The Past, Present, and Future of Optometry at Indiana University

Atwater Eye Care Center Dedication Ceremony
Indiana University
Whittenberger Auditorium, IU Bloomington
October 8, 2008

Good afternoon. President McRobbie, Trustees, Provost Hanson, friends, colleagues, and students. It is my great pleasure and honor to be with you today to dedicate our new Atwater Eye Care Center. Greetings to all of our friends from Indiana, from across the nation, and around the world. I am delighted to see all of you here today. You have, through all your many special contributions, made it possible for us to celebrate this new facility today and in the days ahead.

This extraordinary day in the life of an extraordinary school marks the completion of our magnificent new clinic and the expansion of our academic facilities. At the heart of this ceremony is our outstanding faculty, our dedicated staff, and our talented students and graduates. Your dedication and commitment will animate every square foot of our new building as you have long enlivened our present home.

We have enjoyed a close relationship with IU's administration, since the founding of Optometry at Indiana University in 1951. President Herman B Wells' initial support of the IU Division of Optometry, and his esteem of such early luminaries as John Davey, Noah Bixler, and Irvin Borish were especially instrumental in its initial success. Today, we are an internationally renowned research and teaching institution thanks to the administration's guidance and support over the years. My friends and colleagues, Provost Karen Hanson and President, Michael McRobbie, continue to ensure that the School will take the lead in vision research and clinical practice. We value their support of our growing programs.

At the School of Optometry, we take seriously our responsibility to train vision specialists who are members of a profession that serves the public good. In 2001, Dr. Borish wrote,

The accepted social position of a profession bears distinct relationships to the role which society understands its members play in the social order. It refers to a group of individuals recapturing a sense of vocation and pursuing a learned art as a common calling in a spirit of public service. If it becomes a livelihood first, and only incidentally a public service, it becomes merely a calling.

For Dr. Borish, public distinction reflected the strength of one's sense of vocation and purpose. He went on to add,

foremost is the realization that the vocation commands a broad body of specialized knowledge that is sufficiently defined and delineated so that it readily and universally can be identified by the public.

This fundamental vision of Dr. Borish's has shaped my own understanding of what academic optometry means to the profession and the public it serves.

The standard set long ago for the School of Optometry at Indiana University was the expectation that it would lead the efforts of a growing profession to create, define, and delineate its knowledge-base through research and education. The founders of Optometry at Indiana University had the foresight to see what the future could bring. They challenged the university administration to establish a school that would be a leader. First, the Division, and later the School of Optometry, have responded in extraordinary ways.

The same foresight was present when we last dedicated a building, in 1968. Our first stand-alone home consolidated Optometry's scattered pieces under one roof, helping the School to strengthen its research and teaching agendas. Henry Hofstetter, then head of the Division of Optometry, would write of the new building: "With the essential resources so near at hand the school is truly a camp for learning, not just an array of lectures and assignments. . . . It is a most stimulating environment, one that is creating great advances for the profession." The new building improved morale and provided a showcase facility for recruiting faculty and students. As Hofstetter was once told by a visitor, "Bloomington is the capital of the optometric world."

This legacy of leadership and excellence directs us towards our future. The dedication of our original building signaled a fresh era for our programs. The new Atwater Eye Care Center heralds another wave of program-building as we combine research and clinical practice in more effective and translational ways.

The growth and the excellence of the Indiana University School of Optometry is poised, with this new addition, to impact teaching, service, and research in ways that will broaden the School's national and international reputation. The vacated space in the Optometry building will be utilized to expand patient-based research. It will add resources to the Borish Center for Research, which provides an environment for developing new ophthalmic devices and treatments for common and sometimes not-so-common vision disorders. And it will enrich the work of our world-class faculty, those who mentor our students in the clinical setting as well as those who train future instructors and investigators. Together our faculty, both clinicians and scientists, will advance eye care on a daily basis.

Our new clinic will help us nurture a vocation that meets the needs of students and inspires our faculty. It will let us rededicate ourselves to the mission to create, in Dr. Hofstetter's words, "a most stimulating environment," a "capital in the optometric world."

Dean Lowther's vision for the School has been similarly expansive. When we broke ground for the new clinic last January, we passed a milestone that will forever be attributed to his leadership. Jerry, thank you for your contributions in helping us build this new eye care center.

Thank you all.

Borish, Irvin M. "Optometry: Its Heritage and its Future." Indiana Journal of Optometry 4.2 (Fall 2001): 25?26.
http://www.opt.indiana.edu/IndJOpt/ijofall01.pdf

Goss, David A. "History of the Indiana University Division of Optometry." Indiana Journal of Optometry 6.2 (Fall 2003): 55.
http://www.opt.indiana.edu/IndJOpt/ijofall03.pdf