Dear Colleagues,

As you undoubtedly know, the long-time head of the School of Architecture and namesake of our Minneapolis facility, Ralph Rapson, passed away on March 29 at the age of 93. There will be a public memorial service in his honor at the Guthrie Theater at 10 am on Monday, April 21. Buses will bring people to the Rapson Hall courtyard for a reception around noon that day. All are welcome. There will also be an open mike in the court for those who want to remember Ralph in the space in which he worked for 30 years. Working up to the day he died, Ralph did what he loved to do, and that may be one of the greatest lessons he could teach any of us.

I don't need to tell any of you how busy the last month or two have been around here. There have been many lectures, symposia, and events and with eight faculty searches underway, with at least three candidates each, the calendar has been packed. I want to thank, publicly, the search committees and faculty who have given so much of their time, as well as the staff in the college and its various units, for your hard work and dedication. The new crop of faculty starting next academic year will not only invigorate us all, but also provide bridges among our various units in exciting new ways.

Such bridging will become even more important for all of us, given the Governor's recent veto of funding for a new Bell Museum, which seems, at this point, likely to stand and which means that our move to one campus will be delayed an additional year or more. We have done a number of things to forge a common culture across our two-campus divide, ranging from lectures and exhibitions occurring in both Minneapolis and St. Paul to the new graduating student show that mixes the work of students from all of our units. I welcome ideas of further things we might do to connect our various parts.

Continue reading "Letter from the dean: March-April, 2008" »

Posted by Michael Fraase at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dear Colleagues,

On March 1, every college must submit to the University of Minnesota Foundation its plans for the upcoming capital campaign, the "silent phase" of which has already begun. We have had several conversations about this among the deans, department heads, and center directors, based on discussions at meetings and retreats over the last year. The Foundation has asked each college to identify no more than five themes that we will focus on in the campaign, and it has provided us with a format within which we must describe our ideas. This process has progressed to a point where we now need your input. Although the attached form has gone through two revisions already, it remains still very much a draft and open to your comments and suggestions, which you can send to me by let's say, Monday, February 25, so that we can try to incorporate your thoughts in the final document.

Not that this document will be the final word on our collegiate campaign. The Foundation will gather what each college has identified as its aspirations and then look for common themes across the University in order to define a larger, institution-wide set of campaign goals, of which ours will undoubtedly be a part. So look at this as a first step. We will have several more opportunities to clarify and hone our case statement and your input along the way -- as well as your participation in helping us identify and approach potential donors -- will be invaluable.

Capital campaigns offer us an opportunity to define what we want to become. Some have already asked me what I thought our college might be like in ten years, so let me explore that a bit with you here.

• Download podcast of Dean Fisher's letter (.mp3; 3.7Mb)

Continue reading "Letter from the dean: January-February, 2008" »

Posted by Michael Fraase at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dear Colleagues,

This past year has been a good one for our students and our faculty and staff alike. Students in Clothing Design and Retail Merchandising won awards at the International Textile and Apparel Association conference for the best sustainable design, the most innovative research, the best paper in the consumer track, and the undergrad research award. In Housing Studies, one of our students won an award from the Housing Education Research Association for the best undergraduate research paper, while in Graphic Design, a student won third place in the national competition, Exploring Visual Problems and Creating Change. Meanwhile, in Architecture, students won nationally competitive awards in the KPF Traveling Fellowship and the Torske Klubben Fellowship programs, and in Landscape Architecture, one of our students won an honor award in general design from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Continue reading "Letter from the dean: November-December, 2007" »

Posted by Michael Fraase at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Continue reading "Letter from the dean: September–October, 2007" »

Posted by Michael Fraase at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dear Colleagues,

I have waited to write this letter until we received more concrete budget information from Morrill Hall, which did finally arrive by letter last Friday and e-mail this weekend, just in time for our accounting staff to have the college budget submitted by this week. Nothing like just-in-time delivery! The news is better than we had for you at the last all-college meeting, although not as good as we might have hoped. While we will still have a deficit going into next year, it is much smaller than the $1.8 million we feared last month and within the range that we should be able to handle with careful monitoring of expenses and more tuition than our very conservative projections would predict.

Compact

We had many compact requests based on the ideas we heard from the various units of the college, and the Provost has funded a few of our highest priorities. Provost Sullivan continues to be supportive of our efforts to start a top-quality product design program, seeing it as a field that links to every discipline in the college. As a result, he has funded our request for a product design faculty member, with the goal of attracting someone in the area of wearable technology - an area of great potential research funding and interdisciplinary connections. The Provost also funded a new position in World Heritage Studies, capitalizing on our ties with UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and recognizing the connections such a faculty member could make across several of our fields.

In addition to the recurring and start-up funding for those two new faculty positions, Provost Sullivan has funded the materials library staff position and the non-recurring planning money to establish such a library. A materials library would build on the materials collections we already have in several units, such as the fabrics and textiles collection in the Goldstein Museum of Design, and it would enable us to gather new materials of interest to all of the disciplines in the college. This librarian position could also double as the registrar that the Goldstein very much needs, while the planning money will enable us to strategize about how to establish a collection at the leading edge of where material science is going in our fields.

A major disappointment was the decision by the Provost not to fund the third faculty position we had requested in sustainability, although at the end of last week, President Buininks called Deb Swackhamer (Director of the Institute on the Environment) and me to prepare a pre-proposal to a large, local foundation requesting funding for a major sustainability effort across all of the University's campuses. Apparently sustainability was a priority of many colleges in the Twin Cities and all of the coordinate campuses, and our proposal will focus on making environmental education a fundamental part of the entire undergraduate curriculum, as well as establishing practicums in which students can work with faculty and staff on sustainability efforts across the University, borrowing an idea that we have talked about in this college of thinking about our campuses as a "living laboratory."

Continue reading "Letter from the Dean: May-June 2007" »

Posted by Michael Fraase at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)