Dear Colleagues,

Now that we have the first two weeks of the term past us, I wanted to update you on the next steps in forming our new college. With a lot of advice and input from the deans and department heads, I have spelled out in the following sections how we might begin establishing effective communications, shaping our mission and academic agenda, putting in place a system of governance, becoming fully operational, and developing a collegiate culture. As you read this, think of the coming year as the second of a multi-year transition. Last academic year, we had the task force interviews in the fall and the final report submitted in February, with the University's determination of our staffing levels and organizational structure in the spring, and with the hiring of collegiate staff in the spring, summer, and on into this fall. Much has already occurred, but we still have a ways to go. As Kate Solomonson, our Associate Dean for Academic Affairs put it, "we have the structure of a new college, but not yet a college." For that, we will need all of your ideas, input, and effort to give the college life and to help make it one of the best of its kind in a public university anywhere in the country.

I have heard from a few returning faculty members that they feel disconnected from and somewhat marginalized by what has gone on in the college over the summer. That is a completely normal response to the massive amount of change that has occurred during a brief period of time. We will be doing a lot of communicating and community building during this transition year, and I want to encourage you to give us your feedback and to participate in collegiate events as much as possible. But let there be no doubt that the faculty are the core of this college, essential to its very being, and now is the time for all of us to step forward in designing this new college. Like any design process, this will take time, go through much iteration, and require a lot of conversation and input from all sides, but it is important that we see this moment as the beginning of a process in which everyone has a part to play.

Communications

I want to thank all who attended the college retreat at the end of August; we had a great turnout, and your ideas for moving the college forward filled 14 pages of typewritten notes. We have transcribed your suggestions, have organized them a bit, and will be posting them on a wiki, accessible from our Web site, to allow those who were at the retreat to edit or elaborate on comments, and those who were not, to add thoughts of your own. The site tracks publicly everyone who adds comments, so be aware of that. We will keep this up for some time, and will eventually "freeze it," so that we can begin to summarize and use the material to help guide us on next steps.

By the end of September, we will have on the Web site a directory of all faculty -- fulltime and adjunct -- with contact information to ease our ability to connect. We will also have a list of all the staff, with contact information and a description of what each person does, so that we all know who to go to when we have a question or need. Since we are not fully staffed and since there will inevitably be things we haven't thought of, I've asked our chief of staff, Kathy Witherow (kwithero@umn.edu) to be the go-to person if you have a staff-related question so that you are not bounced around from one person to another in search of an answer. Kathy will find out who is best suited to help you and make sure you get the support and service you need. We will also develop and post on the Web a list of frequently asked questions and their answers, to save you time in navigating the new college.

Governance

While our constitution and by-laws will eventually determine the college's committee structure, we need some transition committees to get essential work done until our governance documents are in place. I showed a preliminary committee list at the retreat, and we have refined it with input from faculty as well as the deans and department heads, and will send it out, with proposed committee charges, for your comment next week. Taking a recent suggestion from professor Leon Satkowski, we thought it made sense to have the members of the committees most closely tied to the academic mission of the college elected rather than appointed, enabling the widest amount of participation and input. So, have a look at what we send out and give us your thoughts. Some of the committee work needs to get done this fall, so I'd like to have committee members elected or appointed by the end of September or early October at the latest.

To help in the writing of our governance documents, Kathy Witherow, with input again from the deans and department heads, has gathered together material drawn from the constitutions and by-laws of both the former colleges of Human Ecology and Architecture and Landscape Architecture, along with elements that the University requires in every collegiate constitution. This work can serve as a starting point for the framers of our constitution, who will need to have a draft ready for our review in February, for our discussion in March and for our review of revisions in April, with the goal of having ratified documents by early May. If the group working on these documents wants to have a "constitutional convention," to widen the discussion, that is certainly fine, although we also need to keep in mind the University's expectation that we have our governance procedures in place by the end of this academic year.

There are other timeframes that will also drive the work of some committees. For example, the University has asked for a description of our collegiate promotion and tenure review process soon, so the committee working on that will need a proposal this fall for review and approval by the faculty. Likewise, we will need proposals for spring lectures and exhibitions by late fall and recommendations for internal and external honors and awards in early spring for review and approval in time for commencement. We have a college convocation scheduled for October 31, to which the provost will come to give us his views about our new college and how it relates to the larger strategic positioning of the University. That date also gives us a goal of moving the work of the college forward to the point where I hope committees can give us updates or ask for input about what they have done so far.

Budget and staff

The college budget is another work in progress. We plan to summarize and explain the budget at the October convocation, and answer any questions you might have. If you send questions in advance to our Director of Budget and Finance, Rose Blixt (rblixt@umn.edu), that will allow us to answer them more completely. Until then, let me mention a couple of things about the budget. Since we did not know what our revenues would be this coming year with any real precision, I decided to allot each department the budget it had last year, with a 3% inflation increase and a 3% discretionary fund for the heads. I have also held back some money in order to have an investment pool, the allocation of which will happen this fall, based on discussions we've had about priorities with every unit in the college. At the same time, we have protected recurring compact dollars specified for particular initiatives, such as the funding for the Design Institute, the World Heritage Studies Center, MS degree development, and graduate student recruitment in architecture and landscape architecture. We will also continue, for the former CALA regular faculty, and commence, for DHA regular faculty, the granting of $2,000 annually for professional development.

Let me also address another budget-related matter. Some faculty members have expressed to me their surprise at the size of the college staff, so first, let me say that appearances can be deceiving. Even though our college has roughly the same number of students as the former College of Human Ecology, we have a smaller staff than CHE, and though we are more than twice the size of the former College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, we have less than twice the number of staff. Second keep in mind the diversity of roles our staff play. Of the 92 total staff members, 21 are research fellows, 30 are operations staff, 9 are in academic resources, 17 are in student services, and 11 are in the departments. Finally, remember that the University determined the size staff they thought we needed and has funded us accordingly. Were we, for some reason, to think that we can do with less staff, funding for those positions would return to Central coffers and would not remain in the college to be spent in other ways. I am committed to building our faculty, but that is a separate issue from the size of our staff.

As you will discover, we have a terrific staff, among the very best at the University. But I also need to ask for everyone's patience, since we are not yet fully staffed in areas such as technology, finance, development, grants management, and continuing education. We have many jobs still posted and we plan to move forward as fast as possible with hires. At the same time, we have new staff members in almost every area of the college, all of who have had to learn or invent a lot at lightning speed. So, while there have been some glitches in starting the new college, this is a temporary situation, a bit like moving into a new building before all of the equipment has arrived and the systems have become fully functional. We will have the staff we need very soon, providing a much greater range of services than some of us have ever had before.

Transition

The most important thing for us all to keep in mind as we go through this transition is that meaningful change never comes without major challenges. Probably everyone in this college, including myself, has wished at some point that we didn't have to go through this change, and that the familiar colleges and roles we had even just a few months ago were still there. But I am convinced that after we have gotten to the other side of this transition, we will find that what we have created together is amazing, allowing us to do far more than what we ever could have before. I also think that our new college positions us perfectly for the demands that our students and we will face in the coming decades. As I said at the retreat, and before the regents last week, we start this design college at the very moment when the world has begun to value design highly and to see in it a means to address some of the most pressing of our time.

And you should know, by the way, how much the University supports that vision of our college. After I made a presentation about the college at the September Board of Regents' meeting, using a version of the PowerPoint you saw at the retreat, I was pleasantly surprised at the enthusiastic response from the regents and the provost. According to the provost's office, they thought it was the "high point" of the meeting, which has nothing to do with my presentation skills and everything to do with the potential of this new college to be a major player in this University and in the larger professional and public communities we serve. We have a lot of internal work still to do, and there will be, as in any design process, re-examination and revision as we go along. But we must keep our eye on the larger opportunities that lay out in front of us: a world that desperately needs our disciplinary skills in a period of great transformation. Seeing the potential of what doesn't yet exist is what designers do, and we need everyone's creativity in this regard, both in terms of creating this new college and our in making a real difference in the lives of our students and in the larger world.