Tributes to Rick Edwards upon His Retirement

Dear Rick,

I understand that you will be retiring from UNL in August. I wanted to express my sadness that you will be leaving the Center for Great Plains Studies, but am glad that you will now be able to perhaps enjoy life even more without having to do the administrative tasks that go with being the director of any organization. I hope to see you from time to time if you stay in Lincoln, but wish you well if you move to be near relatives instead. If you do the latter, I hope that you will find the time to check in with me now and then and let me know how your life is going.

While Director of the CGPS I know that you have done an outstanding job of improving the organization. Both Great Plains Quarterly and Great Plains Research continue to be excellent regional journals. The art museum continues to mount interesting shows and we have had stimulating lectures there over the years. Your work on Great Plains Ecotourism has been wonderful and the Great Plains Book Series has been and continues to be a great success. Your addition of the Platte Basin Timelapse project to the Center's activities, led by Mike Forsberg and Mike Farrell, was inspired. The Black Homesteader project is also a wonderful addition to the Center's work.

I have enjoyed working with you and the other folks in the Center for all the years of your tenure. I hope to be able to continue my activities with the CGPS and hope that the Center will get another fine director.

Best regards!

Robert F. Diffendal Jr.

Emeritus Fellow,

Center for Great Plains Studies

Professor Emeritus, Conservation and Survey

Division, School of Natural Resources

Curator of the Invertebrate Paleontology

Collections, University of Nebraska State Museum

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Speaking of Rick Edwards …

Somewhere there's this great map that shows all the various boundaries of the Great Plains as defined by a wide range of scholars—historians, geographers, soil and grass folks, and so on. It looks like a small child got loose with a crayon and scribbled over and over around the same general outline on a map of the continent.

Nevertheless, it portrays the passion that many people who love this region are willing to put forth in attempting to define it. No one can even agree where it begins and ends. Let alone agree about many of the other vexing details and definitions.

Rick Edwards is a person who is able to hold all this sort of contradictory quibbling in his mind's eye and see beauty: the beauty of disparate points of view coming together through shared love even if not shared definitions.

The Center for Great Plains under Rick has been a haven for folks like me and our Platte Basin Timelapse colleagues as we attempt to scribble our way around the edges of our watershed. We're neither purely art nor science, neither research nor academic, neither staff nor faculty—yet Rick has given us a home for the past few years for which we are ever in his debt!

Michael Farrell
Michael Forsberg
Platte Basin Timelapse

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Although my experience with the Center is somewhat limited and only a few years old, it was very quickly and readily apparent that for Rick the Center was a labor of love. It has been a distinct pleasure to know you, and my only regret is that we hadn't been introduced much sooner. Warmest wishes on your retirement!

Maurice Godfrey
Professor
Director, Science Education Partnerships
Associate Editor, Journal of STEM Outreach

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Dear Rick:

Congratulations on your retirement, and on a long and distinguished career of service at this university. You have been a model of professional leadership, an example of wisdom, breadth, and intellectual values in a position of major responsibility. The diversity...