What began as a discussion among this university's board of trustees in the fall of 2006 became reality today. At the stroke of midnight today, Jan. 1, 2008, the University of Missouri-Rolla became Missouri University of Science and Technology.
But as regular readers of this blog know, the renaming was not an overnight occurrence. And talk about renaming the university began long before the fall of 2006. Talk of renaming this university goes all the way back to the early 1960s, when UMR came into being from our original name, the University of Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy (better known as the Missouri School of Mines, or MSM).
Then as now, not everyone was elated by the decision.
I'm not sure what the communications process involved back then. Blogs were not a part of the picture, and stakeholders were likely not as involved or as savvy to the ways of marketing and communications techniques as they are today. But whatever the processes employed by the university back then, it's evident that not everyone got on board. Even today, 43 or 44 years after the fact, a few alumni remain bitter with the decision to switch from MSM to UMR.
Over the past 11 months, we've tried to use this blog as an avenue to talk about the name change with our alumni, students, faculty and staff. As we said when we launched this site last January, we wanted it to be:
- a source for useful information about the proposed name change.
- a forum [for] discussion about the issues being raised by the proposal.
- an avenue for providing up-to-the-minute information about the proposal.
When this blog experiment began, the idea of a name change was still in proposal form. It is now reality. But even after moving from proposal to recommendation to unanimous endorsement from the University of Missouri Board of Curators and on through the process of picking a logo and other details of the implementation, I'd like to think that this blog has achieved its purpose.
I hope you agree. But if you don't, well, that's fine. It's not like we haven't had our disagreements in the past. But I hope you can at least agree that this forum has allowed you to freely express your opinions about the name change and to participate in a process that we have tried to make as open as possible.
In my opinion, "transparency" and "conversation" were two of the most overused buzzwords of 2007. But those two terms best express what we have tried to do with this blog. We have used this blog to make the process more transparent than it would have been otherwise, and we have used it to try to engage you in a meaningful conversation about this change in your university's identity.
We don't want the conversation to end. As always, your comments are welcome. Just remember to keep them relevant, respectful and as brief as possible.
Happy New Year from Missouri S&T!
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