Cornerstone: the newsletter of the College of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 1992

              By Way of Introduction... Ross Murfin, Dean
t seems appropriate for a new dean writing a first column for the first alumni newsletter published since 1983 by the College of Arts and Sciences to begin with a few words of introduction.
Although I became dean just about a year ago, I am hardly new to Miami— or the University of Miami. My father, Mark Murfin, was on the faculty of the School of Education from 1952 to 1976—some of you may remember im. I left Coral Gables High School ior Princeton University in 1967, sure that my future lay in the Northeast.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to Manhattan:—I married a Miamian! After graduate school at the University of Virginia and seven years on the Yale faculty, I was offered a position in the UM English department in 1981. I jumped at the chance to bring my family—by then a family of four—home to Miami.
Since that homecoming year, I have been an English professor, director of graduate studies, associate director (and later director) of the University’s Honors Program, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, master of the first residential college on campus (the Honors College, later renamed Florence Hecht College), and vice provost for undergraduate affairs. (I have done several of these things at once, for those of you who are wondering if I can hold a job.)
Having introduced myself, I’d now like to reintroduce the College of Arts nd Sciences, because whether you graduated in 1932 or 1992, the College
has grown and changed. We still have the departments and programs that you remember, but we have two new undergraduate programs (Environmental Sciences, Meteorology) and one new graduate program (M.F.A. in Creative Writing) that just got underway this fall. Almost as new are our Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, our program in Women’s Studies, and our Comparative and International Studies major (now in its third year, it enrolls over one hundred students).
As these new programs suggest, the College is strong and growing. In 1988-89, approximately 4,000 students majored in one of our departments or programs. This year, the number of arts and sciences majors stands at almost 4,800. Last fall, the College hoped to attract about 930 freshmen (the University’s goal was 1,800). Instead, 999 of the University’s 1,801 new freshmen enrolled in the College. By the time you read this, the College will have easily met its fall 1992 goal of enrolling 1,000 new freshmen—this in spite of the fact that the number of high school graduates has been dropping during the past several years! More students, of course, create a need not only for more programs but also for more of everything else: more scholar-
ships, more faculty, more courses, more computer labs, and so forth. That is why last November 8th was the most exciting day of the first year of my deanship. During his homecoming conversation with alumni in Gusman Hall, President Foote announced a three-year Cornerstone Campaign, the goal of which is to raise $50 million to support the College of Arts and Sciences and the Otto G. Richter Library.
The College can’t wait, of course, until the end of the Cornerstone Campaign to meet student demand for more faculty and better facilities. For this reason, the College took advantage of a gift of 241 IBM computers last winter to establish student computer facilities/labs in virtually every department in the College. In addition, we have begun a pilot program to develop
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