Student at the Listening Center, 1964
Back in the old days, students who wanted to learn a language or listen to music for class, had to go to one spot on campus – the Listening Center, located in the basement of Denney Hall. Created in 1960, the center held 150 booths with radio-style tuners. Students could tune into 11 “program channels” that were had the required listening assignments for various foreign language and music courses. Two years after its opening, roughly 5,000 language, speech and music students were using the facility each week, more than double the attendance of the year before.
In 1965 the Center premiered a dial-access phone system that allowed 40,000 calls a week to over 90 “channels” for homework and private study use. Other departments, including English, education and military science took advantage of the Center to teach students with recorded lectures and supplemental materials. At the time, students could dial in from an Instructional Material Center in Denney Hall, Cunz Hall, or the West Campus Learning Center.
Later that year, at a cost of $292,000, 118 new private listening booths were added in eight more locations on campus, including the Ohio Union, the Main Library and several dorms. In 1978, the University introduced an updated dial-access system that enabled students to dial directly into the Center from any telephone and listen to classroom assignments.
1963
The Center’s first director was Prof. Paul Pimsleur, who transferred to OSU from the University of California at Los Angeles. Pimsleur was also a professor of Romance languages and taught applied linguistics, with an emphasis on language laboratories. In 1965, he was chosen as a Fulbright Professor of Applied Linguistics to teach at the then-new Speech Cybernetics Research Center at Heidelberg University in Germany. A frequent traveler to Europe, Pimsleur died on a visit to France in 1976.
– Filed by C.N.
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