"It is a statement that says were committed to working across departmental lines, across college lines, and in many cases across university lines"

 

President Barker's opening remarks (Real Media, low resolution)

"Welcoming Remarks"
President James F. Barker

Good morning everybody. It's a pleasure to be here this morning to welcome visitors to the Clemson campus and say good morning to my colleagues. We think this is a important event in the life of Clemson University, and I am glad that you are here to be a part of it. I hope by the end of the day today you will be inspired.

I have been giving considerable thought to the power of ideas and how ideas are developed, how they are nurtured, how they are formed, and particularly how they develop momentum on a university campus. And as an architect, which is my profession and discipline, I have spent considerable time with ideas, and have a great deal of interest and belief in the power of ideas. I have also learned that creativity is found in many different parts of the campus, for creativity is really the stuff that a university is made of. There is no corner on the market of creativity. This colloquium began with an idea, and it developed in the way all good ideas and meaningful ideas develop. That is, with a group of faculty in a collaborative and stimulating environment where they could begin to talk to each other. I have also learned that the role of a president or a dean is to create that stimulating and creative environment and then get out of the way, because faculty will know what to do. The job that I think I have is to help make sure that that environment is exactly the way I described it. Then when those ideas come out of that discussion and collaboration, the role of the president is to support the ideas of faculty, especially the ones that are as stimulating as what we are talking about here this morning. The concept of the work that we are talking about today is really very simple. What if you were to create a university press in the twenty-first century? How would it be different than one that was created in the eighteenth century or the nineteenth century, or even the twentieth century? That is what has been driving the work that we have been doing, and I think that that's what really brings us together today.

We have been having discussions on this campus for about two decades about a university press. After those discussions, when we really took stock of where we were, we really were not making very much progress. So, this idea seemed to be very much liberating because it allowed us to consider a university press in a completely new context. The Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing is a result of this liberated thinking and planning, and it made sense to me as a natural outgrowth of the work that we have been doing in the English department and in our Master of Arts in Professional Communication Program. The work in this program and at the Pearce Center for Professional Communication showed us that a center such as this would be not only possible for Professional Communication, but would make a great deal of sense.

This work as many of you know is the origin of communication across the curriculum on this campus, the result of which has been the recognition by TIME magazine as Clemson being Public College of the Year. So, there is every reason to have confidence that the group of faculty in this area would be the ones to carry this thought forward.

We realize that we are in some new territory here and we like it. We like being in the new territory even though its confusing and we don't have the answers all yet.

And just as we have been considering the future of our libraries, in some ways today is a kind of a crafting of a declaration of independence. It is a declaration that we are not going to be bound by a traditional view of what a university press is. It is also in many ways a crafting of a declaration of interdependence, as Joe Boykin likes to say, because it is a declaration in support of collaboration. It is a statement that says were committed to working across departmental lines, across college lines, and in many cases across university lines, so that we can develop the potential of this new center.

This colloquium is an early step in understanding this new territory that we are in. It is a statement about the fact that Clemson is committed to the substance, and making sure that the work we do here has meaning.

We are very pleased that you are part of this gathering today, and that together we will help craft a feature for this new center by the discussions that we will have. We are delighted that you chose to join us this morning, and I look forward to the discussions that will take place.