelty of being new that can be compared to Bachelor now.
The main difference is that MJF alumni won’t be able to visit the classrooms where they studied and found their passions. They can only park their cars there.
Maureen Wilson is a first-year student double majoring in media and communication and emerging technology in business and design, with a minor in creative writing. She is an Opinion writer for The Miami Student and is involved in Sigma Tau Delta, Asian American Association and MU Kababayan.
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