Eighteenth president of

Sou th Da kota School of MineS & t echnology

A L eg Ac y of e xceL L ence :

T e A c h i n g , R e s e A R c h , A n d s e R v i c e

By he ather W il Son

The inauguration of Heather Wilson, eighteenth president of the School of Mines, was rescheduled and abbreviated due to inclement weather. These are remarks she prepared and

was not able to deliver.

In the archives of the School of Mines there is a black and white photograph taken almost one hundred years ago of a man in his office on this campus. Against one wall is a massive oak roll top desk covered with papers and open notebooks.

The sun shines through two large windows, and the ceiling of the room is stained by a water leak – which probably hasn’t been repaired yet.

In the center of the room, sitting at a massive table is a well-kept man in a suit, with his hands lying delicately on the pages of an open book which he is studying intently.

In 1898, Dr. C.C. O’Harra left Johns Hopkins University to teach geology here, at the School of Mines.

When he became president in 1911 this was a small, struggling mining school of about sixty-five students in a frontier town. Over a twenty-four year period, he helped it become a robust science and engineering college.

Perhaps more than any other previous president, Dr. O’Harra determined what the School of Mines would be, and what it has become.

I now serve in the office that C.C. O’Harra defined, in the building that now bears his name. I can only hope to live up to the standard which he set.

Our nation desperately needs more well-prepared engineers and scientists to solve the problems before us, and Mines will help meet that need. While other colleges struggle to convince Americans that college is still worth it, Mines will show the nation how to provide a great education at a price families can afford.

The demand for the kind of rigorous education we provide has never been more evident.

Mines is growing. This year’s freshman class is over 550 students – 20 percent larger than last year. This fall, there was a waiting list for companies to come to our career fair because there were not enough rooms on campus for every firm that wants to hire our graduates.

We are thirteenth in the nation for average starting salary, and 98 percent of our graduates had jobs or places in graduate school.

So, why is that? What are we doing right here and how can America – and Mines – keep getting better?

For those of you who have devoted your lives to this school, perhaps it’s hard to see. But I see it here every day.

Peter Stephens escaped communism and came to the School of Mines from Hungary in the early 1960s. He’s a very successful businessman, and he toured me around his factory near Pittsburgh where he makes titanium parts for aircraft as well as artificial hips and knees.

We ate lunch at his lovely country club and he drove me around in his really cool Audi sports car. And then I asked him what he remembered most about

Mines. What mattered to him? He paused for a bit. And then he said, “They welcomed me. The head of the electrical engineering department met with me and made me feel like I had a new home. I was just a boy. I had nothing, and they welcomed me.”

Mines is still that personal, welcoming place that transforms lives.

But it is not just that we are a personal, friendly place that makes Mines what it is. Mines is devoted to excellence.

I walked through a building on campus last week, unscheduled. Scrawled in red marker on a white board were the words, “Excellence is not a decision. It is a habit.”

We expect excellence, and we teach in a way that is hands-on to achieve that excellence.

It is a tragedy that, in many American high schools today, large numbers of students learn biology, chemistry, and physics almost entirely from books. We lose students who would love to be engineers and scientists because we are not connecting these disciplines to the real world.

This passive approach to teaching is now creeping into some of our universities.

While the rest of higher education is drifting or driving toward distance learning and massively open online classes as a panacea, Mines is not. And we will not. We are technology enabled, and we will continue to be. But we are a high touch engineering school, and we must not lose that focus.

Our students build things and break things; fix things and fly things.

They design things and destroy things; burn things and blend things.

We build Formula One race cars and autonomous robots. We even lost one of our drones over Rapid City last summer. (Sorry about that.)

We teach metallurgy, and every Friday the blacksmithing club cranks up the forge and pounds iron bars into hand tools while they cook burgers and chicken fingers on the side.

3M just outfitted out one of our biochemistry labs, and one of their executives told me that they hire more engineers from this school than from the University of Minnesota, which is many times our size. I asked him why.

He said, “Your graduates aren’t afraid to get their fingernails dirty.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Your academics are great here. But your students make things work in the real world.”

Mines will continue to be both “book smart” and “hand smart” and we will judge ourselves based on the demand from the best American companies for our graduates.

That will be our legacy of excellence.

Mines is very good at teaching engineering and science – one of the best in the country. But a university is something more. We don’t just transmit knowledge; we create it.

Our strength in mining, metallurgy, applied biology, mechanical, and chemical engineering has positioned us well to continue to explore new materials and manufacturing techniques.

We are geologists and civil and environmental engineers in a university equidistant from the Bakken, the Powder River Basin, and the Niobrara where America explores for the energy we need while protecting the land we love.

Building on our unique relationship with the underground laboratory in Lead, South Dakota, Mines will be part of the community of particle physicists who seek to understand the very nature of matter in the universe.

We will steadily grow research and increase the number of Phd graduates from Mines.

And like C.C. O’Harra before me, we will seek the facilities, equipment, and support to accomplish these great things.

With few exceptions, our students are not wealthy. They are purposeful, hard-working young Americans, determined to get an education that will open opportunities for themselves and their families.

We will work with our alumni and friends of higher education to raise the money and finally fix the water leak in Dr. O’Harra’s office.

Finally, let me say this. Mines is not a vocational school. We prepare leaders in science and engineering. Leaders serve.

If this community needs judges for the science fair or helping hands at the United Way, Mines students will be there.

Mines is not only in this community, we are of this community, and we will serve this community.

Near the end of his tenure and his life, C.C. O’Harra said, “There never has been a day better than today, and tomorrow will be a little ahead of this one. Let us open our door to cheerfulness and surround ourselves with joy.”

So, let us develop a closer connection between the people of South Dakota and the School of Mines.

Let us be a welcoming place for purposeful young men and women who are driven to make a difference.

Let us recommit ourselves to excellence in both teaching and research.

Let us inspire and prepare more engineers and scientists to address the problems of the twenty-first century.

We can do this. We know we can do this.

After all, we’re Hardrockers.

May God bless you all, and may God bless the university we serve.

our mission

To prepare leaders in engineering and science; to advance knowledge and its application; and to serve the state of

South Dakota, our region, and the nation.