A new alumni house:
Future home could nurture exciting partnerships
Ohio Today: Let's talk a little bit about a new home for the alumni association. Certainly, Konneker Alumni Center has been a great addition to campus and was appropriate for the time, but what do you think about the process of working toward a new alumni house? What will that mean for the campus?
ALDEN: It could be a vehicle for lots of things that we've been talking about. For example, we talked about so many of the alumni working with interns, working with the Cutler Scholars and so on, and so having an alumni center where those interchanges can take place, I think is very important. I think also that we ought to have more continuing education programs. Individual colleges might have a three-day or one-week program, and the alumni center could be the center for those conferences that are held. It could be the vehicle for getting the alumni more and more involved. It could be a stop-off place for alumni when they come back to meet students, to meet faculty and so on.
PING: I think that part of the rationale is simple reality. I love the Konneker alumni house, and I remember when Wil (Konneker) proposed it. It seemed to me, if you could picture what an alumni center should be for Ohio University -- that's it, exactly. So I give it up with some reluctance. I think (we need a new alumni center) for many of the same reasons that we are building a new university center. Baker Center is a graceful building that served its time and its numbers well, but for some years now it has been strained beyond any reasonable level.
Ohio Today: Dr. Ping, we understand that you have a good perspective on what the process of building this new facility will do for alumni in terms of mobilization.
PING: Well, I don't remember what that perspective was. [He laughs]
GLIDDEN: I will remind you. When we had a session over at Konneker, you suggested that the process of raising the funds to build this is in itself going to be an important engagement.
PING: The point being how do you get people engaged? You, in fact, get them active contributing, and then they have a sense of ownership.
GLIDDEN: I think if you want to get people engaged, you have to ask them to help in whatever way. Not very many people -- particularly alums of an institution -- will turn you down. I think that all of the themes we've talked about, as Vern started out mentioning, would be enhanced (with a center). (For example), lifelong learning has been mentioned several times, and certainly a facility (could) help provide better for that. Utilizing alums to come and work with our students, which is great for engaging the alumni, is also a way to enhance the -- particularly undergraduate -- education of our students. (There is an) opportunity for networking that comes about simply because alums have an opportunity, someplace to get together.
I'll tell you a story. I met with a fellow in New Jersey who is one of our alums. He's a fairly young man in his 40s and is the director of national sales for Johnson & Johnson Pharmeuticals, so (he's in a) pretty responsible position. I gather he was not in a fraternity or anything when he was here, but he has five friends and of the six couples, the 12 people, only this man’s wife is not an alum. Of the 12 people, 11 of the 12 are alums, and they get together for a weekend together every year, and every third year it's in Athens. So they meet in a city, somewhere, and they just have a weekend together and they sort of stay in touch that way. And as I said every third year, they’re in Athens.
We had no way to know about this. They don't have a place to meet when they come, unless they meet here (at the Ohio University Inn, where the interview took place), if they all stay here. And there's a lot of that kind of thing that happens. People, because of their fondness for this community and so forth, will come back. Well, imagine if they had a place where they could get together and with others so there are a lot of opportunities for networking that occur. And then the other thing is that if we’re to do all these things with alumni that we want to do, we really have to accommodate them when they come, because Athens is not a place that you pass through going somewhere, this is a destination, right? [Others nod in agreement] You have to want to come here, right? You're not here on business for some other thing usually. So we need to have a way that we can accommodate alums when we ask them to come and speak to our students, or be together for anything. So I think that this facility will be more important than most people recognize. A lot of other institutions have began to recognize it, and there are a lot of new (alumni centers being built) around the country. And those who've had an experience now with it, that have been up long enough, I think, are finding great success in the very kind of alumni engagement that we're discussing this morning. So I think it’s a very important development that we just need to get to as soon as we can figure out a way to raise the money.
Ohio Today: What do you think it will mean for students?
GLIDDEN: Well, if I may start, let me just give you one example. If you're a business professor, and you invite that guy from Johnson & Johnson back to speak, probably you're only going to engage your own students. If alumni affairs organized that, they would find three or four different areas of students who would be interested in what he has to say. He, by the way, is not a business graduate; he's an arts and sciences graduate. If you are someone in engineering, there are a lot of our folks who have had great business success as engineers. You would like to invite certain people from the business school as well as the engineers and maybe some from arts and sciences to come and be part of that. And we don't have the space for those meetings now, nor do we have the mechanism to make certain that we have the information across various disciplinary lines to get everybody involved that should be involved. So I see great opportunities for students and also for their networking. You know if you're interested in working in a certain field and a person comes from a company in that field, that’s a contact right there; and even if he doesn't have a job for you, maybe he knows somebody who will, you know.
PING: The key to getting the alumni active in their support in a variety of ways is to start when they’re students. Konneker's a lovely spot that has all the graciousness that Ann Lee (Konneker) built into it. But the truth of the matter is there's not much room. And I think the efforts to host events for seniors, the events for international students, maybe getting them while they’re students in some sort of alumni facility will in fact increase the likelihood that they will be engaged.
GLIDDEN: Charlie's done it, too. I don't know how many times I've stood on those steps to talk to groups there, and most of them can't see me 'cause they're back in the dining room. There's no place for a fairly large group to be. I don't want to be critical of that because it is a lovely place. In a way you wish you could start with that and go on back and build on everything right there. But you know structurally, architecturally, we could certainly model the Ohio University style in doing this. And as Charlie says, if you get students coming there and working more with alumni and coming to events there and so forth, it just gives them a start on being active.
Continue to Section 8: Affinity for Athens Return to the introduction Posted 09-12-06 |
