Colleagues,

I want to thank all who contributed to and gave us input on the compact requests that we presented to the Provost near the end of March. The compact meeting went well, with good conversation about our priorities and a very supportive response to our goals. At one point, near the end of the meeting, one of the members of the Provost's office asked, "Is there anything design isn't connected to?" We should all take that as a compliment, for it shows how central our various disciplines have become in the minds of many in Morrill Hall -- a testament to the expansive thinking, interdisciplinary research, and community engagement that characterizes so much of the work that goes on in this college. Thank you!

The Provost asked that we rank our requests in priority order, and I wanted to explain our thinking here. You may recall that we had five major initiative areas: building our infrastructure, establishing a product design program, strengthening our interdisciplinary activities, increasing our international presence, and expanding our sustainability efforts. All of these initiatives have the potential to add value across the college and to propel the college and its units forward in important and groundbreaking ways. As a result, we decided to prioritize something in each of the five areas instead of emphasizing a couple at the expense of others.

After additional conversations about priorities with the department heads and among the deans, we decided to put new faculty hires at the top of the list. As the first priority, we requested funding for a product design faculty member who could be a bridge to clothing design, which desperately needs faculty given its faculty/student ratios. Next, we requested money to hire a faculty member in historic preservation, with expertise in world heritage, to help build the MS degree in world heritage studies as well as to serve the preservation interests of students in our various units. We also prioritized the request to fund a faculty position in sustainability, reinforcing our commitment to strengthen our teaching and research in an area in high demand among students and within the state.

In all of these cases, the faculty hired would help us fill needs in our core programs as well as boost our efforts in areas that can give us a comparative advantage among competing colleges. We also have to make sure, with each of these hires, that we recruit the strongest pool possible. The three searches -- two new positions and one a replacement -- that we conducted this year for faculty in retail merchandising and interior design all ended up without our making an offer to any candidate. I know that disappointed the faculty in these programs and the members of the search committees who spent a lot of time with the search process, but if we are to be among the top three design colleges in a public research university, we need to make sure that everyone we hire will, without question, help us achieve that goal.

Other compact priorities included requesting funds to expand our academic resources to serve the technology needs of our students on both campuses, bridge money to enable departments to hire new faculty as others go on phased retirements, summer salary for faculty to work on interdisciplinary courses, and staff support for our international programs, for our museum and planned materials library, and for our exhibition program. We also listed, further down the list, infrastructure improvements and planning money for future facilities. I don't expect us to get all that we have asked for, but central support for some of the above requests will certainly help us take the college and our various programs to a new level.

Nor is the compact the only way in which we can grow. With the University's new budget model enabling us to keep 100% of our tuition and fees (while also requiring us to pay for our space, utilities, and use of central resources), we have the ability to grow our financial base through strategies, such as making all of our programs freshman admitting or offering University-wide service courses in our increasingly popular fields. Our financial future, in other words, depends upon our creativity and collaboration -- capabilities that we have in ample supply in this college. Now that our first, transition year is almost past, I see the next academic year as one in which we apply our design and analysis skills to ourselves, thinking about how we can achieve the greatest amount with the fewest strategic moves.

Speaking of strategic moves, I took four trips in the last four weeks, each of which revealed something about the future we all face. The first trip, a convening of academics and design practitioners in Los Angeles to discuss the integration of sustainability into higher education, showed how much clients and the professions want colleges like ours to move even more rapidly to "green" our curriculum, something that we will be forced to do anyway with coming changes in accreditation requirements. The second trip, to the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in Philadelphia, led to a meeting of heads and deans to commit to gathering key facts about our schools and colleges to provide prospective students a searchable database of information to balance out the often anecdotal ranking of programs. Minnesota will do well with a more factually based way of comparing schools, and we will learn a lot about the areas in which we need to improve.

The third trip, to a gathering of New York City alumni, demonstrated the extent to which the University and our alumni value what we do. Both Jerry Fischer, president of the University of Minnesota Foundation, and President Bob Bruininks talked about how our college exemplified the new energy and creativity at the University, echoed in comments made by alumni, who mentioned how well our graduates were doing in New York and how important our fields are to the economy of that city. The fourth trip, to an assembly in Prague of deans from North America, South America, and Europe, uncovered the differences among design education on the three continents. The Europeans focused on defining core competencies among their students, the North Americans on integrating computing and new knowledge into the curriculum, and the South Americans on dealing with the overwhelming students demand and inadequate government funding. Certainly among the North American schools, Minnesota stood out for our leadership in integrated practice, sustainability, and human-centered research.

As I think about the lessons of these trips this past month, I sense the sea change going on in the world. We are linked together as never before, in the international flow of information and capital as well as in the global flow of people and the natural environment. And it seems as if everyone, from our professional colleagues and alumni communities to competing schools across several continents, has come to realize that we need more integrated, resourceful, and resilient ways of working together if we are to thrive in the future. As we, here in Minnesota, engage in the ongoing design of what we want this college to become, we need to continue to keep that larger context in mind. I think our compact priorities have put us on the right path by focusing on building our technology infrastructure and on growing our programs in new interdisciplinary, international, and sustainable ways.

Tom

ps. I wanted you to know that the provost, based on the recommendation of the committee who conducted my last review three years ago, has granted me a two-month leave this summer, from mid-June to mid-August, enabling me to finish the manuscript for a book on design and ethics that I need to deliver to my publisher on September 1. I have been a dean now for 11 years, and I am looking forward to a little time away, knowing that the college is in very good hands with of our extremely capable staff and collegiate leadership.