Keynote Remarks for President Jo Ann M. Gora
Friday, Oct. 15, 2010, 2:00 p.m.; Virginia B. Ball Center
Thank you, Joe. Good afternoon and welcome to all of you on a very special day for the university.
This has been an exciting fall at Ball State as we have dedicated several new buildings or centers. Later this afternoon, many of you will be touring the Marilyn K. Glick Center for Glass, which is one of those buildings. One reason for such excitement comes from the knowledge that those buildings will enhance the lives of our students and faculty and will increase the vibrancy of our campus.
Today provides us with a different opportunity for celebration, however. We gather to observe the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry's 10th anniversary, and to recognize the ways that this building--and the important academic work that occurs in it--already has enhanced the lives of our students and faculty and benefited Ball State University.
Our university's continuing partnership with the Ball family runs so deep that we have shared the same vision for 92 years. Many of you were there when we dedicated the Ball Honors House last October. Ed and Virginia Ball's former home on Riverside Avenue now serves as the center of our increasing Honors College activity. I'm pleased to welcome back the many members of the Ball family, employees of Ball Associates, and other special guests who are with us today.
That energetic and vibrant campus I described a moment ago is creating a living-learning community. And no one was more committed to that concept than Ed and Virginia Ball, who were active supporters of education, the environment, the humanities, and the arts. The activity in this building exemplifies their legacy.
Virginia established the center in 2000, three years before her death. And its operation is sustained by gifts from the Edmund F. and Virginia B. Ball Foundation. The idea for this center for creative inquiry was to bring together small teams of students from many different disciplines, pair each team with a faculty mentor in a seminar setting, and allow each one to examine a community problem from a number of different perspectives, offering tangible solutions and meaningful results.
I have said many times to many audiences that the cornerstone of everything we do in redefining education is immersive learning. The Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry was really the birthplace of immersive learning at Ball State, and 10 years later, the wonderful academic model that was developed here has spread throughout the Ball State campus. It simply was too powerful and too successful to be limited to four faculty members and approximately 60 students per year.
So providing every undergraduate student at the university with the opportunity to participate in at least one immersive learning project is one of the major objectives in our Education Redefined strategic plan. Ball State University is in the fourth year of the plan's implementation and I'm very pleased to say that we are making great progress. In the last three years, more than 8,100 Ball State students have completed 512 immersive learning projects under the mentorship of faculty from 44 academic departments and all seven of our colleges. Those projects have been conducted in 69 counties around Indiana, but their impact has truly been statewide. Some have taken our students as far as Hong Kong and Vietnam.
Immersive learning allows students to demonstrate their ability to be innovative and collaborative as they apply classroom knowledge to solve real-world problems. These projects help Ball State students turn their knowledge into judgment and their judgment into action. At this university, knowledge acquisition is only the first step in the learning process, not the end of the process as it is at so many other universities.
We are so committed to the immersive learning model exemplified here at the Virginia Ball Center because we know how well it prepares our students for the global marketplace they are entering after graduation. That is why our Ball State Bold capital campaign includes a $40 million component to endow and sustain an additional 100 immersive learning opportunities.
Joe Trimmer, VBC director, reports that a recent survey showed that 97 percent of students who participated in a seminar here said that it was the most significant experience of their college career. And student teams at this center continue to tackle important issues from an interdisciplinary perspective each and every semester. You can read some descriptions of those seminars and their results in your program, and we also will have the opportunity to see some of their work during the open house that will begin shortly.
I could talk at length about the breadth of projects and the range of partners. Virginia Ball Center seminars have tackled important community problems in Muncie--and partnered with students from a university in Denmark. They have won regional Emmys, as with the "State of Assault" documentary, and received invitations to present from the Council on Undergraduate Research, as with "The Human Faustus Project." They have earned honors from the Harvest Moon Film Festival, the American Anthropology Association, the American Society of Landscape Artists, the Society of Professional Journalists, and other regional or national organizations.
In fact, every time I visit Noblesville, Fishers, or Carmel, I am reminded of the lasting power of a Virginia Ball Center seminar. Reporters and community leaders there still bring up "Sobrevevir," a project led six years ago by Chin-Sook Pak, associate professor of Spanish. She mentored a group of 15 students who studied how Hispanics were assimilated into American culture. The students worked with Hamilton County’s Intercultural Services Agency and Victim Awareness and Support Program in examining the problems these immigrants face.
The solution our students came up with was a series of DVDs produced in the style of Mexican soap operas, some of the most popular programming in these immigrants' home countries. Using Hamilton County residents as actors, these DVDs demonstrated problems and offered solutions. The series was so powerful and effective that the DVDs were distributed to more than 750 agencies and schools around the United States and aired on Univision, the largest Spanish-language network in the United States.
This tradition of innovation and collaboration, so evident in Virginia Ball Center seminars and all immersive learning projects, has its roots in the Ball family itself. I was reminded of that again last year when I attended the funeral of John Fisher, such an important figure to Ball State, to the city of Muncie, and to the Ball family.
A fellow attendee gave me a copy of "The Ball Way," a handbook that is given to new employees of Ball Corporation to explain aspects of the company’s history and corporate culture. That handbook is filled with examples of a corporate culture that values innovation and entrepreneurship and that grew and thrived because they were able to redefine themselves over the years, finding new markets, creating new products, and leaving a lasting mark. Leaving a legacy was as important to Edmund F. Ball as it was to his father, Edmund B. Ball, one of the original Ball Brothers.
One of Edmund B. Ball's favorite poems was "The Bridge Builder," by Will Allen Dromgoole. Mister Ball liked it so much, in fact, that he often recited it from memory, to his family, to his employees, and to his colleagues in civic organizations. I thought it would be appropriate to read that poem today.
"An old man, going a lone highway
Came at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
"Old Man," said a fellow pilgrim near,
"You are wasting your strength building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You've crossed the chasm deep and wide,
Why build you this bridge at evening tide?"
The builder lifted his old gray head,
"Good friend, in the path I've come," he said,
"There followeth after me today,
A youth whose feet must pass this way;
This chasm that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I'm building this bridge for him."
The evidence of the Ball family's partnership with the university can be seen across our campus. Their philanthropy and service have brought the university many outstanding buildings, faculty, and students. That partnership has continued for more than nine decades and has led to a university that offers close to 300 degree programs to more than 21,000 students--quite a return on the Ball family's original investment.
For all this and more, we deeply appreciate everything that each generation of the Ball family has done to make Ball State the university that it is today. Together, the family and the university have accomplished much in this partnership that approaches a century; we are confident of even greater achievements in the days and years to come. As we at Ball State boldly embrace our future, it is heartening to know that new generations of the Ball family will be with us, continuing the storied legacy of beneficence evident in our past. On behalf of everyone at Ball State University, I extend our deepest gratitude to each and every member of the Ball family, past, present, and future.
It's now my pleasure to introduce Frank Ball, president of the Edmund F. and Virginia B. Ball Foundation, who will speak on behalf of the Ball family.