Lubbock Avalanche Journal – www.lubbockonline.com (May 27)
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New York Times
May 25, 2007, 6:04 pm
An Opening Gambit With an Odd Acronym
By Dylan McClain
When the legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight was pushed out of Indiana University, Texas Tech University in Lubbock jumped to welcome him, in hopes of raising the school’s national profile. Perhaps that move did not reap enough public attention (or maybe it was not the right kind), because the school is now trying another visibility-building leap in a different kind of competitive endeavor: Chess.
Texas Tech announced with some fanfare on May 12, the day of its graduation exericises, that it had hired this year’s commencement speaker — Susan Polgar, the former women’s world champion — to head something called the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence, or (wait for it) Spice.
…Jim Brink, Texas Tech’s senior vice provost for academic affairs, said that Spice will receive more than $250,000 a year from a combination of private donations and university financing. What will the institute do? “All sorts of things,” he said.
Among them: Help recruit and train a “world-class” chess team; organize and promote tournaments; do community outreach in local schools to promote chess; and work with departments around the university on the use of chess as a research tool, particularly in the development of artificial intelligence.
…Mr. Brink said that the university hoped to attract better students through chess. “There is a strict correlation between excellence in chess and excellence in the classroom,” Mr. Brink said.
Source: NY Times
This is great. Good luck to Texas Tech!
This is a wonderful project. I wish there are more like this around. Way to go GM Polgar!
Does Texas Tech have any chess scholarships and if not are there any future plans for this?
I would think the word SPICE should always be spelled with all capital letters because it represents an acronym.
I also think it looks much better with all capital letters.
We will have to educate the newspaper reporters.
I’m actually surprised with this mistake. Mr. McClain should have known that the proper way to write is SPICE and not Spice.
Tech has some chess scholarships right now and we are working on raising funds for more and increasing the level of the scholarships.
Dr. Karlsson
Member of the SPICE Group
>>I’m actually surprised with this mistake. Mr. McClain should have known that the proper way to write is SPICE and not Spice. >>
Not only that, Lubbock is already on the map. I’ve seen it lots of times. It’s on Mapquest and Google Earth too, so this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The statement of “putting something on the map” is not a literal one of course. For example it has been said that the 72 Fischer-Spassky match put Iceland on the map. It simply meant that more people knew about it. Let face it many people don’t know their geography very well – let alone know about a small somewhat obscure town like Lubbock. So this definitely helps put Tech and Lubbock on the map – so to speak.