Carnegie Mellon University - Thistle Yearbook (Pittsburgh, PA)

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orientation in life. I have seen too many young people without this orientation struggling to find some way to contribute to life and cam their way through it. Some of you young men and women have denied professionalism as •‘irrelevant”. I disagree. Whatever world you young people construct (and I’m cheering you on for a good world) it will be a complex society. And professionals with a good humane and human outlook will be much needed. Another goal of the University is to help our professionally-oriented students become better citizens of the world, to know more about man, his failures and his successes, his ideals and his ideas, the place of the individual in society and the requirements of society on the individual. We hope to do this part of our job much better as we strengthen our humanities and social sciences in the new college. And we would like to concentrate some of our professional strengths on helping society solve its biggest problem today, the urban problem, in the establishment of the new Graduate School for Urban and Public Affairs. The third aim of the University is the development of an environment well suited for the young people to make the many transitions from youth to adulthood. It is quite difficult to specify the exact environment we would like, for we discover, as many other colleges and universities have discovered, that we have a great variety in our undergraduate body. Personally, I am pleased that we do. for I think it would be a tragic mistake for us to select one type of students and try to mold them into one set of environments. In everything we do in the future, provision of living facilities, social facilities, athletic facilities, intellectual facilities, cultural facilities, we hope to provide many paths through this University for the undergraduate and the graduate student. Here again, our goal is to have greater and better facilities to provide this variety. As you probably know, on March 14, 1968. we announced our Carnegie-Mellon Fund for Distinction. This came from several years of study by our faculty and administration on where CMU should go from here. We actually looked ten years ahead, but our immediate effort includes only a certain number of projects which we believe we can attain with a goal of $55 million to be raised in three years. Of this amount $30 million is for academic programs and $25 million for new physical facilities. 5

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Letter From The President Every president leaps at the chance to write on the subject of the goals of his university. 1 am no exception, and yet, it does seem to be a strange subject for the Thistle, which is mainly for upper classmen, particularly seniors. By the time you read this, most of you will be far away from this University, and in any case you know first-hand what the University is like, in some ways better than I. You know what you got out of it and perhaps may have speculated on what you might have got out of it had it been farther along toward reaching its goals. For these reasons the question of where the University is heading may seem not to be of great interest to you now. Still, as you progress through your careers, if you follow the patterns of many generations before you (and I venture that many of you will), some of you will grow increasingly interested in this University. An alumnus has a natural stake in his university, for whatever happens to his university reflects on its graduates. The better it becomes, the more value will attach to its degrees and to the people who have awarded them. But I would also bet that many of you will be interested in the long-range goals of this University for quite a different reason. Responsible citizens play an important part in shaping educational institutions, partly to make them better for their children and their children’s children. Some of you will feel that call, and in fact will point that deep interest toward this University. As 1 have said often, we are best at this University in giving a strong professional orientation to our students. In the competition you face after finishing here you will know that you have been well-prepared professionally, and we want to make the quality of that preparation always better. It is for this reason that our goals are to strengthen the departments and schools which we already have, to bring them all up to a very high level of quality. Along this line it’s interesting to note that a very highly placed official in this country once asked me if it would be possible for a university to maintain high quality in the fine arts, for example in drama. Wouldn't an institute of technology be better? I was puzzled by this remark because in changing from an institute of technology to a university we really didn’t change any of ouV attitudes toward our professional specialities. In fact, one of the reasons for changing our name from an institute of technology to a university was to give all of our professional specialities proper recognition. Unlike many people 1 believe in strong professional 4

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The facilities planned for this first three-year phase will increase the educational area on our campus by about 50 per cent through construction of three major projects. The Computer-Research-Complex will ease the pressure for research and teaching space in the engineering departments and the sciences, and permit us to reach new plateaus of excellence. It will, for example, provide the facilities needed to achieve our goal to become a center of excellence in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, for which we received a grant of S3.4 million from the National Science Foundation last year. A second major project is the Fine Arts Complex being designed to house the departments of Drama, Architecture, and Design. These new facilities which will include a new experimental theatre for our nationally renowned drama program will provide superb educational facilities for the departments housed in it and permit the expansion and complete renovation of the present Fine Arts building for the departments of Music and of Painting and Sculpture. The third structure being planned is a major addition to Skibo. which will concentrate on the kinds of recreational, relaxation, and activity space needed to enhance the quality of the out-of-class life of our students and which will include a modern and much expanded bookstore. Finally, let me say this. We want to develop a university community in which no member or no special grouping within it ever refers to another group as “they”. If we can have students and faculty, administration, trustees, and alumni, all emphasizing the “we” in our University community, I think we have a chance of really going farther up the ladder of distinction which is the goal of all our goals. Best wishes in the year to come. H. Guyford Stever, President