Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 11, 1994                   TAG: 9402150268
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TECH LEADER

As Tech's president from 1988 until ill health forced his retirement this past fall, McComas recognized and acted on at least two fundamental truths:

A university exists to serve its customers.

Who or what constitutes a university's customers should not be too narrowly defined.

Those points may seem self-evident, but they have not always been ruling principles in American higher education, at Tech or elsewhere.

The notion of serving customers, for example, is at war with the paradigm of cloistered academe. In the conflict, there was no question about where McComas stood: on the side of service. That stand is especially important to promulgate in an era when public spending and higher education are under close, sometimes hostile scrutiny.

Similarly, McComas insisted that a university's customers are not merely abstract knowledge to be advanced or an intellectual tradition to be preserved, important as those missions may be. The university's customers, he insisted, include real people: students to be taught, and residents of the larger community beyond the campus to engage.

On the campus, his concerns were evident in such initiatives as strengthened programs for undergraduate counseling and improvements in student living conditions. Off the campus, his vision of university outreach extended to ongoing efforts to nurture closer Tech-Roanoke Valley ties, one expression of which is the Hotel Roanoke-conference center project.

Of course, McComas did not invent notion of service to customers, broadly defined, as the reason for a university's existence. Indeed, one might say it's as old as Tech and the land-grant universities' traditional threefold mission of instruction, research and extension.

Yet in his quietly intelligent manner, McComas helped redirect Tech's - and Southwest Virginia's - attention to that mission, and to a consideration of how it could and should be applied in a world far different from the 19th-century world into which Tech was born.

Jim McComas, a 20th-century man, is missed. His caring and careful work - laying groundwork for Tech's place in the 21st century - will be with us a long time.