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."

Cost pools and compensation

We did receive some financial help from Morrill Hall to offset what turned out to be a 16% increase in the central cost pools we needed to pay for space and utilities as well as central services like the library, computers, and university administration. The deans will be having a discussion with Provost and President at an up-coming retreat about cost control as well as new sources of revenue, since I have heard from other deans that their cost pools went up at an even higher rate than ours. I think all of the deans hope that, in future years, there will be a greater alignment between the rate of revenue growth in the colleges and centrally allocated expenses.

We also received funding to cover compensation increases, although not enough to cover all that we need or had hoped for. The University has made available for the third year now, a special compensation pool that the legislature has allocated to reward the most productive faculty. We made a case for many of our faculty, and we received about 40% of our request from the Provost, with a request that the college contribute another 10% from our funds. We will work with the Department Heads on how best to allocate these funds to deserving faculty, and we will be getting allocation letters out to all of our faculty and staff about compensation increases in the next week or two. Thank you for your patience with this process.

Investments

Because of the uncertainty of our central allocations until now, we have not made investment decisions yet, but we plan to move quickly to get some seed money to the faculty and staff who came forward with the most promising proposals. Given the overall budget constraints we face, we do not have as much money as we had hoped earlier in the year to invest in the many good proposals we received, but we have identified enough funding to make a start on what we hope will be an on-going process of the college helping new ideas get off the ground until they can secure other, more permanent support.

Some of these decisions will be made now and some we may hold off until the early spring 08, at which point we will know where our tuition and fee revenue stands for the year. As I mentioned above, we have budgeted our tuition revenue very conservatively, and if we have more tuition income than we had last year, we should have some more funding to reinvest in the college. So for those who hear from us soon, congratulations! And for those who don't, don't be discouraged. In academic budgets, as in life, it's never over until it's over.

Governance and mission

Members of the constitution committee gave reports on their progress at both the faculty retreat and the recent staff meeting. While there are still some things that need working out, they have made much progress, including the decision on the part of the faculty to meet first thing in the fall to determine if they want to have a faculty consultative committee and how they want to proceed with an interim governance structure until the constitution gets ratified. I would welcome whatever input the faculty can provide, as I have welcomed the input of the P&A and Civil Service/Bargaining Unit committees this past year. I also think that a faculty assembly of some sort would be useful on an interim basis to take up the many academic opportunities we have before us, such as freshman admitting for all of our programs, a college-wide Ph.D. degree, and the question of how we can create room in our curricula for the interdisciplinary work that faculty and students have called for.

The faculty retreat at the end of the semester also had a productive and encouraging discussion of the mission of and vision for the college. I was struck by how many of the faculty were aligned in terms of what you value and what you hope to create in the new college. I recently took the notes from the mission/vision discussion and created a "tag crowd" (www.tagcrowd.com) that helps you visualize the frequency with which certain words get used in a text. The tag crowd of our mission/vision discussion was informative and a pleasant surprise.

The largest word (the one most frequently used) was, as you might expect: design. But other words came up almost as large: research, justice, environment, centers, scale, social, systems, thinking. And another set of words came in a close third: cultural, engagement, environmental, forward, global, innovation, interdisciplinary, local, natural, reciprocal, responsibility, understanding. From these and other words, we will craft some possible mission and vision statements for everyone to consider, edit, and combine once the faculty return in the fall. But the above list gives a good sense of what many of us stand for, with a strong sense of design's social and environmental responsibility, at both the local and global scale, based on interdisciplinary and cultural understanding and innovative and forward thinking. Whatever challenges we face in the coming years, such values provide a strong foundation for us all to make a real difference in the world.

Have a good, productive summer everyone. I'll write again in the fall.