Letter from the dean: September–October, 2007
Dear Colleagues,
The last two-and-a-half months have certainly been eventful. It began with the I-35W bridge collapse, to which several of our students rushed and helped victims out of cars or the river before emergency vehicles arrived. Then, on the second day of class, our unionized staff went on strike, which was very painful for all of us: those who stood on the picket line and those who did not or could not. Meanwhile, several national conferences held in the Twin Cities this fall have prompted visits to the college by a number of our professional colleagues, who have seemed uniformly impressed by what they saw here. Those experiences have opened my eyes to the quality of life that we often take for granted in Minnesota. The culture of caring about this place and about its people has made this such a great community in which to live and work, even though we have seen that culture slip in recent years as deferred investments and growing inequality have increased. That is also why our giving, at whatever level, to the University’s Community Fund Drive provides an opportunity for all of us to help recover that culture of caring and to show how much we Minnesotans will extend ourselves in helping others. I have made my pledge, as have about 16% of us in the college, and I dearly hope that we can improve upon that percentage before the end of October, when the fund drive ends. Our goal is to get at least a 50% participation rate, at which point I have agreed to humiliate myself by performing a ballad about the college, cleverly written by Kathy Witherow. Give what you can, and meanwhile, I will start practicing my balladeering.
Speaking of giving, donations to the college have been at an all-time high. Since July, the college has secured gift commitments of $2.5 million, including a bequest in an estate plan of approximately $2.1 million for the college and two bequests that will benefit the Goldstein Museum of Design, one $250,000 gift to be used for acquisitions, and another, from Catherine Cerny '87, for the acquisition, exhibition, and preservation of ethnic textiles and costumes. Current gifts include a generous donation from Peggy Matthews '45 for a fellowship for apparel design graduate students and a bequest of $28,000 from the estate of Victor Gilbertson '35 for an undergraduate scholarship in architecture. SALA Architects has also donated $25,000 to create a prize that will be awarded to BS architecture students in their final year of design. And on September 26th, we recognized six donors – Frederick Bentz ‘48, AIA Minnesota, and the firms Elness Swenson Graham, Kodet Architects, The Cuningham Group, and Meyer Scherer & Rockcastle – whose gifts, cumulatively, of $150,000, helped purchase furnishings for Rapson Hall. Many people were involved, over a long period of time, in making these gifts a reality: deans, department heads, faculty, development staff, UM Foundation gift officers, and college staff. And these donations demonstrate the excitement and support of this college in the community and among our alumni, which is the result of everyone’s good work!
If you are interested in hearing more about numbers, come to the all-college meeting this Friday, October 19th, from 10:30 am to noon in 33 McNeal. I will make a presentation on the financial state of the college – Budget 102, following on the Budget 101 presentation at the all-college meeting last year – and will look forward to your thoughts not only about the budget, but also about the college’s identity. We have, over the course of several retreats last academic year and at the beginning of this one, gathered a number of great ideas about how we might define and convey the mission and vision of this college, and the conclusion at the end of the last faculty retreat was that the time has come to engage a graphic design firm to help us translate our words into a visual identity that can inform our website and the print materials we send out. I have assembled a small task force consisting of the three department heads and myself, with Laura Weber and Kathy Witherow as ex officio staff, to develop a request for proposals and establish a process by which we can vet candidates and commission a firm to get this work done by the end of the academic year. Part of this process will involve getting as much input as possible from all of you, our faculty, staff, and students, and to that end, we will ask each firm to make a public presentation of their work, as an educational opportunity for us all. Steven McCarthy has also set up a “wiki,” where we can post design ideas as they evolve to get your feedback. We have also begun conversations with University Relations about its desire to redesign the University’s website and they have expressed an interest in having our faculty and staff serve as a resource to them in evaluating the work being done by their consultant. Stay tuned.
The idea of our college being a resource to the entire institution has evolved quite a lot this past year. As UMore Park evolves (www.umorepark.umn.edu), several of our faculty and staff have helped the University see the potential in developing a healthier, more sustainable life-long-learning community in Rosemount, one that can provide invaluable research opportunities for our faculty and students as it becomes a living laboratory for development innovations. We also have many initiatives going on under the broad umbrella of greening the University, ranging from working on Mississippi River improvements to mapping all of the environmental activities underway at the institution, as well as initiatives inside the college in this area, from purchasing green materials and composting waste to setting up a hydrogen fuel facility powered by solar energy from the Rapson Hall roof. Deb Swackhamer, interim director of the Institute on the Environment, has called us the “poster child” of sustainability at the University, which again has been the result of the work of many, many people. And word has gotten out nationwide about our efforts. I’ve started conversations with a PBS producer about their interest in profiling our college and the work we are doing as a segment of their “Sustainable Planet” program, which would reinforce our national reputation in an area that we are already among the top three.
That came home to me at a recent gathering of some of the largest design firms in the country, who met with a dozen deans at the Harvard Faculty Club last week to talk about the future of design practice and education. The good news for our students was how incredibly busy all of these firms are and how eager they are to employ our students in numbers far greater than we can educate. Also good news for our faculty came in the strong interest among these firms in our research, as they find themselves facing pressures from clients, communities, and whole countries to improve worker productivity, housing affordability, environmental quality, brand identity, and product viability in an increasingly competitive and fast paced global economy. The challenge these firms laid in front of the deans was how we were going to ready students and relate our research to the changing needs of the networked world in which we all now live. The deans assembled there spoke of the variety of things our colleges are doing to address this, but I sensed, coming away from that meeting, that the great opportunity we have here, with one of the broadest range of disciplines of any design college in the country, is to figure out how students, faculty, and staff can move across the traditional boundaries of the institution even as we ensure that students learn enough about one field to make a contribution. I see that as a wonderful challenge for us and one that I will do all I can to help us meet.
Tom