Message from the Chancellor

Chancellor's Note

April, 2008

John A. White There's a phrase I've been hearing lately to describe members of the baby boom: analog in a digital world. This is a polite way of being called a dinosaur; I'd use the word fuddy-duddy, but that's a terribly analog term these days. Still, I admit to preferring handwritten letters to e-mails, books to movies, and magazine pages I can touch to Web pages I must surf. While I may value these increasingly antiquated pleasures in my private life, a modern university does not have the luxury of being "analog" in an ever-flattening world.

Since 2000, I have been updating university stakeholders on the State of the University in an annual address. This has traditionally been a speech delivered in the fall. It was paper-based and read aloud, and might even be described as "pre-analog" in its delivery.

But this year we plunged into the digital age.

Rather than deliver a speech, I hosted a documentary video that gives viewers a chance to experience the sights and sounds of campus, and hear about campus life from a cross section of faculty, students, researchers and donors emblematic of the University of Arkansas. We hear from faculty and students at the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, as well as the award-winning University of Arkansas Community Design Center. This is only a small part of what we were able to accomplish by shooting video rather than reading from a script.

The result is a much more visceral experience in half the time a speech required. But don't just take my word for it: judge for yourself by going to http://chancellor.uark.edu/ and clicking on "State of the University video."

I think you'll be surprised and pleased by what you see.

The video is part of a general trend on campus to develop more video and on-line content to satisfy the demands of the You Tube generation. In fact, for the first time, Research Frontiers is now including a Web-based video component. The four feature articles in this issue all will have a video component. The video shorts, produced by Will Gisler, run anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes, and are not condensed versions of the articles. Instead, they provide supplementary information. Careful reading of the features will be rewarded with interviews and images that broaden understanding of the source material. To view these videos, please turn to "On the Web" on page 2.

Though we will be increasing the amount of video content available on the uark.edu Web site, we remain committed to a print format, and will continue to produce in-depth feature articles. This might be the digital age, with an ever-growing demand for online video content, but it has not yet made extinct the value of the printed word, the actual page, the handwritten letter. Hopefully, it never will.

Then again, maybe thinking this is hopelessly analog of me.

Happy reading,

John A. White
Chancellor