from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 1997, 6
© Copyright 1997 Virginia Community College System
A new venture wears many coats, and in the case of our new Virginia Community College System journal, Inquiry, all of us can feel the layering of pride, optimism, trepidation, fear, perhaps ennui caused by so many new things so often and so quickly. Yet, a professional scholarly journal that creates opportunities for the display of the intellectual power of our faculty and staff and communicates their discoveries, their insights, their advances is essential to our enterprise.
Inquiry is at once a celebration of our faculty and staff, and their commitment to student learning. It is a recognition of a few by their peers for important accomplishments which in turn should help all of us feel the vitality, stimulation, and energy of discovering our academic beings, and each person’s critical and contributing role in Virginia’s most vital institutions for the 21st century.
Professor George Vaughn, a great continuing supporter and friend of Virginia’s community colleges, has written an important article for this inaugural issue of Inquiry. I urge you to read the article and embrace it. His writing provides fundamental definitions for what Inquiry is about and a framework for scholarship in community colleges.
The role of our new journal is another step in the process of creating the most far-reaching and energizing professional development and renewal program in the United States. As I have written before, we do this, not because we want to have the best program nationally, but because we want our students to benefit from the rewards of interacting with faculty and staff who are current in their fields of knowledge and their pedagogical strategies, who are challenging, who are committed, and whose knowledge is always expanding and their vitality strong and obvious.
I welcome the merger of the former VCCA Journal and this newly created journal, Inquiry, a project begun by Chancellor’s Professor Susan Coffey. She is a talented and energetic professor; I have great confidence in her abilities. The collaboration of former VCCA editors Robert Jobin and Darrell Hurst with new editors Susan Coffey, Ron Head, Carmon Kiah, Sally Nelson, Wendy Weiner, and Terry Whisnant will provide a venue for greater publishing opportunities for VCCS professionals.
Inquiry, distributed to all members of our VCCS family, will offer a means for the VCCS to recognize achievements in what must always be the heart of our institutions: the transmission of knowledge, insights, and critical thinking skills, and the discovery of new knowledge to our students.