Let me start by congratulating the Luddy School on its 25th anniversary – Dean Millunchick for her outstanding leadership; the school’s superb faculty, staff, and students; and all the dedicated and generous members of the Dean’s Alliance and its earlier incarnations. And I think it is especially appropriate that I recognize and thank one member of that Alliance, Fred Luddy, for his extraordinary generosity to the school that made its naming and two of its buildings possible, and to thank Tom and Heather Luddy who are here tonight, for their personal commitment to the school, and to remember their vivacious late mother Mariol, whose beaming pride in the naming of the school will remain an indelible memory for me.
When I received the invitation to this event, I was struck by the fact that I had been involved in nearly every major decision affecting the school from its earliest days until 2021.
I also had the somewhat somber realization that I was the only one of the three people involved in founding the school still alive – former IU President Myles Brand passed away in 2009, and founding Luddy School Dean Mike Dunn passed away in 2021.
This event then, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of a school in which they both played such seminal roles, is a fitting and proper time to pay tribute to them.
Myles Brand was a true visionary, a word that is regularly misused, but is fully accurate in his case. Between 1997 and 1999, IU had had a series of major successes in building its information technology infrastructure and programs. These had attracted considerable positive national attention. Myles felt that because of this considerable momentum, the time had come to establish a new school that was, as he put it, “technology based.” He realized that IU would be blocked from establishing an engineering program by Indiana’s antiquated mission differentiation policy. But he thought approval for a school focused on the uses and applications of information technology might be possible given these were exploding and of enormous importance in the wake of the massive expansion of the Internet in the mid-90s.
Extensive work was done over the next year in developing the academic case for a new school and developing the political and community support for it. I had the great honor of working closely with Myles in all of this. And when this had all been successfully achieved, I vividly remember him asking me for my recommendation as to who should be the school’s first dean. I recommended Mike Dunn, who I had known since I was a graduate student in 1975 and who was, in many ways, responsible for my coming to IU. Myles, who also knew Mike well, agreed and was subsequently appointed to this position in which he served until 2007.
The school grew rapidly and successfully. It merged with the College’s Department of Computer Science in 2005, and in 2013 it became the School of Informatics and Computing when I approved its merger with the School of Library and Information Science. In 2015 we finally gained approval after a lengthy and difficult battle for a sorely needed intelligent systems engineering program, which I had proposed and the Trustees approved. I want to pay great credit to IU’s superb former Provost Lauren Robel, and to former Luddy School Dean Bobby Schnabel for their tenacious and indefatigable hard work and advocacy that helped make this happen. In 2017 then, the school became the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, and finally in 2019 became the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering following Fred Luddy’s magnificent gift.
I have had the great honor of appointing four of the six Luddy School deans or interim deans – Bobby Schnabel, Brad Wheeler, Raj Acharya, and Dennis Groth. And it is the first of these who I have been asked to introduce. Bobby was dean of the Luddy School from 2007 until 2015 when he left to become the CEO of the Association for Computing Machinery. In that time, he masterfully oversaw the transition of the school from what, in business terms, would be regarded as a fledgling startup to a mature, thriving enterprise. He was one of the finest and most able deans with whom I worked while he was at IU. He is a highly distinguished computer scientist and came to IU from the position of vice provost and associate vice chancellor for academic and campus technology at the University of Colorado, to which he has now returned as a professor and the external chair of computer science.
Please welcome Bobby Schnabel.