Cornerstone: the newsletter of the College of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 1994

              The Ripple Effect...Ross C Murfln,Dean
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f you live in the South Florida area—or if you read your Miami magazine carefully—you know that Richard L. Cooper, a 1940 alumnus of the College, died last year and left the University an unrestricted gift of over $5 million. President Foote decided to commit $4 million to the College, with most of the remainder going to the library. What you probably don’t know is what we have decided to do with this extraordinary legacy.
Approximately half of our $4 million is being used to realize one of the top goals of the Cornerstone Campaign: turning the unfinished “shell” adjacent to our new Physics building into a complex of organic chemistry laboratories. Environmental standards have become so tough that even common table salt is now classified as a hazardous substance! As a result of new rules governing “clean air” and the ventilation of substances more toxic than sodium chloride, it has become increasingly difficult for our faculty and graduate students to carry out critical research projects in the Cox Science Building. The new labs, which will be completed by November, have already had a positive impact on our Chemistry Department, allowing us to recruit an outstanding new chairperson and two extraordinary younger faculty members in a highly competitive market.
Another top goal of the Cornerstone Campaign was to provide additional research space for our social scientists. So $1 million of Mr. Cooper’s money has been put in an endowment
that is helping build a new facility just over the right field wall of Mark Light Stadium, right next to the University’s new parking garage. Nearby Metrorail access, plus adequate parking for visitors, will make it easier for professors in our Psychology and Sociology departments to interact with colleagues at the medical school as well as with the surrounding community. This new facility will house our Psychological Services Center (a mental health facility that benefits the community while allowing graduate students in clinical psychology to be trained), plus several other Psychology Department projects devoted to the study of children and their families. Current initiatives focus on such things as autism, giftedness, bilingualism, and the effects of poverty. Faculty in the Sociology Department will be one floor below, working on a multi-year, federally-funded research project on patterns of adolescent drug use in Dade County.
In case you think the College is fixated on space (or has what a fellow dean of mine refers to as the “edifice complex”), be assured that the other $1 million will be reserved in endowments that will be used to benefit the humanities and other areas of the College. I have already decided that History (the department in which Mr. Cooper majored) should have an annual Richard L. Cooper lecture series. While there are many other unmet needs, top priorities include
endowed graduate fellowships and funds to replace equipment rapidly being outdated by the ongoing technological revolution.
Thus, although only four departments have so far reaped the rewards of Mr. Cooper’s $4 million, the whole College will ultimately benefit from his (or anyone’s) generosity, for gifts have a powerful ripple effect. Graduate students in English and Philosophy will be moving into the space vacated by Psychology and Sociology. Microscopes used in freshman biology labs were recently replaced, thanks in part to funds freed up when we endowed the History Department’s lecture series.
That word “endowed” brings me to the last, and in many ways most important, way in which gifts really do keep on giving. At least half, and perhaps all, of the College’s share of Mr. Cooper’s $4 million will be placed in endowments. That means that the History Department’s lecture series can go on as long as there is a University of Miami—and that when the “mortgage” on the facility housing our social science researchers is paid off, a new project can get off the ground. Over time, I expect Mr. Cooper’s generous bequest to benefit students and faculty in every program and department in the College.
—Ross Murfin, Dean