Friday Focus: The history of the future

April 8, 2022

— Owen Guthrie, vice chancellor of student affairs and enrollment management

I love this old aerial image of Troth Yeddha’. It was taken by Bradford Washburn on a late September afternoon in 1938. The leaves have fallen; hay (or perhaps a crop of oats) has been cut and stacked to dry. There are a handful of faculty or student cars out front of the Main Building. Parking looks so convenient! If you look carefully, you can see a small car in the shadows of the road on the left of the frame. The camera probably caught the driver trundling toward class or town after chores at the Agricultural Farm. 

The Main Building of UAF, now gone, looks to have been designed with such aspiration! I am guessing it was the largest and most future-focused building in Fairbanks at the time. It had a wonderful southeast aspect and featured huge light-gathering windows, much larger than anything else on campus. It must have been the ELIF Building or Murie Building of its day. Its ambitious design says to me that the builders had high hopes and an inspired vision for the future. Much has changed since 1938, but those hopes and aspirations for what the future holds continue today. 

In our Strategic Enrollment Planning (SEP) work, we spend a lot of time talking about change. Faculty, staff and students from many units, including CBSM, CLA, CTC, CEM and CNSM, have been looking at opportunities and working to improve our student recruitment and retention strategies. We have also been working to improve student support systems such as advising, tutoring and mentoring through the creation of the new Student Success Center. Updating our program offerings is another important piece. Several new programs have been proposed for development and some have already been created. It has been so exciting to work with those engaged in the SEP process and embrace our opportunities for improvement. These efforts follow in the footsteps of those who built that giant hall of classrooms almost a century ago. Yes, much has changed since 1938, and much continues to change, but the thread of inspired engagement with the opportunities of tomorrow is constant. 

There are other constants as well. This video from the UAF Archives brings the above image to life. It opens with footage of faculty and students disembarking from what was once College Station, a small train stop at the bottom of our hill. It is a bright snowy day in April. It could be today. Then, we see students busily walking about campus and past what would later become Signers’ Hall on their way to and from their dorms in the bright April sun. We then cut to a slightly later date, probably later in April or early in May. We see the front of the Main Building. Faculty (including Charles Bunnell, I believe) and students process in their regalia for their commencement ceremony. It is great to imagine all the futures that these students were stepping off into. The specifics of our spring ceremony have changed, but soon we will repeat the spring ritual of celebration of the achievements of our students. 

This ritual has happened every year for nearly a century, and this year, we will celebrate the achievement of many more students and more diverse students. Students will graduate from many more programs and will step off into the pursuit of more opportunities than the folks in 1938 imagined. We have more faculty and a more diverse faculty. We now serve students through our five rural campuses and our Community and Technical College downtown. We serve online students across Alaska, across the U.S. and around the world. A lot has changed for the better since the commencement ceremony featured in the video, and if you look at the smiling faces from all those years ago, a lot remains the same. In just a few weeks, we will celebrate new smiles and celebrate new moments of recognition and achievement. These moments in time, in the lives of our students, are part of the fabric of spring itself and have been so since 1923. I can’t wait. 

If you regularly attend commencement, I will see you there. If you don’t, I encourage you to come and see the joy on the faces of our students and their families. We each contribute in our own way to their journey and it is inspiring to see the culmination of that effort, and to share in their celebration. It puts our work in focus. In doing so, we are connecting to the many graduates who have come before and to the yet uncounted graduates of tomorrow. What do we imagine for those future celebrations in years yet to come? We have the opportunity, even the responsibility, to design the scale and scope of future celebrations to be as vibrant and bountiful as possible. The opportunities for tomorrow remain largely limited by our ambition, by our vision, and by our imagination. 

Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF's leadership team every week.