From 1984 to 2000, Dr. John Worthen served as the 11th President of Ball State University. During his tenure, Dr. Worthen earned the respect and admiration of his colleagues—and the campus community—on account of his effective leadership of the institution.
In this episode, Dr. Worthen recounts growing up as a child during the Great Depression and what inspired him to pursue a career in higher education.
Dr. Worthen also reflects on his experiences serving in the Navy, meeting his wife, Sandra, and the many milestones of his presidency, including the successful completion of Ball State’s first capital campaign and helping the institution become nationally recognized for its use of technology to enhance learning.
If you enjoy this episode, please leave a review to support the show.
From 1984 to 2000, Dr. John Worthen served as the 11th President of Ball State University. During his tenure, Dr. Worthen earned the respect and admiration of his colleagues—and the campus community—on account of his effective leadership of the institution.
In this episode, Dr. Worthen recounts growing up as a child during the Great Depression and what inspired him to pursue a career in higher education.
Dr. Worthen also reflects on his experiences serving in the Navy, meeting his wife, Sandra, and the many milestones of his presidency, including the successful completion of Ball State’s first capital campaign and helping the institution become nationally recognized for its use of technology to enhance learning.
If you enjoy this episode, please leave a review to support the show.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Hello, and welcome back to Our Call to Beneficence. My guest on the podcast today is someone who is very familiar to many of you. Dr. John Worthen served for 16 years as the 11th president of Ball State University from 1984 to 2000. During his tenure, he led the successful completion of the university's first capital campaign. He strengthened our reputation as an outstanding teaching university, and he helped Ball State become nationally recognized for the use of technology to enhance learning. In this episode, I will ask President Worthen about some of the many milestones of his presidency. But I also want you to get to know him better, so I'm going to ask him questions about what it was like to grow up a child of the Great Depression and how it felt to learn how to fly fighter jets for the United States Navy. As you are about to discover, President Worthen's life story will make you believe once again in the power of the American dream, and I'm grateful for this opportunity to allow him to share more about himself and his career with you, our listeners. President Worthen, welcome, and thank you for joining me today.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, thank you, Mr. President, for inviting me to be part of this podcast. I'm looking forward to it.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Me too. Thank you. So, let's begin with your childhood. You were born in 1933, a few years into the Great Depression. While you were young, you grew up in a small home along the Mississippi River. What do you recall about growing up there and about your parent's resilience in raising and supporting you?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, I was born in 1933, probably the bottom of the Depression. So, the Depression had a great effect on me and my family and lots of other people, of course, during that time. My parents were both teachers of one-room, eight-grade schools. And my mother had a two-year certificate for teaching from what is now Southern Illinois University. My dad began teaching about a year after graduating from high school. So, he had no real teacher preparation, but he was known as a disciplinarian and managed the schools very well so kept getting rehired. And by the time I was born, he had been teaching for about 12 years and my mother about seven.
But at that time, my mother decided to stop teaching for a few years and then began teaching later when my sister was born. And so, I was the oldest of two children. You ask about resilience. My dad earned $800 a year, and he could teach for eight months because by the ninth or tenth month the kids needed to be home to help with the farming. So, we had $800 a year income. Actually, there were a lot of people in that area who didn't have any income at all, so my parents were very careful. They were very careful what they spent money for, and they bought just the necessities. They had to have gas, and they bought sugar and flour and those necessities, probably coffee. But they also were ambitious, and they expected to move from this little house with no indoor plumbing as soon as possible. And so, they were saving to buy that next house.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
On $800 a year, they were able to save money to buy another house.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes. Yes. But remember, they had been teaching before, so they were doing this for some time. And so, when I was about four years old, my mother came to me and said, “We're moving. We have bought a house, and it's about two miles from Murphysboro, Illinois. It's on three acres, and when we get there, my husband,” she said, “your father is going to buy a cow, and we're going to have a cow. And I'm going to make everything you can make from fresh milk.”
And so, we moved, and it was a great opportunity to be close enough to this Murphysboro, which was 9,000 people.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So, to say the least, that was a modest home environment. Did you feel poor?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
No, no, no. No one who grew up in the Depression ever said that we were poor. It was just tough. So everybody did the best they could do, but there were opportunities, and those people who managed their situation so that they could save some money were able to take advantage of some of these opportunities. And so, to go back to the question about resilience, they were models of resilience.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
You also said your father was a disciplinarian in the classroom, in the schoolhouse. Was he a disciplinarian at home?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes, but they were loving parents, and they wanted me to not just survive, but they wanted me to be successful.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So they also taught you about the importantance of discipline leading to opportunities, and that was the kind of ambition they had for you?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes, it was discipline, but it was also responsibility, and taking advantage of opportunities with when they became available. And I think when I received my doctorate at Harvard, my mother probably thought that's what we've been working for. And my dad would have said, probably a little much. [laughs]
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Probably a little, an extraordinary achievement. So let's go back a little bit to your own education. You were an outstanding student in school, ahead of your time, outstanding student in high school, and I understand after you graduated from high school you enrolled in Northwestern University in Chicago. At that time, tuition was what? About $450 a year, and why did you decide to leave Southern Illinois and go to the big city and go to Northwestern.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, it had a good reputation. We were within seven miles of Southern Illinois University, but I thought that was really too close, and one of the things that my parent taught me was independence. And they permitted me to be independent. And so, I didn't want to be seven miles from home. I wanted to be further away. It seemed like about 350 miles was a good distance, and so we went to Evanston, where Northwestern is, and they awarded me a half tuition scholarship. So that was another thing. I mean I got half the tuition. So, that was great.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And was I right, tuition was about four—
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Four hundred and fifty dollars a year. I think I remember that correctly.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Yeah, that's about it.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
It was -- it was a lot of money at that time.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Right.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
You know.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And that scholarship was an academic scholarship.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Academic scholarship.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And what did you major in?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
I majored in psychology, and I became interested while there because I had an appointment every quarter with a person that had a title of scholarship secretary. And he was interested in checking on his students, and advising them if they had questions, but particularly, you wanted to make sure they were keeping up their grades—
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So that you'd retain your scholarship.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yeah, so we could retain the scholarship. And I thought, you know, I really like what he's doing. My parents had instilled in me an idea of serving, and education was something that I might want to go into. So I thought maybe some kind of staff work in higher education. I wasn't really at that point thinking about teaching, but I was thinking about administrative work in higher education.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Student affairs, advising, those kinds of things.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Right, yeah.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So after you, so that in the was sparked while you're at Northwestern, and after you graduated from Northwestern, you earned a master's degree from Teachers College—
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Columbia University in New York. What prompted you to go to Teacher's College at Columbia?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, I made appointments with three vice presidents at Northwestern and the dean of education, and I went in and told them what I wanted to do. So I wanted to work in higher education and asked them what route I should take to make that happen. And they said, well, you should get a doctorate in a field that you like and teach and become a department chair—
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
The traditional route through faculty…
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Right. I said, well, that really wasn't what I wanted to do. So it turns out that I just happen to meet a—I pledged Sigma Chi at Northwestern, and my senior year was the president of the fraternity. And I met this person who had just completed a doctorate at Columbia in student affairs, student personnel administration, and I talked with him about what I was wanting to do. Well, I applied and was accepted, and that's how we got there.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So that's how you got there. Let me—before we continue down that path, when you and I had a conversation earlier this week, you told me about an interesting job that you had around that same time, which is as a tour guide, as a tour escort. What was that all about? What did you do?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
First, I should tell you that I had a lot of stories to tell about tour escorting, and my wife finally said, you can't tell everybody these stories. [laughs]
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Well, tell us a couple about the job.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, first of all, the tour business at that time not very many people flew to the West Coast, but people would get on a train in Chicago and go to the West Coast. And the business was taking these people on 15-day trips. And we would see more than you can possibly see if you tried to book all this stuff yourself. And so, there were several companies downtown Chicago who were there, running these trips to the west, to Mexico, and Canada, and the West Coast.
And so, I had a terrible job after my sophomore year, and one of my fraternity brothers came in, and I learned that he had that summer done this, and so I began to figure out how to do it and then arranged to have a job doing that the next summer.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So that was a summer job while you were in college.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
It was a summer job. The first summer I ran six 15-day trips to the West Coast and Mexico and Canada and just had a great time. Essentially, I was a traveling business manager. I wasn't supposed to be able to tell people about particular sites, but I had all the tickets and all the baggage, and everybody could take two bags. So sometimes I had a lot of bags.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So you certainly learned how to run an operation, which maybe came in handy a little later.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
It was, it helped advance my interest in management.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
[laughs] Okay, good. So, let's go a little further in your career. You earned your doctoral degree from -- or you earned a graduate degree from Columbia in 1955, which is shortly after the Korean War had ended. But at that time military service was a rite of passage for many young men in the United States.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
And it was required. You either joined someplace, or you were drafted.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So, you decided to volunteer, and you enlisted in the United States Navy and became a pilot. Tell us about that.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, first I went to OCS, which was an 18-week program, and after that, after finishing that program, I was commissioned as an officer and at that time decided that I would like to go to flag training. And so I did that, went to Pensacola where all Navy flyers are trained, and then my advanced training was in Corpus Christi, and I have to correct you because when we finished up our advanced training in Corpus Christi, we were invited to tell the Navy what kind of airplane we wanted to fly. Did we want to fly multi-engine planes or did we want to fly fighters or attack planes or whatever. And so, along with my colleagues, we put down the first three choices were fighter jets, but we didn't get fighter jets.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So, it was fighter jets, fighter jets, and fighter jets?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
That's right. But we did get a plane that was called an AD6, A for attack, D for Douglas, and six was the modification. And it was a great, big propeller-driven, single-engine, single—the engines were the same engine that the B29 had four of, but it was a great airplane, and it was carrier based. And the mission after receiving my wings, I was stationed at Oceana, Virginia, which is inland from Virginia Beach. And our mission and our squadron was close air support. For example, we would help Marines and Army on the ground with strafing or bombing or rockets. And the other mission was low-level nuclear delivery. And so, I had targets.
This was the Cold War.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Right. So this was both conventional, and I guess what we now refer to as unconventional or nuclear weapons.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes, yes. And we could strap a 28-K nuclear weapon on the undercarriage of the airplane and fly in and deliver it is a half Cuban eight and hope you got out before the blast got you.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Right. Wow that's remarkable. And then you shifted from the military to you began your career in academia at American University.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Right.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And that's where you met your wife, Sandra. And at that time, as I understand it, she was serving as the director of the freshmen women’s residence hall at American.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
One of them.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
One of them.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
One of them, yes.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Okay. How did you meet her, and tell us about your early relationship.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, my title was director of housing, and I arrived on campus on the first of April, which was sort of symbolic. [laughs] But she came in a couple days after I arrived and said, “I am so glad to see a new director of housing because the last one couldn't solve any of my problems. And here are all of my problems.”
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So she gave you a task list.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes, yes, apparently. And I explained to her that this was the third of April, and in one month we were going to do commencement, and everybody was going home. And what we needed to do was make a list of these complaints and work on them over the summer and try to get them resolved, but right now we were not going to be able to resolve it, and she was not happy about that.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So your relationship didn't start well. How did it evolve?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, later I decided that maybe I should date her. And so I called her, and this is probably a month or six weeks later. I called her and asked her if she would go to dinner with me on a Saturday evening, and she paused and said, “I'm really busy on Saturday, but I'm available on Friday.” So, I thought that was a great possibility, and so, we started dating and dating pretty often. And then it developed.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
It developed -- how long after you started dating did you get married?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, we started dating in probably the middle of July, and we got married in February
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So only about eight months.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, yeah. Actually, I asked her to marry me—actually, I didn't really ask her to marry me following the correct protocols. We were walking on a September afternoon along the canal in Washington, DC, and I said, I think we should get married. And she said, “When?”
So, I was a little shaken by the response, but what I've learned is that she needed a plan. But I said, I recovered and said, Thanksgiving. And she said, “Oh, we can't get married at Thanksgiving. My mother would never get ready by that time.” And I said, “Well, you know, we can't do it at Christmas. There's too much going on, you know. And so we decided on February.”
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Okay. Well, at some other time, when the roles are shifted, I can tell you how long it took me to persuade Jennifer to marry me. Our courtship lasted about five and a half years. So, you were much more effective, much more persuasive than I was. So after you and Sandra got married, you moved to Boston where, as you said earlier, you received your doctorate from Harvard, and then after earning your doctorate, your first position was at the University of Delaware, and it's my understanding that Sandra then decided to run for the Delaware House of Representatives?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes. But not immediately. She had taught in Lexington, Massachusetts while I was in Cambridge working on the doctorate for a couple of years. Then when we went to Newark, Delaware, she taught for probably four years or so. And at that point came in one day and said, you know, I think I should run for the legislature.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Did she ask you whether you thought it was a good idea, or she just announced her intention?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
She announced the intention but was interested in my thought, and I said, I think that's a great idea, so she did. We began.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And it's my understanding that when she was running at the same time she met somebody by the name of Joe Biden, who was running for the U.S. Senate. What do you remember about their relationship, and have you kept in touch with now President Biden?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
It turns out that Joe Biden was a young lawyer at 29. He was running for the U.S. Senate, and of course, you had to be 30, but he was going to be 30 before being sworn in. So he was a young man out there running for the Senate, and he happened to be in Sandra's district. So they met, and of course, they were on the same ballot. And they both won. And have we kept in touch? Well, sort of. He, of course, knew Sandra quite well because they were campaigning at the same time in the small state of Delaware, and we were in the Denver airport later on, coming back from our place in Steamboat Springs, and we looked across the way, and there was Joe Biden sitting by himself looking at some papers, reading.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And at this time he was in the United States Senate?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Oh, yes. Yes. I mean this was like maybe 15 years later. It may be longer. And I said, “That's Joe Biden over there,” and she said, “Yes.” So, we went over and talked with him. And I said, “You need to come to Ball State and speak.” And he said, “I will.” And so, I called his office, and we set up, and so he came in and spoke with us in Emens Auditorium, one of our major speakers that day—that year.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Right. Right. So, let's put a pin in that. We'll come to Ball State in just a moment. But in 1979, you became president of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. What was it about that point in your career where you felt you were ready for that step, that significant increase in leadership responsibility?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
At Delaware, where I served for a total of 16 years, the last 10 years I was the vice president for student affairs and administration, and the administration included almost everything except the financial. We had a treasurer who managed the financial, and so, I was involved in everything from campus security to building buildings to legislative lobbying, and we—Sandra and I—talked about this, and I said, “You know, I've done everything that the president does, except fundraise. And you know, I'll have to learn that, but you know, I think I'm ready to apply for a presidency.” So we decided to do that, and I was finally appointed at IUP, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And you spent about five years there as president.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
What did you learn from your experience at that institution that prepared you to come to Ball State?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, I'm not sure that it prepared me to come to Ball State, but what I learned was that with no money from the state and very minor tuition increases, you could still manage a very good instructional program. I also learned that it was tough dealing with a university where the faculty was unionized. It wasn't just the faculty. I had several unions on the campus. The AFSME people, the security people, everybody was unionized, and so it really mattered a great deal whether or not there was unions on the campus.
And the other thing that I learned probably was that you needed a board that was knowledgeable and supportive, and particularly supportive when you got in trouble with the faculty union. So, I was delighted to learn when I heard about Ball State University had a possible opening that there was no faculty union and that the board of trustees had responsibilities, and they could go directly to the legislature and the governor for their support.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
You started here at Ball State in 1984. There had been a little bit of turnover in the position of presidency before you arrive. Did that turnover concern you at all about this opportunity?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Not really. The person who had been here, Dr. Pruis, had been here for 10 years, and when he resigned, the board hired a new president. But that president didn't last but about a year and a half. At that point, there was a vice president for business, Robert Bell, who was a beloved and very effective administrator on the campus. And the board turned to him and said, “Will you take the presidency and settle things down?” And he said, “Well, I'm going to retire in three and a half years,” and they agreed to that. And so, by the time I got here, things were pretty calm.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Okay. So, there are many things, we could talk for quite a while … you served for 16 years, so we could talk about a number of things. But while you were here, the university switched from quarters to semester, and you supported, you initiated and pushed that change. Why did you believe that transition was necessary, and how did you respond to some of the opposition from the faculty?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, at first, my major concern was teaching and learning. I really thought that Ball State was an institution where we could really advance learning. And it turns out that in the discussions with faculty, particularly the faculty who ran the freshmen composition program, they said, you know, I think if we had a little bit longer with students each time that we're working with them, which would happen in a semester versus a quarter, we think that we could do a better job teaching. And I said, “Well, that seems to be, you know, a very important part of this whole idea of switching.” The other reason to switch was to be more in touch with other universities where we were cooperating on foreign programs and other arrangements, and most of these other universities were on semester. So, we made a change. And I also thought that, you know, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea for faculty to reorganize their coursework, which they did, of course.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Right. Well, and as you know, and you and I have had this chance to talk, some of these decisions are difficult, but if you start with the fundamental principle of what's in the best interest of the students, it really is the place to start every conversation about how we—
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Exactly.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
How we manage the institution.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Exactly.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
You've also told me that among many of your accomplishments, you count the technological changes that took place on campus as something that you're quite proud of … and by the last year of your presidency, Yahoo Magazine had ranked Ball State among the top 20 in the country of the most wired universities. Tell us why you thought it was important to make that technological shift. Why was that so important to the students?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
The last year that I was at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, we had a commencement speaker who had just written a book, and he gave his book as the commencement address. And it focused on the fact that the U.S. and the world was moving from the agricultural society to the industrial society and now moving to the information society. And that was, that struck me. Only about seven years earlier, Apple had released Apple 2. So, we were right at the beginning of the computer, and actually, and also, video.
And so we began to concentrate on that, and particularly getting faculty up to speed on using the computer. And of course, the computer was continuing to evolve and develop. But also, this video. So, we partnered with AT&T and put fiberoptic all over the campus, buried it on the campus, so that every classroom could bring video and data and voice into their classroom if they chose to do it. And then we developed a College of Communication Information and Media. We hired Steve Bell, who had been 12 years at Good Morning America and had covered the Vietnam War. And we developed a master's program in information science—information and communication science. And so it began to really take off.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Yeah. So you were ahead of your time. One of the other accomplishments, you were the, you were president at the time of the first capital campaign for the university called Wings for the Future. You launched that shortly after you arrived. You launched it in 1987 with a goal to raise $40 million, which was a big number at that time.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
It doesn't seem like such a big number now.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Not with inflation.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
It was.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
No, it's still a big number. Why was that capital campaign, that fundraising campaign, so important to the university at that time?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, obviously, we needed something more than the tuition and the state support could give us, and we had never done a capital campaign. And so, I thought it was important to get started with—and other institutions were doing this, and it just seemed like it's something that we ought to get moving on.
I was pretty close to the president of Temple University when I was in Pennsylvania because we would have meetings with all of the universities and colleges in the state, and they had just completed a campaign. And we were both tennis players, so we played a lot of tennis at these meetings, and I talked with him about the campaign and got some great ideas and told the board that as soon as we could get it arranged, we were going to develop and conduct a campaign, and they were all in.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Right. And you enlisted wonderful people outside of the campus and the community. Our good friend, Stefan Anderson, I understand, played an instrumental role in that campaign.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
He was the chairman of the campaign committee, yes.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And we're fortunate that Stef Anderson continues to be a wonderful friend of our university.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Yes, we are. Yes, we are.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
So, at that time also there was a great run in athletics—took the team, under your leadership, took the team to the Sweet 16 in 1990. And now, we play basketball and volleyball in Worthen Arena. What does it feel like when you walk into that facility, see the Ball State Cardinals compete at the highest level in collegiate sports in a building that's name after you?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Well, it's a great honor, and I love it. But I must tell you that when we opened it in 1992, it was University Arena and was for eight years, and then the board of trustees, during the cocktail hour of my last dinner that was celebrating my retirement, they rose and announced that it was going to be changed to Worthen Arena, and that was a surprise and a great honor.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
And an appropriate recognition of your service, extraordinary service. In the last year of your services as the president here at Ball State, you and Sandra lived in Bracken House. You were the first Ball State president to reside in that historic home, which is a gift from the descendants of the Ball family to Ball State. What do you think your parents would have thought of you living in a grand house like Bracken House, a house so far removed from that little college where you were born and raised on the Mississippi River?
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
I would think that my mother would have said, “This is what we've been working for,” and my dad would have said, “This is probably too much.” [laughs]
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Yeah, but certainly both of them extraordinarily proud of what you have accomplished.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
It was very important that before I retired, if possible, if we could finish the restoration of the house, the renovation. We could move in so that this would because the president's home. And what I didn't want to happen is to leave the university and a new president come in and move into that, and this new president would be the first time in the Bracken House. And people would make unfortunate comments about the fact that the university was doing too much for this new president. So, we got in there for a year, and it was clear then that the board supported this, and it was the president's home from then on.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Well, I appreciate your vision. Jennifer and I now have the good fortune to reside, at least temporarily, in Bracken House, and we feel quite fortunate.
So my last question for you is one that I ask all of my guests, and it's a question about Beneficence, the iconic statue. It's a symbol that you know well, and it's a good reminder—I'm wearing a pin this afternoon that has Beneficence; you're wearing a pin that has Beneficence on it—and it reminds us, it's a good reminder of our commitment to the enduring values that we believe distinguish Ball State University.
Beneficence also means doing good for other people, doing good for other people through service and philanthropy. So, John, tell me, what does beneficence mean to you.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
My first thought about beneficence is to think about the statue, the statue that is on our campus and is our—is what we use to talk about Ball State. It was a statue funded by the community as a recognition of the beneficence of the Ball family. And it was not so much for the university, it was the community saying the Ball family has done a lot of things for this community, and one of them, of course, is that the university, they wanted a school to be here.
And so, I think the fact that—I'm very impressed and positive about your using our enduring values as one of the lines that you keep reminding us about. And I think perhaps the one that is most important to me is gratitude.
Because we all have a need to express our gratitude about what the university has done for us. The faculty has done great things for students, and those students who have gone out now and used what they have learned at Ball State, I think, need to be thankful to the university and to the people who got the idea in the first place—the Ball family.
[GEOFF MEARNS]:
Well that is certainly an appropriate and fitting way to end our conversation and to give me an opportunity to express my appreciation, my gratitude to you, gratitude for your continued engagement, my gratitude to you for your good advice, for your support, your encouragement, and for your continuing, very generous spirit. Thank you, John.
[JOHN WORTHEN]:
Thank you.