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PRESIDENT'S LETTER
President Barbara R. Snyder
This fall we celebrate the opening of two extraordinary new spaces on campus: The Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at The Temple – Tifereth Israel, and think[box] in the Richey Mixon Building. Each involves extensive and imaginative renovation of existing space, and each provides a new home for initiatives central to our role as an institution of higher learning.
The work at the Maltz Performing Arts Center reflects the first phase of a two-part project to provide state-of-the-art performance and rehearsal space for our departments of dance, music and theater. Our acclaimed graduate acting program has helped launch the careers of people including 2012 Tony nominee Elizabeth Davis and Mad Men regular Rich Sommer. Yet the performing arts exist on our campus for far more than those solely pursuing them as a career.
The efforts involved in learning, rehearsing and presenting a piece provide lessons that apply to myriad professions—and hone skills that play a part in nearly every facet of our lives. As noted in these pages, we marked the opening of the Maltz Performing Arts Center's Silver Hall with a performance by The Cleveland Orchestra on the new stage. Orchestra members played the Violins of Hope, instruments from the Holocaust restored by violin maker Amnon Weinstein. As we listened in that historic space, imagining where those violins had been, the music carried profound meaning, and we felt equal awe.
As David Rubenstein, the chair of the Kennedy Center board has observed, "The world is a complicated place, and there's a lot of division between people. The performing arts tend to unify people in a way nothing else does."
Then there is our innovation hub, think[box], which this fall moved from a cramped basement area to the Richey Mixon Building with 10 times the space. Yet even before the big move, its equipment and technology helped launch multiple student startups, including one that led to a White House visit for undergraduate entrepreneur Felipe Gómez del Campo. His jet-engine nozzle injects plasma into jet fuel, making the combustion process safer, more efficient and less expensive. His company, FGC Plasma Solutions, has won $130,000 in startup competitions and has a patent application awaiting action.
The Richey Mixon Building not only offers expanded areas for brainstorming and prototyping, but also offices where students can secure advice regarding drafting business plans, protecting their intellectual property and more. Like the performing arts center, think[box] enhances creativity and commitment; it shows that even the wildest ideas may well translate to opportunity, if only an individual has the courage to try.
With the exception of their scope, these projects hardly differ from a violin or trombone, calculator or computer. Like those tools, these buildings provide little in and of themselves. They matter because of what our students, staff and faculty bring to them: talent, intellect, dedication—and dreams. In many ways, this concept applies to our entire university. We exist to teach, learn and discover. But we need people to engage with Case Western Reserve if we truly are to think beyond the possible.
To all who do, we cannot say it enough: Thank you.
