If you know what you’re looking for, you can see it through the window on the second floor of Knauss Hall. In the now-decommissioned building at Western Michigan University, a model of the world sits lonesome.
But Capital Renewal and Planning Manager Anand Sankey was able to give us a closer look.
Since the decommission, the building is no longer cooled, making it very warm inside. Especially on the second floor where we saw the globe.
“I think it was a nice feature right in the middle of this atrium hallway lobby area,” Sankey said. “The one thing I like about it is it doesn't have countries by borders which would have changed a lot since 1971.”
The mini-planet Earth in Knauss Hall has raised features such as continents and mountain ranges.
Sankey, who is over six feet tall, is still not quite as tall as the globe, which used to rotate every three minutes.
When first searching for information on the globe, I reached out to the Coordinator of Exhibitions at WMU’s Gwen Frostic School of Art.
However, the piece was not part of the University Art Collection.
From there, I was connected with the university’s Zhang archives, who were able to start digging for information on the globe.
Lynn Houghton, the regional history curator at the Zhang Legacy Collection Center, first looked at digital archives from the Kalamazoo Gazette.
“We looked through any possible term that we could think of and did not come up with any results to the question of where did the globe come from, what's its history,” Houghton said.
Houghton added that when dealing with the digital database, finding the specific subject term can be tricky. After no luck with digital archives, Houghton looked through the physical clippings.
“I took a chance and looked in the clipping files and lo and behold, the first two articles we pulled out dealt with the globe,” Houghton said.
There were three clippings regarding the globe, all of which were dated from 1970. They tell us it was donated by the Talbert and Leota Abrams Foundation of Lansing and is a twin of one donated to the National Archives.
However, something interesting was of concern in the articles: Ireland was upside down. According to the Kalamazoo Gazette, the company that produced the globe, which was located in Santa Ana, Calif., sent WMU a replacement copy.
The official dedication happened in April 1971.
It is unclear how the globe made its way from the university auditorium, now known as Miller auditorium, to current its home in Knauss Hall.
The future of the globe is unknown as the university waits to hear if it can get state funding to help improve the building.
"The unoccupied classroom facility tops the University's capital outlay funding list, which means that should state funding become available, Knauss Hall would be WMU’s first priority for state-supported renovation," Western said when it announced the decommission in November of last year.
“We don't know when we're going to get approval or if we're going to get approval if that happens,” Sankey said. “Then I think the decision on what happens will take place.”
In either case, the fate of the globe rests with Western Michigan University.
