UMBC Arts & Humanities Groundbreaking
September 17, 2010
It’s great to be here at UMBC – U.S. News & World Report’s #1 Up-and-Coming National University! All together now, can we get a “Let’s go Retrievers?!”
To all the students and faculty who are with us – today is about you. It’s about your moms and your dads and your sisters and brothers too. It’s about building a stronger future and helping you reach your dreams in the present,…awakening new possibilities to compose a life that matters.
And it’s about our mission as a State to create jobs, to save jobs, and to lay the groundwork for even greater job growth, job retention, and expanded opportunity for all.
It’s about moving forward rather than slipping back,… and it’s about our best days which are still ahead of us, if we choose in our own here and now to invest in the best asset we have for creating and saving jobs, and restoring, refreshing, reinvigorating, and retooling our economy: you. Your talents, your skills, your education, and – yes - your creativity.
Forward, Together
We’re going to be able to use this facility to help UMBC build its national reputation – attracting great scholars and helping students expand the limits of their imagination and potential. And it’s going to help us create jobs in our State both today and tomorrow.
The construction of this facility will create 326 full-time jobs – and as a LEED certified facility, it will allow UMBC to get more out of every dollar we invest, while also helping our planet. It’s all connected.
The fact that this facility will be the biggest building on UMBC’s campus says something about all of us. It says that the humanities matter. It’s says that the arts matter. It says that our people matter and that the greatest of freedom’s privileges is the freedom to choose a stronger future.
The arts, humanities, and the STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math are all connected,… they’re connected to each other, to jobs and greater job creation, and to a new prosperity. When a painter divides the space on a canvas, when a musician studies meter and rhythm, when an English major studies the great works of literature – it brings us closer to the future we aspire to.
To reach our greatest job creating potential, we’ve chosen – alone among the fifty states -- to freeze in-state tuition at UMBC and our other state colleges and universities for not one, not two, not three, but four years in a row.
We’ve chosen to increase our investment in Baltimore County public school construction by 80%.
And we’ve chosen to invest $40 million in this new facility – even in the toughest of times.
Conclusion
The way to get through tough times like these is to pick ourselves up off the mat and punch forward,… and that’s what we’re doing together. With 40,000 jobs we’ve created in Maryland since January at more than three times national growth, we’re moving forward,… with America’s #1 public schools so says Education Week magazine for two years in a row, we’re racing to the top,… with the lowest violent crime rate since 1975, we’re rising.
It’s been said that “there is an instinct in us for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power,…” We are going through a great period of renewal in Maryland – recovering stronger and faster than other States. And by unlocking the power and potential of our creativity we can reaffirm that sense in our heart that our best days our still ahead of us.
Our best days are ahead of us, and as One Maryland, we move forward,… together.
