As this issue of Weber Studies rolls off the press in early Spring, Weber State College campus will gear up to kick off the institution's year-long centennial celebrations at its June 1988 Commencement. There is something marvelous about celebrating a centennial as there is in a fin de siecle. There is, to start with, a sense of significance that may be incommunicable but invaluable precisely because it cannot be conveyed. The attendant romantic nostalgia or romantic optimism could change self perceptions and heighten a sense of self worth. Celebrations such as these have their origin in euphoria but must end in practical considerations to be worthy of attention.
Celebrations are serious business.
As we embark on ours in this issue, we offer to our readers the same kinds of thought-provoking articles as we have done in the past, but which are of closer concerns to Utahns. This issue, for the same reasons, features more Utah scholars and poets. Clarice Short's posthumous poems may come as a surprise to many who knew and admired her during her long career as a Professor of English at the University of Utah. I thank Emma Lou Thayne for letting us use some of Dr. Short's unpublished works. Maureen O'Neill's poems breathe the spirit of the mountains and the outdoors that are still an integral part of life in this state.