In talking with graduates from our earliest classes to recent graduates, like those in Dubai, I hear the same themes: close relationships with the faculty have changed the lives of our students. Their relationships with faculty and their friends here have helped form their personalities and prepared them for meaningful careers and lives as citizens in a democracy.
— Walter Harrison, President


On the Sunday before Thanksgiving I was sitting in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. I was meeting with four University graduates who work in that most fascinating city.

The four graduates were Farah Al Hinai A’99, ’99, M’04, who came to the University from Oman; Rachid Abu Hassan ’00, an acoustics engineer from Lebanon; Faisal Al Saja A’01, ’02, a banker from Saudi Arabia; and Mohammed Ali A’05, ’06, who is a native of Dubai and works in information technology. Faisal’s wife, Gulru Kutluk M’01, who came to the University from Turkey and now works in human resources at the United Arab Emirates University, was unable to join us.

Talking about the Commons residence project and the Integrated Science, Engineering, and Technology complex from some 7,000 miles away was an exhilarating experience for me. But it was even more thrilling to listen to these former students describe how they are using what they learned at the University to help improve the world through careers that touch on almost every facet of business life in Dubai.

You can probably tell that I was bursting with pride for the University of Hartford. What I was experiencing that evening was the clear sense that the University of Hartford is more than living up to its mission of preparing students for careers as active and productive citizens. We are sending our graduates all over the world to become leaders in shaping tomorrow.

That is what the community leaders who founded the University 50 years ago were aiming for, although they were thinking more immediately about serving the Greater Hartford region. In the intervening 50 years, the University has grown physically and intellectually. It has changed from a university for students commuting from the Greater Hartford region, to a largely residential university for students from across the United States and around the world. The university those leaders founded has expanded to encompass a graduate program of increasing stature and prominence. But along the way, it has never lost its fundamental mission: to be a private university with a public purpose.

If you know anything about the history of higher education, you know that since the close of World War II, it has been characterized by the rise in prominence and popularity of public higher education. From the University of Connecticut to the University of California, public universities have grown in size, in stature, and in their places in American public life.

Yet when our founders conceived of a university for Hartford, they chose to found a private university. They didn’t go to the legislature and say, “Give us a public university,” as leaders of so many other cities did. They said, “We’ll do it ourselves. We’ll bring three small schools—the Hartt College of Music, the Hartford Art School, and Hillyer College—together, and we’ll form our own university.”

I can’t think of a more shining example of New England self-reliance. The founders took it upon themselves to found, raise money for, and build a university. They saw themselves as the guardians of tomorrow, and they accepted the responsibility, as citizens of Hartford, for founding this University.

That sense of self-reliance and service has characterized this University ever since. We continue to serve the Hartford community in ways too numerous to do full justice to here: from the Community Division of The Hartt School, which provides performing arts education and training for 3,000 children through adults every semester; to the Micro Business Incubator on Albany Avenue, where Barney School students provide valuable consulting services for small-business owners; to Project Horizon, which places our nursing students in homeless shelters throughout Hartford.

The best example of this service to our community is our connection with the public school system. No other private university of our size has such a deep and abiding connection. Each semester, over 300 of our students provide a wide variety of services to students in nine schools in the city of Hartford through Educational Main Street. And, of course, the University is home to two magnet schools—University of Hartford Magnet School (from early childhood to fifth grade) and University High School of Science and Engineering. No other private university can boast of two public schools on its campus. No other has worked as hard to close the distance between K–12 and higher education.

But at our heart has always been our dedication to the learning experiences of our students, both undergraduates and graduates. In talking with graduates from our earliest classes to recent graduates, like those in Dubai, I hear the same themes: close relationships with the faculty have changed the lives of our students. Their relationships with faculty and their friends here have helped form their personalities and prepared them for meaningful careers and lives as citizens in a democracy.

There is much in the next 50 years we cannot predict. We have just begun a major strategic planning effort to think about that future. We have a great deal of deliberation and a number of important choices before us. Whatever we do, however, you can count on us to build on our history of service and connection. That will be the key to our future, just as it has been the key to our past.

Beginning in February we will mark 2007 with a series of celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the University’s charter. We have much to celebrate and explore. This issue of the Observer kicks off that celebration.