During Donald Erb’s tenure as University of Oregon president in the early 1940s, one of his prominent goals was to create an area on campus dedicated to the veterans who would be returning from World War II. He passed away before he could see his idea, but eventually, the UO made a building in his memory, the Erb Memorial Union. On April 20, the EMU will celebrate its new veteran’s center — a place dedicated to achieving all of the services student veterans need in order to thrive at the UO.
“The last area we were in was nice,” said AJ Klausen, a student veteran majoring in political science, “but we shared it with, like, four or five other groups.”
The old veteran’s center shared its space with organizations like the Nontraditional Students office and Campus and Community Resources.
“Vets are a distinctively different group,” Klausen said. “We have a lot of different qualities that I don’t think many other groups share with us. It might make sense to put us in an area with the nontraditional students, but if you really look at it, we’re a pretty different group, even compared to the nontraditional sense.”
Director of Nontraditional and Veteran Education and Support Gretchen Jewett says the goal of the new veteran’s center is to provide all of the resources veterans will need while also being a nice, relaxing place for them to hang out in between classes. Essentially, her program wants to make the center a “one-stop shop.”
“We want the center to have all the resources they need,” she said. “The center will have things like VA program coordinators at the ready to answer whatever questions students have. The center will provide everything they need, and it’ll be a place that veterans can call their own.”
One of the resources provided at the center will be the Veterans and Family Student Association, an organization that sets up events throughout the school year, such as Veterans Awareness Week and the Veteran Memorial Ball.
Dog Tags to Ducks is another organization that will be housed in the new center. The program sets up first-year veteran students with other veterans who have been on campus for more than a year.
“I’m just happy that we get to have our own place,” Klausen said. “I know when the EMU was first built, it was meant to be a place dedicated to vets from World War II. It’s nice to know that the EMU is sort of going back to having a dedicated place specifically for veterans.”