ou might expect that Ellen Rontal '73--tear-gassed in South Quad during a wild protest demonstration in her sophomore year--would feel differently about her U-M experience than her father, Dr. Henry Gluck '51 Dentistry, who entered a politically quiet U-M on the GI Bill at the end of World War II; and still more differently than her daughter, Sara, an LSA junior confronting a global but jittery job market.

And yet, the Rontal-Gluck generations share a general enthusiasm, affection and respect for Michigan that speaks to a recurring experience--an intellectual and personal adventure--that seems to have shaped the core values of many U-M graduates over the decades. This, at least, is a preliminary finding of a Michigan self-study project dubbed MIMI-VUE (Michigan Millennium Values of/for a University Education).

Sara Rontal, one of the core team of undergraduates involved in the project, says that the U-M degree is especially prized by the graduates they've talked to. "Everyone we've interviewed so far is very concerned about the degree and the achievement, the time and hard work, it represents," she says. Her mother, Ellen, agrees, saying the family believes the University "provided a professional foundation and sense of discipline for the rest of our lives." And Dr. Gluck adds, "I am always proud to say that I am a graduate of the U-M Dental School."

Sara Rontal and her MIMI-VUE colleagues suspect that there are many U-M core values, and the students are now gathering data to discover recurring patterns. MIMI-VUE will involve hundreds of alumni who will share their most potent memories and reflect on what their campus years have meant to them over their lives. Nine members of the Rontal-Gluck family were interviewed during the project's pilot stage.

Diane M. Kirkpatrick, Thurnau Professor of the history of art, is directing the project with Jamy Sheridan, adjunct assistant professor and systems project coordinator at the School of Art and Design.

The pilot interviews, conducted last spring by Rontal and five other undergraduate researchers, were recorded via digital audiotape, videotape, photographs and video. The data will be stored on CDs and entered into a data base being constructed in a software program called Filemaker Pro.

To flesh out the personal histories, the students also will research the archives at the Bentley Library, pore over decades of Michiganensians, Michigan Dailys and alumni publications, read books on U-M history, and study U-M souvenirs and scrapbooks collected by alumni. Interviews will also be carried out with current and prospective students, high school counselors, faculty and staff.

In the fall, the pilot interviewers will help train 40 or so other undergraduates to conduct the intensive interviewing and information-gathering that will take place in 1997-1998.

Assisted by the undergraduates, local artist Zlata Baum and electronic musician-composer-programmer John Dunn of the School of Art and Design, Professors Kirkpatrick and Sheridan hope to mine the raw information to "isolate patterns through time that could be presented in a range of forms." The forms include printed matter, traditional and electronic works of art and music, and charts and graphs.

In addition to producing those artworks and texts, the team will construct a "Walking Tour of Michigan Values Through History" that will include maps, photographs and narrated video clips accessible on the Web. Parts of these works will be featured in a University Showcase on the Millennial Web Days, Dec. 31, 1999 and Jan. 1, 2000.

"In some ways, depending on the ultimate scale, the project could become a longitudinal ethnography of values," Kirkpatrick says. MIMI-VUE will offer insights into "the most important and central values" of the past-values that are likely to ensure "a vibrant University of the future," she adds.

How the research will shape up is unclear. "The bread is still in the dough stage or the flow stage," Sheridan explains, noting that his goal is to "upgrade the conversation about this University's values-not dictate what they should be but identify what they seem to be and how they are passed on and communicated over the decades.

"We are going to leverage the technology to develop and enhance a living conversation about values and, not incidentally, about the potential collision between technology and values," Sheridan says, "so that the students working on MIMI-VUE today will have an opportunity, through their identification of U-M core values, to address students and alums for generations to come."

Several of the first interviewees included two centenarians, Alva Gordon Sink, 101, co-founder of the Michigan League, and Bert Welcker, 100, secretary to the first four directors of the Michigan Union from 1917-1966. Among others interviewed were several prominent alumnae, including former U-M Regent Trudy Huebner '36 AB; Betty Van Den Bosch '71 AM, a longtime employee of the U-M Alumni Association; Catherine (Kay) Walz '27 AB, co-founder of the Michigan League; and Nan Sparrow '61 AB ED, former instructor in English composition and a major fundraiser for the League building.