In 2010, Wallis Annenberg and I began a conversation. We reflected together on the importance of journalism and communication for the future of democracy in the United States of America. She described her deep commitment to the eternal values of openness, inclusion and transparency. She articulated a vision of these values — values that would inform the design and the purposes of any new home for the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. This conversation we had then spread to the Annenberg community as a whole. Students, faculty and staff were engaged in that conversation. They embraced the ideas of openness, and they saw the need for 21st-century spaces that are not containers, but are connectors. That are places of innovation, not places of inhibition. Soon these values that we talked about in our conversation were reflected in designs and blueprints, and then they were reflected and expressed in mortar, and in glass and in wood. Wallis Annenberg Hall — built with these values, these ethics, this openness — will shape students in this great school for generations to come. And future conversations shaped by this school will take actions that make the world a better place. On behalf of the students of today, and the students of tomorrow, for generations and generations and generations to come, I thank you, Wallis Annenberg, from the bottom of my heart.

—Ernest J. Wilson III is the Dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.