Dedication of the Hub - April 20, 2007
Good afternoon!
I like the name of this building. It's simple and direct. "The Hub."
We used to name buildings after scientists or influential people. These days we name them after big donors. [Perhaps we will soon name them after...ex-governors.]
But the Hub remains humbly in your service as, the Hub. Just three letters. But, they say a lot about the historic and future use of this building.
Miriam-Webster defines "hub" as "the central part of a circular object (as a wheel, or propeller)." This building lies at the center of campus, neatly balanced between landmark buildings like Weil and Tigert halls to the east and west, McCarty and Fletcher to the south and north. The major roads and paths on campus spoke to a point here.
This makes the Hub the crossroads of foot travel on campus. That's just what was intended when it was built in 1950. At that time, UF was undergoing an unprecedented expansion following the end of World War II. During the war, with so many young men overseas, UF's enrollment dropped as low as 1,000 men. But, with the war over, and with the 1947 decision to open UF to women, students poured in. By 1950, enrollment had reached 10,077. UF needed a hub for all the hubbub. This was that place.
The original Hub had a soda fountain, restaurant and barber shop. It had a box office for campus performances. There was even a post office here. Imagine hundreds of students furiously checking their mail between classes! The Hub was also home to the campus bookstore. You can get through college without setting foot in the student union, but try doing it without buying books. Students gravitated here.
The renovated Hub will carry on the tradition of serving as the center of campus life. But if enrollment has quintupled since 1950, the university and the world have also changed in much more fundamental ways. Still our geographic core, the new Hub will center our global and educational missions.
This building houses the International Center and the Office of Academic Technology. These may seem unrelated. But they are intertwined. Globalization and technology are the biggest forces in students' lives today. More than any other place on campus, the Hub is where students will encounter these forces.
The International Center manages our study abroad and international student and faculty services. It also promotes internationalizing our curriculum. Academic Technologies provides all of the many different computing services faculty and students rely on. These include the computing help desk, video and collaboration services, instructional technology and training, and much more. Academic Technologies is UF's wireless port on the virtual sea.
What is wonderful about the renovation of this building is that it synchs the international with the technological. Many of you may have heard the musical group Jacare Brazil playing with music faculty member Welson Tremura at the start of this program. Musicians, separated by thousands of miles, appeared together simultaneously on one stage. That performance hints at the possibilities of the new Hub.
There are many more.
Over there to my left you see eight wall-mounted flat screens. Each broadcasts a live program from a different country. To hear the programs, you press a button on the wall, then stand in front of a screen. A special speaker broadcasts a cone of sound around you, enabling you to listen to that broadcast but not disturbing anyone else. Step out of that cone, and the broadcast seemingly goes silent. Press all the buttons, and you can walk from one TV to the next, hearing Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish in quick succession. Here at the Hub, listening to the global dialogue is not just a figure of speech.
Also built into this Hub are two video conferencing rooms, each equipped with three large flat screens and all the other latest technology. These rooms allow students to meet virtually with peers anywhere in the world. More and more of our students do this as part of their regular classes. You can really appreciate the possibilities when you see American and Siberian students singing their native children's songs together, as happened in one class recently.
There's more. Like most of the rest of campus, the Hub is wireless enabled, but it will also soon have dozens of walk-up computer stations for students who left their laptop at home. There are also rooms dedicated to video production and editing, a necessary skill for many students in a global economy. And, behind me is the warm and open computing help desk, where students can walk up for assistance with their Gatorlink account or their personal laptop. Until this renovation, students not able to solve problems on the phone had to troop to the fifth floor of the Computer Science Building.
Like all other new buildings on this campus, the Hub is a green building. It has water saving fixtures, super-efficient air handling units and low-polluting materials. This is in keeping with our efforts to become more environmentally sustainable as a university. We hope we will inspire other large educational institutions to follow our lead.
There's still more to this building. Upstairs, for example, Academic Technology has a suite of new offices.
But, in keeping with its historical role, the Hub remains fundamentally a student gathering place. Instead of a soda fountain, we have a Starbucks. Instead of checking their snail mail here, students can check their email. Instead of buying books, they can make a video, or meet for a class project with counterparts on another continent.
So, today the gathering at the Hub is a global one. This is utterly appropriate for the heart of our campus in 2007, and I am very pleased to dedicate this building today.
Thank you.
Bernie Machen