PITTSBURGH—Due to space allocations caused by recent University budget redistributions, during April, half of the second floor of the Miller Gallery will be the temporary home of the office of the University’s Jettisoned University histories Center. (JUnhC)

Since its inception the Center’s fortunes have found it in permanent flux. One year the offices were in the basement of Margaret Morrison but were moved due to Drama relocation and a leaking foundation. Briefly, during administrative restructuring the office was located in a Highlander Café dining room, while its archives were put in a drained swimming pool in the old gym. This recent temporary relocation was facilitated in part by the help of its intern who offered use of his portion of the Miller Gallery during the time allotted for his MFA thesis exhibition.

“I felt sorry for them,” said intern Tak Noguchi. “The center’s like this disavowed child born from the diversion of funds through arcane loopholes from initiatives that were meant to address issues like the environment and diversity, trendy in the 90’s.” He added, ”I’m not sure what its exact mission is, but I liken it to this repressed repository underneath the rhetoric about ‘bold interdisciplinary research’ and ‘technologically rich environments’—think of it as a campus recycling for dispossessed histories.”

Typical of this, the office art on the walls are photographs taken by Jen Morris, remnants of an abandoned research project undertaken long before she was hired as the center’s photo archivist. Referring to the center appropriating her pictures, Ms. Morris said with a characteristic shrug, “Glad somebody found them—really, what else was I going to do with those things?”

For its current Dustbin of History Project the Center has resorted to impromptu broadcasting of its research via its own campus area microwatt radio station. (100.1 FM WJNC), since most of its classroom funding was cut recently due to reprioritized budgets brought about by current security issues and the economy. The project features interviews with campus custodians asking among other things their frank thoughts about race and class on campus.

But as resident technician Bobby Bigwitz said, it’s likely the Center’s work will be subcontracted, in the tradition of the university’s custodial and dining services. “The university can even find some possibilities of contracting this service for less outside of the country, in places like South Asia for example.”