Thank you Bill.  It‘s great to be back, to see old friends and colleagues, and especially to have the chance to hear the Sambistas, always a sign that exuberance and high spirits, to say nothing of outstanding musicianship, are alive and well at Lawrence.

I‘d like to make one thing clear: I am not the anonymous donor.  Margot is the anonymous donor.  Well, actually, that‘s not true, but she and I do know the identity of the anonymous donor and we are grateful to that person—you thought I might slip up and provide a gender reference there, didn‘t you?—not only for a magnificent gift to Lawrence for a very important and long-awaited project, but for exercising ”naming rights“ to put our names on the building.  To put it bluntly: Margot and I are both honored and thrilled.

Back in 2000, when we completed Science Hall, students complimented me—or so they thought—by commending me for not putting someone‘s name on the building.   To which I replied, the reason there‘s no one‘s name on the building is because the project did not receive a naming gift, and if we had, you can be sure there would have been a name.  For the next four years, as I visited with Lawrence alumni and friends around the country, I constantly talked up what I called ”Your-Name-Here Science Hall,“ though got no takers.  But President Beck has authorized me to say that the offer is still open.

I mentioned that the Campus Center was a long-awaited project, and on that score I speak from experience.  The focus of several studies and task force reports, and appearing in various guises and iterations, it has been on Lawrence‘s agenda for nearly twenty years, and I had the privilege of dealing with it for fifteen. While the Memorial Union has its charms, it also has its limitations, as does Downer.  So on and off over a period stretching over three decades, the idea of a new campus center received lots of attention, though academic buildings got the funding.  There were many starts and stops along the way—more stops than starts, to be frank about it—and even a ”pause“ six years ago as we sought to generate consensus on how to proceed.  I commend President Beck and the Board of Trustees for now proceeding, and I am particularly thrilled that a building the construction of which eluded me as president will bear Margot‘s and my names in my emeritus years.

In 2002, during the ”pause,“ consideration of the Campus Center didn‘t so much slow down as get kind of frenetic, and a number of you here this afternoon will recall the various ideas and recommendations that were delivered and debated..  There was some sentiment to site the campus center on land occupied by Memorial Union and Wriston Art Center; there were notions of having the building span Lawe Street, like the Plaza on I-94 in Illinois; there were proposals to split the building and construct it in stages; there was the idea of connecting it to the recreation center; and there was—finally and tellingly—a suggestion that it be placed in the hillside on the site of Hulbert House and ”stacked.“  And that is where we are today, though it was hardly a clear path from 2002 until now.

I am personally excited by the Center‘s location, the Hurvis land bridge connection to the central campus, and the fact that the building embraces the Fox River as part of the campus landscape.  My only concern is that its location will require Professor Chaney and others to travel a bit further on their several daily trips in search of sustenance—at least there were several daily trips a few years back; maybe there are more now.  But do know that I will relish knowing that I will be somehow connected to faculty and staff colleagues and friends when they gather there for coffee and conversation, perhaps—it‘s been known to happen—for an argument.  It will be a nice change.  Faculty can argue in Warch rather than about him.

Finally, as members of the Lawrence community know, I am a great believer in the efficacy of liberal education at a residential college—in fact, the first strikes me as largely dependent on the second—and that I am also an advocate of the serendipitous and spontaneous aspects of that liberal learning.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote ”I pay the schoolmaster, but ‘tis the schoolboys who teach my son,“ a statement I have always taken as a great endorsement of the values of a residential college.  Students do indeed teach one another. 

Robert Frost said that education is hanging around until you catch on, and in that respect I hope the campus center will be a place that will invite students to hang around and hence be a place where they teach and learn from one another, and that in and through those exchanges they will indeed catch on. 

It is a great honor for Margot and me to have our names on the Campus Center, and I want to close by once again expressing gratitude to the anonymous donor for this great generosity and most meaningful recognition.  The Campus Center might not be an ”academic building,“ narrowly defined, but it certainly can and should be a building that serves Lawrence‘s academic mission.  For me, that will be the greatest satisfaction of all.