Renovating a (Mostly) Unloved Art & Architecture Building at Yale

Buildings that some people don't like are in the news a lot, lately.

A $130M renovation and expansion of the Art & Architecture Building at Yale University has some people scratching their heads and talking about a building that "was not beloved by anyone who was not an architecture student or faculty member" and is only still standing "because it would be too expensive to tear down." The article is by Lawrence Biemiller and in in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The image at left is from a page of images of this building published by Mary Ann Sullivan.

When the time came to decide between renovation and demolition, though, the building's unpopularity was outweighed by concerns about sustainability — tearing down a usable building is a LEED no-no — and by preservation advocates' newfound interest in well-known Modern structures. The renovation of the Art & Architecture Building comes on the heels of the Kahn gallery's $44-million renovation by Polshek Partnership Architects. Plans are also in the works for renovations of Eero Saarinen's two Yale residential colleges, Morse and Ezra Stiles, as well as of the 1963 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

"Yale was a leader in the 1950s in building Modernist buildings," Mr. Stern said, "and now it's a leader in restoring them." But each, he said, "presents gargantuan problems to its owners."

So far, though, the problems almost all appear to have been resolvable. Mr. Stern pointed out with glee that the Art & Architecture Building's notorious orange carpet is being replaced with new carpet woven especially for the project. "It's coming back," he grinned, "in its full orangeneity."

Very Old Campus Heritage Outlasts the University

Vietnam's first university was established here, at the Temple of Literature, in 1076, predating Harvard by a few hundred years. This image and many others can be found at this wonderful website.

Here is a Wikipedia article on it. Here is a New York Times travel guide item about it. Mor information can be found on this Answers.com page. As well, there are some nice images in this personal blog post.

Here is a little more about the curriculum and the students who - surprise, surprise - were often seen by outsiders as "troublemakers."

This is a case where the architecture outlived the university, however, as it shut down as an institution in 1779 after awarding 2,313 doctorate equivalent degrees.

Creating Campus Appeal

Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) writes in University Business about the beauty of college campuses and the impact on their decision to matriculate and their later affection for their alma mater. He also notes the CIC's wonderful Historic Campus Architecture Project and its online database of 2,100 historic buildings on its members' campuses.

Campus planners and alumni often have very different opinions about campus architecture. When alumni are asked about the buildings on campus that they like or about the design plans for a new structure, they often express conservative stylistic preferences, with collegiate Gothic often being a favorite. When campus planners and architects are surveyed about campus buildings, however, they are often dismissive of the lack of imagination that led to a decision to build another building in this style when more innovative options were available. When they discuss other options with institutional administrators and others, the results can be surprising and illuminating.

Ekman also refers to the SCUP-published book by Richard P. Dober, Old Main, which is full-color companion piece to Dober's Campus Heritage book (also full color). Each would make a nice holiday gift for anyone who loves campuses and campus planning.

Big Plans for Higher Education in India

We really don't at the moment know how to better express this than by a relatively large quite from this article. Setting up 30 new central universities in 10 years? Changing student fees from covering 5% to covering 20 percent of operational costs during the same time frame? Just looking at the advertisements on the web page is illustrative of a culture gap:

These are exciting times for higher education in the country. The 11th five year Plan document proposes an almost 10-fold increase in outlay for higher and technical education. The planners have set ambitious targets — to attract 15% students passing out of class XII (from the current 10%) into higher education by 2012 and 22% by 2017. The way to do this, they say, is to expand and upgrade on an unprecedented scale.

In the new Plan, there’s more of everything — 30 new central universities are to be set up, seven IITs and IIMs, 10 National Institute of Technology, five research institutes to be called Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, 20 IIITs, two schools of architecture and 330 colleges in educationally backward districts. All this is in line with the PM’s announcement in his August 15 speech this year.

Infrastructure in existing universities and institutions is also in for major upgradation. Among the big beneficiaries of these special grants will be 17 yet-to-identified central universities which will get Rs 3,298 crore. Besides, 39 engineering institutes will receive a whopping Rs 6,749 crore, again for ramping up infrastructure. A good dose of funds has also been set aside for upgrading agriculture, management and medical institutions.

But this money comes with a plan. The document envisions wide-ranging reforms in the way higher education is imparted and much of the fund allocation has been tied up to the beneficiary institute carrying out structural changes. Some of these proposals are likely to trigger debate and attract controversy.

For instance, the document seeks to raise fees for higher education to up to 20% of operational costs, which is 5% at present. "Higher education is highly subsidized. The document seeks to reduce this subsidy to improve quality of education," said Bhalchandra Mungekar, member Planning Commission.

Colleges Cope With Bigger Classes

This Washington Post article by Justin Pope - requires registration for access - presents some of the issues surrounding mega-classes, students, and learning, with continuing references to a Nobel physicist from the University of Colorado (now, also, the University of British Columbia), Carl Weiman, who is planning ways to fix the system. [He also references the work of Carol Twigg and others at the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT).] The article includes a nice survey of some of the learning measurement research being done at a number of universities. Many thanks to our colleague at APPA, Steve Glazner, for sharing this link.

Wieman is at the vanguard of the reform movement, but it's really his second career. In his first he was a researcher with a rare distinction: He produced a new state of matter. Most people know the three most common states of matter _ solid, liquid and gas. But cooling rubidium nearly to absolute zero, Wieman and Colorado colleague Eric Cornell formulated the first Bose-Einstein condensate, a state in which several thousand atoms align perfectly and behave as a single "super atom."

After his Nobel, Wieman could easily have focused on lab work or training a cadre of elite graduate students.

But Wieman uses his clout to secure invitations to talk to his fellow scientists _ about teaching. He has become one of several physicists to take up the cause, along with Eric Mazur at Harvard, Edward Redish at Maryland and Robert Beichner at North Carolina State.

Wieman wears tennis shoes and walks everywhere like he's in a hurry. He is.

"I have ridiculous, grandiose visions," he said, speaking in his temporary office overlooking Colorado's football stadium. "I want to change how everybody learns science. I won't get into how this will save mankind, but it may."

The problem, he said, is that scientists stop acting like scientists when it comes to their own teaching.

Expanding Elite Institutions: Why? Is Bigger Better? Can It Be?

Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are in different stages of thinking about it or doing it. Haverford decided not to. NYU has expanded. This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Elizabeth F. Farrell examines some pros and cons and some institutional planning. Requires subscription and registration of purchase of a temporary pass for access.

The country's richest and most selective institutions have recently been devoting their wealth to improving their facilities and raising the number of faculty members. Both Harvard and Brown Universities have added at least 100 new faculty members in the past five years, and Princeton has added 60 over the past 10 years. Stanford has added 250 more faculty members over the past decade.

Many of these universities are also buying more space. Yale purchased the former campus of the Bayer Healthcare complex, in Orange, Conn., last summer, which will add over 500,000 square feet of laboratory facilities to the university. Harvard plans to add 600,000 square feet of science-teaching space and laboratories for its stem-cell-research center and other projects. Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania have recently acquired 17 and 14 acres, respectively.

Both Harvard and Dartmouth College say that as much as they would like to admit more students, space constraints on their campuses make it impossible for now. But for some elite institutions, adding more students is a way of increasing access to a tremendous wealth of resources that keeps on growing.

"As knowledge expands, great universities have to expand along with it," says Christopher L. Eisgruber, provost at Princeton. "If you want to have the right educational ecosystem, when you grow the faculty you have to grow the student body, too."

Teaching 6 Courses @ 4 Institutions - Definitely Not Tenure Track

The growth in percentage of faculty who are adjunct (not tenure track) has been getting a lot of attention lately. This article by Alan Finder of The New York Times uses the daily travels of an adjunct faculty member who teaches six courses at four institutions, including the University of Michigan Dearborn and Oakland Community College:

“We have to contend with increasing public demands for accountability, increased financial scrutiny and declining state support,” said Charles F. Harrington, provost of the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. “One of the easiest, most convenient ways of dealing with these pressures is using part-time faculty,” he said, though he cautioned that colleges that rely too heavily on such faculty “are playing a really dangerous game.”

Mark B. Rosenberg, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said that part-timers can provide real-world experience to students and fill gaps in nursing, math, accounting and other disciplines with a shortage of qualified faculty. He also said the shift could come with costs.

Adjuncts are less likely to have doctoral degrees, educators say. They also have less time to meet with students, and research suggests that students who take many courses with them are somewhat less likely to graduate.

“Really, we are offering less educational quality to the students who need it most,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, noting that the soaring number of adjunct faculty is most pronounced in community colleges and the less select public universities. The elite universities, both public and private, have the fewest adjuncts.

Teaching 6 Courses @ 4 Institutions - Definitely Not Tenure Track

The growth in percentage of faculty who are adjunct (not tenure track) has been getting a lot of attention lately. This article by Alan Finder of The New York Times uses the daily travels of an adjunct faculty member who teaches six courses at four institutions, including the University of Michigan Dearborn and Oakland Community College:

“We have to contend with increasing public demands for accountability, increased financial scrutiny and declining state support,” said Charles F. Harrington, provost of the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. “One of the easiest, most convenient ways of dealing with these pressures is using part-time faculty,” he said, though he cautioned that colleges that rely too heavily on such faculty “are playing a really dangerous game.”

Mark B. Rosenberg, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said that part-timers can provide real-world experience to students and fill gaps in nursing, math, accounting and other disciplines with a shortage of qualified faculty. He also said the shift could come with costs.

Adjuncts are less likely to have doctoral degrees, educators say. They also have less time to meet with students, and research suggests that students who take many courses with them are somewhat less likely to graduate.

“Really, we are offering less educational quality to the students who need it most,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, noting that the soaring number of adjunct faculty is most pronounced in community colleges and the less select public universities. The elite universities, both public and private, have the fewest adjuncts.

What Comes Through the Dorm Mailroom? Pretty Much Everything!

Well, we certainly hadn't thought through the implications for residence halls of students ordering more and more things on line, so this article by Jonathan D. Glater in The New York Times was enlightening:

Dealing with the increased mailroom activity is also costing colleges money. Pomona College — whose mailroom handled the ant farm, air-conditioner and barbecue grill — spent thousands on a system to scan bar codes, which sends students e-mail messages notifying them when they have packages in the mailroom. Pomona has also expanded its mailroom, making room for more packages.

At SUNY Binghamton, where the number of packages received increased to 57,000 last year, from 33,000 in 2002, officials invested about $25,000 in a bar code scanning system to track packages from the moment of arrival to the time students sign for them.

“We’re hoping that we’ve seen the worst of it,” said Larry Roma, associate vice president for facilities management at the university.

SUNY’s Purchase College has also invested in such a system, at a cost of $37,000. Meanwhile, Arizona State University decided it could not even handle students’ deliveries itself, and handed over mailroom operations to UPS.

New Book: Architecture of the Absurd: How 'Genius' Disfigured a Practical Art

Former Boston University president John Silber, as noted in this review in The Daily Free Press, "recently took his career in a new direction and wrote a book about some of the world's most renowned flaws, feats and failures in architecture." Purchase the book here.

"I used to say that there would never be an architecture of the absurd," he said. "With architecture, no one was going to pay for something absurd. . . . Over time I came to realize how wrong I was.

"The absurd occurs because there is a confusion between architecture and fine art, and architecture and sculpture," he continued. "You don't live in a sculpture."

LEED for Neighborhood Development

This is a nicely in-depth discussion of LEED-ND, it's background and current status, by Nate Berg in Planetizen:

What they came up with is a finely-tuned mix of USGBC’s materials and land use considerations, CNU’s urban design guidelines, and NRDC’s environmental and smart growth concerns. This three-layered lens evaluates projects by a number of criteria, including location, density, conservation of wetlands and agricultural lands, reduced automobile dependence, proximity to housing and jobs, walkability, energy efficiency, and a host of other measures. In total, LEED-ND has nine required benchmarks and 49 possible categories for which projects can be evaluated. Those involved with the creation of the standard are the first to admit it’s trying to cover a lot of ground. But the purpose, they say, is to create a more comprehensive explanation of what it takes to create environmentally sustainable developments.

“Getting accessibility, affordable housing, public involvement, and open communities all in LEED-ND I think was a healthy and rational expansion of the definition of sustainability” said Doug Farr, founding principal of the green architecture and planning firm Farr Associates, and chair of the LEED-ND Core Committee.

Farr says this new definition of sustainability was intentionally developed with such a wide net to stress the idea that urban design, land use and the environment are inextricably linked. In this way, LEED-ND can be looked at as an updated version of the famous Venn diagram of sustainability that shows the overlap of the environment, the economy and social equity.

“What LEED-ND really does is bring everything together and create coherence across all the specialties,” said John Norquist, CNU president and CEO, and also a member of the LEED-ND Core Committee.

Clinton Foundation Supports Presidents Climate Commitment . . . and Much More Related News & Info!

At the 2007 GreenBuild, former president Bill Clinton announced that this foundation was entering into a partnership with the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. Here's the (PDF) press release.

SCUP also supports the ACUPCC, and that effort is the focus of a forthcoming SCUP webcast on December 12: Climate Change and Higher Education: Leadership to Achieve Climate Neutrality with Michael Crow, Billy Parish, and Dave Newport, moderated by James Gorman.

SCUP will also be providing planning expertise to a course being created by Dave Newport for next semester at the University of Colorado, "Climate Neutral CU." That course will be taught in class to students at UC Boulder and online to a large group of campus professionals who are expecting to learn how to engage their campus in climate neutrality planning while at the same time creating models and templates through their participation in the class. For current information contact Dave Newport at david.newport@colorado.edu.

Who would have thought, six years ago, that so much would be happening in the higher education sustainability world? Here are some other, related things you should know about:

• SCUP's board of directors recently passed a resolution (PDF) that led to SCUP sending 70 federal legislators letters in support of the Higher Education Sustainability Act, which would provide $50M of funding for campus-based projects. See the letter here. [LINK COMING SHORTLY!]
  
• Building Design and Construction magazine recently published a substantial white paper on professional attitudes and understanding about green building. SCUP members were surveyed once again as this is a follow-up from a similar study conducted in 2004. Here's the higher education portion of that report (PDF). [JENIFER HAS THIS LIN
  
• SCUP will be represented by Terry Calhoun during a November 27th webinar, Education for a Sustainable Future, from the Higher Education Associations Sustainability Network (HEASC), an organization that SCUP co-founded.

Assessment & Accreditation: The Frog is Coming to a Boil!

Wow. As the water went from cool to warm, we weren't led to expect that someone would reach over and turn the heat up to "high": A plethora of activities relating to accountability and quality issues are quickly going from simmer to boil!

This (requires subscription or pass purchase) is just one:

A dispute over the federal agency charged with reviewing college accreditors may come to a boil at a key review session next month, when the waning Bush administration will have one of its highest-profile chances to try to force colleges to do more to demonstrate how well they help students learn.

The federal agency is scheduled to assess five of the six main regional accreditation bodies and decide if they deserve renewed recognition.

Some of the accreditors say the session has the potential to play out as a politically explosive showdown between the Education Department and the accreditors and colleges that have been seeking to take control of decisions about how institutions' performances are measured.

This is another:

“I’m shocked at the stupidity of the accreditors in opening up an issue that had been settled in a positive way,” Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, said angrily Wednesday night. The Association of American Universities sent a letter to its members late last week opposing the change, and the association’s weekly summary of developments explained its rationale this way: “The elimination of this important provision opens the door to alternatives that are likely to be unsatisfactory or harmful to the ability of institutions to continue to set their own standards of student achievement based on their institutional mission.”

Hot stuff, indeed.

Note: If you'd like to read some thoughtful, related articles from Planning for Higher Education, collected in one PDF before the heat got turned on, you may wish to purchase this SCUP Portfolio on Assessment & Quality.

Town Gown World: New Website

Joining the wonderful College Town Life website, this new Canada-based resource is all about "town and gown planning from around the world." Editor Rob Payne is producing an excellent resource and he has a strong focus on planning issues. For example, one page asks the question: Collaborative university/community planning. Does it exist? On that page are articles about this topic from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.

This resource is well worth a bookmark in your Web browser, and a visit back from time to time in order to see how it grows.

Frank Gehry & MIT

Lawrence Biemiller, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote this article about the MIT lawsuit against Frank Gehry, over the Ray and Maria Stata Center, MIT's Suit Against Frank Gehry Astonished Campus Architects.

His detractors— and there are many— are reveling in the news that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has filed a negligence lawsuit against the firm headed by Frank O. Gehry, the most famous American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright. But architects and others familiar with how buildings get constructed on campuses are marveling that what probably began as a routine disagreement about construction issues could not be resolved before ending up in court.

Shortly thereafter, SCUPer O. Robert ("Bob") Simha wrote the Chronicle a letter published under the title, The MIT Case Is All Too Common.

Then followed another letter to the Chronicle from SCUPer Jim Winer, published under the title, Gehry Requires Big Budgets, Receptive Clients.

Stay tuned. For background, here's a Boston Globe article on the lawsuit.

The Pendulum Swings On Accreditation

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water . . . a rift is opened between accrediting agencies and individual colleges and universities: "What they did was to reopen the entire topic (accreditation) to anything and everyone, including the entry of the department (of Education)."

Here's Inside Higher Ed's Doug Lederman's take - lots of interesting comments at the bottom, including: "This is truly outstanding reporting by Doug, about very important events unfolding on Capitol Hill. All the important players are here: Senate, House, accreditors, and the colleges and universities, and even the Secretary of Education; and we see all them in action. And the action is complicated, filled with cross-cutting tensions."

George Keller: Intellectual Whirlwind

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wilfred M. McClay writes about visiting SCUPer George Keller at his home in Maryland as George was dying of leukemia: (That's George on the left.) "George was absolutely straightforward about the fact that he was going to die, there was no cure possible, and then ... it was on to more interesting things; there was conversation to be had and ideas to be wrestled over." You'll need a Chronicle subscription and registration or the purchase of a day pass to access this article.

Thanks, Wilfred.

There is an image that we in the professoriate have of people who do the kind of work George Keller did, not unlike Thorstein Veblen's brutal comment about administrators, when he declared that "the academic executive and all his works are anathema, and should be discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate." The cliché has some truth, but not as much as we faculty members would like to think, and in George's case, it was completely false. He was an intellectual whirlwind and always remained true to his old-Columbia sense of what intellectual life was about.

Higher education lost one of its most humane and farsighted analysts with George's death earlier this year at a very youthful 78. His résumé was lengthy and diverse, including a term of service as a professor and chairman of the program in higher-education studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and as editor of Planning [for Higher Education], the journal of the Society for College and University Planning. After retiring from Penn in 1994, he worked as a consultant and writer, producing several notable books, including Higher Education and the New Society, to be published next year by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

***

George roundly disagreed with those who charged that the use of strategic planning was in effect treating the college strictly as a business. No, he insisted, it treated the college as an organization. A properly functioning college, he believed, is better regarded as an organic unity, animated by a sense of common purpose — one that is qualitatively different from the aggregate ambitions of individuals and the imperatives of their disciplines. To be sure, a good college seeks to provide all its employees with the fullest range of opportunities for their own advancement. In higher education, self-realization and institutional goals are seen as complementary, not opposing, forces. But something else is required: a strong sense of the college as a collegium, as the organization to which one's most primary loyalty is owed.

A strategic plan cannot succeed when institutional loyalty is not cultivated, rewarded, and exemplified from the top down. It certainly cannot succeed in an atmosphere in which careerist executive leaders are no sooner hired for one job than they are laying the groundwork for their next jump.

Unbuilt Michigan: The University That Never Was

Retired University of Michigan planner and SCUP charter member, Fred Mayer, has written an interesting article for the Ann Arbor Observer about campus projects that almost- or might-have-been-but-weren't-built at the University of Michigan (PDF). That publication does not post its own articles on line but has agreed to let SCUP share this one. Enjoy! (We're sure that Fred would enjoy hearing from you about this: fmayer@umich.edu.)

The U-M is almost always in the midst of a building boom. Year in and year out, Michigan has one of the most active programs of building renovation and new construction of all American universities.

This program is very carefully managed to ensure that substantial architectural design work is not undertaken until there is a strong likelihood that a project will actually be built. But despite these precautions, some projects never make it to the construction phase. Most of these unsuccessful projects are quickly forgotten.

Because most never progressed beyond preliminary stages, there is often little documentation remaining,and they are difficult to reconstruct. This article focuses on those for which design drawings survive. For more recent projects, it also draws on my own knowledge gained during thirty-seven years as the university planner.

Students Less Engaged at Community Colleges?

The Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE; modeled after NSSE) has just published "Committing to Student Engagement: Reflections on CCSSEE's First Five Years, 2007 Findings." This USA Today article by Mary Beth Marklein reports on it. The complete study can and an executive summary can be downloaded here. The report's executive summary presents "Five Strategies That Work":

• Set High Expectations and Clear Goals
• Focus on the Front Door
• Elevate Developmental Education
• Use Engaging Instructional Approaches
• Make Engagement Inescapable

From the USA Today article:

Many community college students begin slipping through the cracks at school almost as soon as they first set foot on campus, a report says Monday.

The report, released by the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, urges colleges to be "deliberate and aggressively create opportunities to involve students" in their studies, beginning with a student's first interaction on campus.

The report is based on annual student surveys conducted in the past three years. This year's survey was completed by about 310,000 students from more than 500 colleges nationwide.

Must-Read: Educational Facilities and the Impact of Technology, Expectations, and Competition

APPA: Leadership in Educational Facilities has published its 2007 Thought Leaders Series report titled "Educational Facilities and the Impact of Technology, Expectations, and Competition" (PDF) including the top ten critical facilities issues). We highly recommend that you download and read this report. You may also call 703.684.1446 to receive a complimentary printed copy, but we recommend being sustainable and downloading the digital file instead. (You can search inside it!) The top ten critical facilities issues, well-explained in the report, are:

• Improving Communications
• Addressing Sustainability
• Balancing and Articulating Expectations
• Integrating with IT
• Focusing on the Customer
• Aligning Facilities Planning with Institutional Goals
• Making Master Planning More Effective
• Implementing Total Cost of Ownership Strategies
• Managing Maintenance and Adaptive Reuse
• Instituting Metrics for Performance Measurement

Many thanks to the nine SCUP-member "thought leaders" who participated in the April 2007 APPA Thought Leaders Summit which was the source of this report: Christopher K. Ahoy, Iowa State University; James E. Alty Jr., Wake Forest University; Dave Button, University of Regina; Joseph C. Fisher, West Virginia University; John Hall, University of Texas at Arlington; Mernoy E. Harrison Jr., Arizona State University-Downtown Phoenix Campus; Jay Kahn, Keene State College; L. Carole Wharton, LC Wharton, LLC; and John O. White, University of California-Merced.

A Peek at the January-March 2008 Issue of Planning for Higher Education

We're at the point in production of the January-March 2008 issue of Planning for Higher Education where we are writing what we call the "blurbs," which are short descriptions which appear in the printed journal, just below the titles of the articles. We thought we'd whet your appetite for this forthcoming issue by sharing those with you as we create them.

Warning: This is a "teaser"! You won't be able to read the content described below until January 2008. If you are not a subscriber to SCUP's journal, why don't you join (members get the journal as part of membership) or subscribe now?

Article Title: Smart Change
Description: "This article explains how 'smart change' (contrasted with routine, strategic, and transformative change) is about using learning as a core asset and a guidance system for institutional change and provides three institutional vignettes."

Article Title: Improving Institutional Effectiveness: Description and Application of an Implementation Model
Description: "The authors describe a model of 'implementation effectiveness' and a description of how it was applied at the University of New England, building 'routine practice' developmentally by paying attention to implementation climate and 'values fit' variables.

Article Title: Beyond the Diversity Crisis Model: Decentralized Diversity Planning and Implementation
Description: "The authors detail a three-year, decentralized, 10-phase model for continuing, non-reactive diversity planning."

Article Title: Promoting Faculty Diversity: The Faculty Fellows Program at Appalachian State University
Description: "This case study describes the diversity situation at Appalachian State University, as well as the implementation and results of its Faculty Fellows Program, concluding with four important recommendations for similar programs at other schools."

Article Title: Online Program Capacity: Limited, Static, Elastic, or Infinite?
Description: "You think "space management' is tough in the built environment? What about space in ‘virtual' programs? The authors share five helpful conclusions for planners who need answers to questions like 'What is our course or program capacity?'"

Book Reviews: Sandra L. Kortesoja reviews two books with complementary styles and calls to action that help explain the role that market forces and the media have come to play in higher education: College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy, edited by Lloyd Thacker and Remaking The American University: Market-smart And Mission-centered by Robert Zemsky, Gregory Wegner, and William F. Massy.

College Towns Escape the Subprime Pain. Why?

Ford Fessendon, in The New York Times, provides us with one more reason why we love living in college towns:

As the inner cities, along with much of Florida and the interior of California, face the prospect of a foreclosure meltdown, American college towns appear to be islands of stability.
The list of metropolitan areas with the smallest percentage of high-cost home loans is dominated by small cities with big colleges, including Ithaca, N.Y.; Iowa City; Madison, Wis.; Morgantown, W.V.; and State College, Pa.

Building Security FAQs: What You Need to Know About Video Surveillance

This series of questions and answers by Vicki Powers in University Business is intended to help planners decide if their campus can benefit from video surveillance, and plan for its successful implementation.

[C]ollege campuses struggle to design the perfect mix of technology, systems, and software to protect students, faculty, and staff members. Many questions swirl around these technology discussions as administrators and campus security folks consider privacy, integration, budget, and the latest up-and-coming technology around video surveillance. How can campuses make sense of all this information? The following frequently asked questions will help administrators determine whether this technology can benefit their campus and how to ensure its success.

Emerging Policy Triangle: Economic Development, Workforce Development and Education

From the national Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), this is an updated (2007; 130 pp) version of the 2004 original. Written by Dennis P. Jones and Patrick J. Kelley, it includes updated profiles for all 50 states and international comparative data.

Few issues unite policymakers in quite the same way as that of economic development. Whether their responsibilities are national, state, regional, or local in nature, individuals whose job it is to make and implement public policy find common ground in their interests in ensuring economic growth and prosperity. All understand that the American way of life is fundamentally dependent on economic competitiveness. They also understand the rest of the equation—strong economies are characterized by an abundance of well-paying jobs and, overwhelmingly, well-paying jobs are held by individuals who have knowledge and skills obtained through education beyond high school. Where physical capital drives industrial economies, human capital drives economies in the information age.

Higher Education & National Affairs (HENA)

Oh, no, not another email newsletter! Yes, if your inbox can stand it, this would be a good one to get twice week:

HENA is the American Council on Education's (ACE) biweekly email newsletter covering events in Washington that impact higher education. HENA also keeps you updated on ACE’s activities in areas such as international education, leadership, research and analysis, and lifelong learning. Receive HENA Headlines free to your inbox each Tuesday and Thursday and keep up with the latest news from ACE, as well as the top higher education headlines from around the country.

What Is a Globally Competent Student?

Read the transcript of this Chronicle Live Discussion: William Brustein, associate provost for international affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and president of the Association of International Education Administrators, addresses the question: "What Is a Globally Competent Student?"

Colleges trying to internationalize the college experience are struggling with some key questions: What is a globally competent student? How do you internationalize the curriculum? Is it better to create stand-alone courses or infuse internationalism across disciplines? How do you get faculty members to commit to the goal? How do you involve foreign students and scholars more deeply in campus life?

On the same Web page, there are "free" links to these related Chronicle articles: "'Flat World' Lessons for Real-World Students" and "To Connect With Foreign Students, Champlain College Taps Into Technology."

Presidents' Climate Commitment Gets Boost from The Honorable Bill Clinton at GreenBuild

In a keynote speech shown live via streaming video on the Internet, president Clinton discussed a number of his foundation's efforts to support a greener America and world, and specifically noted the William J. Clinton Foundation's support for the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, recognizing among others SCUPer Tony Cortese of Second Nature, co-founder of SCUP's Campus Sustainability Day. Here is what we currently know about the . . .

partnership between the ACUPCC and the Clinton Foundation (Clinton Climate Initiative) on private funding for energy efficiency building retrofits for colleges and universities. Over the next year, we’ll work alongside the CCI as well as the leaders at NACUBO, APPA, NAEP and SCUP to take these best practice RFPs and contracts and turn them into turnkey models that any school in the country could use, regardless of their institutional expertise.

This group will also collaborate with the CCI’s financial and energy services partners to develop innovative ways to lower project costs and potentially extend the scope of greenhouse gas-reducing projects into new areas beyond building retrofits. This is potentially the biggest step forward in rapid progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from existing buildings as well as helping to deal with deferred maintenance – a huge issue on campuses.

Clinton had, on the stage with him, representatives of several colleges and universities which he said "house more than 250,000 students." More details of that support as they are available. Among other things, Clinton noted that "When America is in the business of solutions, there is nobody better" and noted that if the US has signed the Kyoto Accord, there would likely have been economic benefits that we are already missing in our economy. He shared with the GreenBuild audience that he expected that in 18 months to 5 years the focus of planners, designer, and architects will shift from "energy neutral" to "energy positive" buildings.

We expect the video of Clinton's address to be archived on the GreenBuild365 website, which also features additional live webcasts as the event continues for the rest of this week.

Universities a Big Part of Urban Renewal

In a recent news item (with several images from Detroit) for the Associated Press, Corey Williams writes about the ways a number of universities are being good neighbors and assisting in the economic development of their cities, including Wayne State University (Detroit), the University of Cincinnati, Rutgers (Camden, New Jersey), and Stanford University.

A really good, related article from SCUP's Planning for Higher Education is Higher Education and Health Care Institutions as Stimuli for the Revitalization of Camden, New Jersey, through Capital Expansion, Collaboration, and Political Advocacy, which also addressed Camden, New Jersey.

From the AP article:

"We use the euphemism today and call it Midtown, but it was the Cass Corridor and everyone knew what the Cass Corridor was," Wayne State President Irvin Reid said.

When Reid arrived in 1997, he set about transforming the reputation of the faded community bordering the 200-acre urban campus, with Cass Avenue as its main thoroughfare.

As developers added upscale condos and townhouses costing up to $600,000 per unit, the university also went to work.

Wayne State has spent more than $1 billion in the past decade for on- and off-campus housing and building projects.

Lessons from the Virginia Tech Tragedy

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) has published a new report, by Lawrence K. Pettit, that is a distillation of lessons-learned for campus leaders in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy. It is available on line here. It is organized under six headings:

• The Importance of University Linkages; The Need to Upgrade and Institutionalize Internal and External Communication; The Importance of Early Detection and Warnings; The Need to Respond Quickly to Incidents; The Need to Centralize and Control Media and Public Relations; and
• The Necessity of Well Operated Family and Victim Services.

It makes a good companion piece for SCUP's concise presidential guide about responding to disasters Lessons From the Front: The Presidential Role in Disaster Planning and Response (PDF) by current president-elect Sal Rinella of STRATUS.

Both pieces should find permanent homes in the briefcases of campus leaders.

Twelve Days in China: More Similarities Than Differences

This is the best article we've seen to give a planner, or really, any potential visiting academic, a visitor's eye view of what higher education in China looks like right now. It was written by Diana Oblinger, new EDUCAUSE president, as a result of a trip to several institutions last June and was published in EDUCAUSE Review.

"All the universities we visited are cities in their own right. Beyond classrooms, faculty offices, labs, and gymnasiums, there is a complete infrastructure for the students, faculty, and children who live on campus. All students live in residence halls; there are separate residence halls for undergraduate and graduate students. The universities also have international dorms (in one case, a four-star hotel) for students from outside China. In most cases, there is a guest house for visitors. Huge dining halls feed the students, faculty, and the families of faculty. But students have other needs as well, so campuses are dotted with small shops for sewing, laundry, dry cleaning, and bicycles. On many campuses, schools for the children of faculty are also provided. Tsinghua University, for example, has elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as housing and dining for a large number of faculty and their families.

The campuses are large due to the numbers of students and faculty. But they are also extraordinarily beautiful, with green spaces and well-manicured gardens. For example, the campus of Tsinghua University occupies a former royal garden; the architecture is a blend of ancient, traditional, and modern. The agricultural campus of Zhejiang University (above), located in the middle of Hangzhou, is spectacular, with graceful bridges arching over a lake and streams. The lotus ponds were just beginning to bloom when we visited. At the new campus of Zhejiang University, historic buildings—a seven-hundred-year-old temple and house—have been relocated to the new campus in a garden of their own. The remainder of the campus is ultra-modern but landscaped with trees, flowers, fountains, streams, and sculpture. Even campuses in dense urban settings (e.g., Shanghai, Beijing) have the feel of being in a world apart."

A New Professional: The Aims of Education Revisited

This is an article by Parker J. Palmer from the November-December 2007 issue of Change magazine.

The Last Word

The word "professional" originally meant someone who makes a "profession of faith" in the midst of a disheartening world. That root meaning became diminished as the centuries rolled by, and today it has all but disappeared. "Professional" now means someone who possesses knowledge and techniques too esoteric for the laity to understand, whose education is proudly proclaimed to be "value free."

The notion of a "new professional" revives the root meaning of the word. This person can say, "In the midst of the powerful forcefield of institutional life, where so much conspires to compromise the core values of my work, I have found firm ground on which to stand—the ground of personal and professional identity and integrity—and from which I can call myself, my colleagues, and my profession back to our true mission."

Higher education needs to educate people in every field who have ethical autonomy and the courage to act upon it—who possess knowledge, skill, and the highest values of their vocations. Can such an education become a reality? Yes, if we who educate can think and act like the new professionals we need to raise up.

Second Chance, Not Second Class: A Blueprint for Community-College Transfer

Written by Stephen J. Handel, director of the National Office of Community College Initiatives at the College Board, this article about how to increase the number of students successfully transferring from community colleges to four-year institutions was featured in the September/October 2007 issue of Change magazine.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Transfer

Clearly, the transfer mission can work. In California, analysis of a decade's labor has produced seven "habits" that have a positive effect on community-college students' transferring to, and ultimately succeeding in, four-year institutions.

***

These initiatives are not free, but neither are they prohibitively expensive. Strengthening academic preparation, considering transfer applicants first in admissions, setting transfer goals, and making a public commitment to increasing the number of transfers require more political than financial capital. Other recommendations—such as expanding the number of articulation agreements, creating a transfer-promoting culture, and providing professional development for community-college staff members assigned to assist transfers—require additional dollars, but they do not cost as much as one might predict.

Juliana Curran Terian Design Center, Pratt Institute

This nice, image-laden article by Joseph E. Pollack in Architecture Week, describes this small but important addition's "conceptually significant role of providing common space for design disciplines formerly housed in separate buildings."

Approaching the building from across the green, I didn't spot a sore thumb as I expected, nor did I see a designer's attempt to leave his or her architectural mark as boldly as possible. Instead I was met by a sensibly finished rectilinear volume delicately cantilevered over a softly lit entrance.

This form, which houses the building's main exhibition space, seems to float over the approaching steps, as emphasized by the clever use of light underneath the overhead structure. The gallery's two-story glass wall puts student and faculty work on display for the whole quad. It makes the Design Center a stunning focal point without being visually obtrusive to its surroundings.

'Saddest Cubicle' Winner Is On a University Campus

We knew lots of SCUPers would be interested in the unaesthetic, effective use of campus office space, so we're sharing Wired News' "Saddest -Cubicles" contest results. We talked to the winner, David Gunnells of the University of Alabama. He says that his department's space is in line soon for renovation and they all kind of hope this award speeds things up. (The image is David's, by the way, and used with his permission.)

"The winner -- if you can call it winning -- of the Wired News' saddest-cubicles contest is David Gunnells, an IT guy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His desk is penned in by heavily used filing cabinets in a windowless conference room, near a poorly ventilated bathroom and a microwave. The overhead light doesn't work -- his mother-in-law was so saddened by his cube that she gave him a lamp -- and the other side of the wall is a parking garage. Gunnells recalls a day when one co-worker reheated catfish in the microwave, while another used the bathroom and covered the smell with a stinky air freshener. Lovely."

Land ONLINE: Landscape Architecture Digest

This newsletter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) nearly always has information of use to campus planners. Regular features include Landscape Architecture in the News, which is a bit like a much more topically-focused "SCUP Links"; The Dirt, "ASLA's blog on the world of landscape architecture and beyond," and regular news about ASLA resources. We found the most interesting new item in this issue to be the updating of Green Roof Central, the reporting area about the green roof on top of ASLA headquarters in Washington, DC.

Creativity As a Student Learning Goal

This Project Kaleidoscope collection, of papers from the PKAL community of stakeholders - each with a summary and a "full document" or transcript - focuses on creativity as a student learning goal. Tori Haring-Smith, president of Washington and Jefferson College speaks about the relationship between "reflection" and creative ability. That's paired up with two PDFs from the US Military Academy: "Creativity: A Goal for Student Learning at West Point" and "Educating Future Army Officers for a Changing World."

From Haring Smith's transcript: "My senior staff is always dreading what they call the “shower memo.” They know when I shower and if the time accords with the end of the shower they know it’s a I was just thinking kind of memo. These moments are woefully rare in our fast
paced world of Blackberries and cell phones."

From "Creativity": "Uninformed observers probably would not describe our modern Army as a proponent of creative thinking. To the contrary, the GI stereotype might lead one to believe that Army service involves mechanical obedience to specific orders: e.g., dig the trench, refill the hole, and repeat. In contradistinction to this stereotype, Army leaders, who function in a world of rapid technological, social, political, and economic change, must be astute thinkers and innovators."

NSSE Gets Good Press: 'A New Way to Look for a College'

NSSE, the National Survey of Student Engagement, hit the media big time with a long article by Santa Fabio in USA Today on November 5. More than 25o participating schools have agreed to share their data and USA Today is partnering with NSSE to make the data widely available to the public. Also mentioned in the article are the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the College Senior Survey, and recent initiatives by NAICU and AASCU.

Problem is, that kind of information hasn't typically been available to the public in a meaningful way.

The National Survey of Student Engagement wants to change that. While many popular college guides focus on things like SAT scores of incoming freshmen, or a college's party-school reputation, NSSE (pronounced "nessie") seeks to gauge the quality of an undergraduate education by looking at how actively involved students are with their studies, professors and the campus community. Decades of research shows that the more engaged students are, the more likely they are to learn.

Colleges appear to welcome such information. Since its 2000 debut, NSSE has surveyed nearly 1,200 schools at least once, and it has spawned similar surveys for law schools, community colleges and other populations.

Most colleges keep results confidential, using their data as an internal assessment tool. But this year, for the first time, NSSE is encouraging participating schools to make their scores publicly available.

USA TODAY, in partnership with NSSE, is publishing this guide in print and online to show how NSSE can enhance the college search. More than 250 schools have agreed to disclose their scores.

Pressure from Congress is one reason colleges are inching toward greater transparency; another is growing discontent with rankings like those compiled by U.S. News & World Report.

Accrediting agencies, which provide a third-party stamp of approval to colleges, have been asking since the 1990s for evidence that students are benefiting from their education. Congress has for years decried the absence of useful information available to students and parents. And a national commission appointed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings last year urged colleges to consider publishing results from NSSE and other assessment tools as a way to help families see what they're getting for their tuition dollars.

In a bid to circumvent federal oversight, a number of non-profit higher education groups have developed or are developing websites through which consumers can get information, including NSSE scores in some cases, in easy-to-compare formats. More than 600 private institutions have signed up to participate in a website launched in September by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. A similar initiative by the National Association of State and University Land Grant Colleges is expected to debut in January; it was developed with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Other projects are in the works for research universities and online education.

The Art of Parking Spaces

This is a brief, self-guided, online slide show of unique parking structures (some beautiful, some not) from The Guardian (UK).

"LEED for the Land": Sustainable Sites Initiative

As Scott Carlson puts it, in this brief Chronicle blog post, this initiative is "like LEED for the land."

As those who put this latest 100-page report together, put it:

The Preliminary Report on the Standards and Guidelines for Sustainable Sites is the result of more than a year of work by a diverse group of experts in development, design, construction and maintenance of landscapes. It is based on a thorough and comprehensive review of the current science as well as best practices in the industries involved. The report details the important contributions to the environment made by soils, hydrology, vegetation and materials and how sustainable sites benefit people who view and enjoy them. We invite you to read and comment on this report.

The organizations behind this initiative are also looking for volunteers to review the proposed standards.

SCUP Board Meeting, Ann Arbor, November 2-3, 2007

At left, SCUP president Nancy Tierney of the University of Arizona, engaging in discussion with international director-at-large Miguel Cedano Romo of Universidad Technologica de Mexico.

SCUP's Board of Directors meets face to face four times a year. Once is at the annual, international conference and idea marketplace, which in 2008 will be in Montreal. The other three meetings are in Ann Arbor, which is the location of the society's office. This fall meeting is one where, among the primary objectives, the board takes a look at the status of the FY07-08 budget (The fiscal year began October 1.) and reviews the year's environmental scanning efforts in light of the organization's strategic plan, and recommends directors for volunteers and staff that will inform the first look at the FY08-09 budget in April of 2008.

In this image are, left to right, Rich Franz, Professional Development Committee chair (David E Shambach Architect, Inc); Sal Rinella, president-elect (STRATUS, a Division of Heery International); David L. Miller, North Atlantic Regional Council chair (University of Wisconsin System); Jaime Garrido, director-at-large (Pima Community College).

Below, Niraj Dangoria of Stanford University, chair of SCUP's Pacific Regional Council, makes a point about the importance of personal connection in society professional development events.

As part of its regular review of SCUP's strategic plan, at this meeting the board of directors has revised the language of the society's mission to read: "The Society for College and University Planning is a community dedicated to providing its members with the knowledge and resources to establish and achieve institutional planning goals within the context of best practices and emerging trends."

One of the major discussions at this meeting is about how SCUP addresses "internationalization," both as a society which is serving a membership and as one which scans for emerging and important trends in higher education.

This meeting is taking place in the Michigan Room, on the second floor of the Michigan League, a heritage campus building for the University of Michigan which was, at the time of its construction, the answer for women students to the fact that the Michigan Union was only for men. (Interestingly, as I write these words, there are 11 women in this room and 8 men.)