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professorship is prestigious because, with five total at UW-Green Bay (the
Frankenthal, Johnson and Hauxhurst Cofrin are the others), only 21 faculty
members have held one of these five-year appointments since the first was
established in 1981. The awards are vital because they expand opportunities
for students and keep standout senior faculty on the cutting edge; stipends
can purchase additional special equipment, support scholarly work and pay
to help with student research. The professorships are tributes because of
where and how they originate. Professorships exist only because benefactors with roots in the Green Bay community have created endowments — typically in the six-figure range — generating interest to recognize, reward and support our faculty stars. These donors act because they respect the calling that is higher education. They appreciate what top-flight faculty members do for a University, for students and for the community. Carrying this same concept to a higher level is creation of an endowed chair. Such a gift goes beyond providing invaluable but supplementary support for an existing position. It underwrites an entirely new position reserved for a distinguished professor in a specific field. Such an endowed chair had not existed at UWGB. Until now. Last month, the campus rejoiced as lifelong friend Dorothy Blair and the Blair Foundation announced a magnificent $1.5 million gift to create the John P. Blair Endowed Chair in Communications. It is believed to be the largest non-facilities related gift of its kind in the history of this University. I won’t get into all the wonderful details here. The gift, the remarkable story behind it, and its anticipated impact on this community will be described in the “Inside UW-Green Bay” magazine due out shortly. For my purposes here, however, I do want to share some thoughts on conversations that took place during Dorothy Blair’s visit. Over lunch, Dorothy described a tour she and her late husband, John, had made of UWGB in the 1960s. Chancellor Ed Weidner had brought them in to see the future site of our campus. All that was there, though, was a farm. Dorothy recalls it today as “The Field of Dreams.” aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaTOP OF NEXT COLUMN |
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Great dreams make for great narrative. Certainly that was true with John
Blair. Not widely known outside media circles, he built a multi-media
conglomerate by jumping into television advertising in 1948, almost before
TV sets were widely available for home use. With that perspective, Ed
Weidner’s capacity to look at open fields and, dreaming great dreams
to see a university, must have seemed not at all strange to John and Dorothy
Blair. |
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