Generosity

Yesterday I was in LA with some colleagues from Spain. About five years ago, in Rome, I met a guy from a Catholic university in Madrid named Universidad Francisco de Vittoria. A few months ago he wrote and said they would like to visit California and several institutions they could possibly work with on exchanges. We put together a set of meetings in LA and the Bay Area that had strong programs in areas they were interested in. They ranged in size from USC to Cogswell Polytechnic College (a couple of hundred students). UFV has large programs in communications and film and so we also are having them visit Mount Saint Marys and the Art Center College of Design and Menlo.

The first two visits were very good, everyone was cordial. But what struck me was the unexpected. We were on the Loyola Marymount campus (a wonderful film school and also a great communications school) and were walking around the campus. We went into the film school and popped in on the dean - who was temporarily out of the office and so simply walked throught the building to look at the labs. We found two professors in their offices and they were kind enough to spend about a half an hour showing our guests both the animation labs and the sound stages and to talk about the program at LMU. We talk often about the personal nature of independent higher education - and that extra care that the two professors showed our group reinforced that principle quite well.