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On
Tuesday morning, August 5th, Dr. Steve Hensley, President of
A&M-Texarkana, arrived in Laredo, accompanied by Vice-Chancellor
Leo Sayavedra and two plane-loads of community leaders from North
Texas. The purpose of the visit was a thrilling one. Having just
received statutory authority to expand Texarkana's upper-level
university to a full-service, four-year institution, these visitors
were in Laredo to see how this institution had effected the same
transformation. While their questions ranged over a wide inventory
of issues, their central concern was to see the physical spaces
we inhabit, to learn from us how they might best proceed to create
a new, comprehensive university.
We have, all of us, become very accustomed to visits
of every stripe. After all, Texas A&M International University sits on ground
that barely ten years ago was raw Texas ranchland. Persons from all over the
state and from abroad regularly visit the campus to marvel at its novel conception.
For unlike the traditional pattern of university construction, A&M International
was designed to be executed as one unit. This campus was not conceived merely
to accommodate the needs of the 2500 students who first entered these walls in
the fall of 1995, but in anticipation of the large population we ultimately will
serve.
Hosting the visiting dignitaries from Texarkana
thus seemed a routine responsibility, a familiar tour of familiar space. "What
would you advise us, as we build our new campus?" they asked. "What
has worked especially well for you?" "What features do you deem essential
for us to include in our plan?" " What would you do differently if
today you were asked to develop a university?"
My first thought that day was how pedestrian and
even marginal the concerns with physical space are to the life of the mind. Universities
are about academic programs, not spaces, I thought. Moses, Plato, Jesus-the greatest
and most widely-studied teachers of the Western tradition-met their students
without the support of a campus, or a library, or a travel allowance. And yet
the writings gathered around their names are among the most precious of the human
record. Perhaps it was the questions our visitors brought, the immediacy of their
focus, that quieted my misgivings, making this visit, for me, an unexpectedly
profound encounter. To my surprise, and throughout that day, in contemplating
these questions and articulating possible answers, I came to understand anew
how carefully crafted surroundings become protean spaces for the mind.
The most important ingredients, we told our visitors,
are also the most obvious: you must have adequate land and you must use it to
erect buildings of high quality. Unfortunately, modern technology allows the
construction of attractive facilities that may not actually be of the highest
caliber. A university must exude permanence and stability; structures should
be designed so that 50 years hence they continue to serve and inspire those who
teach and those who learn.
But physical spaces can serve for more than to
house our books and our papers, to shelter our bodies and our equipment. In its
conception and layout, the first building of this campus, our primal academic
space, the Killam Library, not only facilitates our mission, it proclaims it.
The half-globe embedded in the north façade of the library inscribes our
international character. Inspired by a façade of the Belvedere Palace
at the Vatican, this design, this half-orb, also gives light and form to the
main reading room of the library. A Texas plain stretches north from the myriad
array of windows, even as the globe reminds us that this university, and, indeed,
education, is a universal adventure.
As our fine arts faculty continuously tell students,
great art always unites form and meaning to create beauty and coherence. "Ensure
that in their design, your buildings convey your mission, your reason for being," we
told our visitors. I had not fully understood until that moment how successfully
the architects, working with administration and faculty, had incorporated form
and meaning, beauty and function, into our own first building.
When they entered the Great Room of the library,
our visitors were predictably impressed by its size and beauty. Less apparent
was the crucial function that that space served in our first days on this campus. "You
must plan a similar space for your new campus," we told them. The Great
Room, in truth the main reading room of the library, began as our community room,
our reception hall, our recital hall, our banqueting hall, our principal lecture
hall, our exhibition space, our preferred venue for all special moments.
With the opening of the Western Hemispheric Trade
Center, the Student Center, and now, this week, the Center for the Fine and Performing
Arts, other spaces designed for those multiple needs are now available. It is
especially appropriate that students today read and study quietly in a room whose
form reifies our mission and whose first days brought students, faculty, visitors,
and the community together to learn and to enjoy together the benefits of university
life.
Leaving the library, we entered another space whose
meaning and importance to our development I only began to grasp as we explained
its use. The large central plaza, the quadrangle formed by the library, and Bullock,
Pellegrino, Canseco, and Cowart Halls, has become for us the central square of
the community, our amphitheater, meeting place and marketplace, forum and agora.
The English often call similar spaces a "circus," and our plaza has
often seemed to host circus-like activities. The most exalted function for our
plaza, I think, is to provide the setting for our graduation ceremonies, a bounded,
academic close in which several thousand people can see and hear the University
perform the ancient rite of faculty convocation, student commencement.
Our tour for visiting Texarkansans continued to
the Western Hemispheric Trade Center, the Student Center, and the Center for
the Fine and Performing Arts. Each of those marvelous buildings provides ample
venues for meeting, for study, for teaching, for practice, for research. When
one steps into our Student Center and looks up, the inspiring quotations throughout
the building immediately lift us into the life of the mind. The newly completed
Lamar Bruni Vergara Memorial Garden brings us the "buen aire et fermosas
salidas," good air and beautiful promenades, so important to King Alfonso
the Wise as he planned his University in thirteenth century Spain. And no space
on this campus more clearly models the importance of adornment and decoration,
for its own inspiring sake, than the lobby of the kinesiology building.
By the end of the day, it had become clear to me
what our effort and what our focus for the next two years must be. For the first
time since we began occupying this ground, we have a clear sense of how the campus,
fully built out, will look---what all the spaces, when they are finally ours,
will be. Tonight, we, the University and our Laredo community, formally open
and dedicate the Center for the Fine and Performing Arts. The science center
is now well under construction, the crystal pyramid-planetarium certainly destined
to become a focal point for all visitors to Webb County.
We will break ground on the 26th of August, next
Tuesday, for the first comprehensive residential facility designed for university
freshmen ever built in Laredo. And in September, we will begin the plans for
completion of kinesiology and athletic facilities of Phase V of the original
master plan. All these projects, all these spaces, will be completed in the next
two years, the present biennium.
During these next two years, for the first time
since August, 1995, when faculty began to put books on the new shelves of their
new offices, we can consider how best to use a completed campus, a fully realized,
academic space. In the eight years since we arrived here, most of us have been
inhabiting such spaces as were available at that moment, only to be moved to
another office as yet another building opened. Beginning this biennium, our fully-realized
campus will allow us to pursue the essential community partnerships to support
our academic programs and to fulfill our mission to this region. Completion of
the Recital Hall in the Center for the Fine and Performing Arts, and the opening
of a similar facility at Laredo Community College, have permitted us to invite
the Laredo Philharmonic Orchestra to make its home on both campuses, and to make
the Orchestra an integral part of our fine arts program. At present, both the
Laredo Little Theatre and the Laredo Children's Museum have expressed an interest
in collaborating with the University, designing and defining spaces that will
allow us all, working together, to serve our students and the citizens of South
Texas.
In literature and in life, certain buildings and
the spaces they define become metonymies, vessels of human activity whose very
names convey vast domains of human experience: the House of Usher-family failure
over generations; Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange-passion and reason
in eternal opposition; Howards End-an enduring refuge over time. In the public
sphere, The White House, Buckingham Palace, the Vatican, the Kremlin all call
to mind, as we name them, their function, their history, and their meaning for
us.
What do we, faculty and administrators, think when
we say "the University?" What do our students think when they say "the
University?" What do those words mean to the community which surrounds us
and sustains us? If our institutional activities honor the spaces we have been
given, "the University" is also a metonymy, another word for lives
infused with academic freedom and with service to our community. Academic freedom-as
beautiful, open, embracing as our Great Room with its orb, our plaza with its
productive chaos. Service to our community-a common journey in the arts, in science,
in business, in health, to improve and expand human life.
Manos a la obra. Let's do it!
(Remarks delivered at the Faculty and Administrative Staff Assembly,
August 21, 2003.)
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