Welcome
From the editor.
by Neil Caudle
Right: The covers of the print versions of the first issue of Endeavors, Winter 1984, and our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, Fall 2008.
In this issue, you will find a story about Professor Gary Bishop and his students, who are inventing technologies to help children with visual impairment learn to use their bodies as well as their minds. On page 4 of the Winter 1984 issue, you will find (if you never throw anything out) a photo of a gravely serious Gary Bishop, then a doctoral student in computer science, examining an electronic position sensor he’d helped to invent.
We didn’t plan this nice bit of symmetry, but it’s a fitting reminder that over the last twenty-five years thousands of young men and women have begun their careers on this campus, working with their faculty mentors, advancing their science and scholarship, until they were ready to guide their own protégés, here and around the world.
With this issue, Endeavors begins its twenty-fifth year. If you would like to send us something silver, fine, but we would be just as pleased to hear from anyone who recalls a favorite story from one of those twenty-five years’ worth of issues. The way we see it, good stories are better than silver; they’re gold.
A quarter of a century ago, G. Philip Manire, vice chancellor and dean of the graduate school, stern and imposing in his own black-and-white photo on the inside front cover, wrote in the inaugural issue that “the story of research and graduate education is not an easy one to tell” and that our scholars “are often better known in Berkeley or Oxford or Kyoto than they are in their own community.” We have been trying to change that. I hope we’ve made some headway.
Each time we plan the next edition, we remind ourselves that a magazine is only as good as its stories, and that our job is to tell as many good ones as we can. But the most reliable way to judge a magazine is by the quality of its readers, and we have some of the best. On this anniversary, that will be our one and only brag. Thank you for reading. And please stay with us for another twenty-five. We’re going for the gold.
