By Dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand
November 23, 2021
Before we head into Thanksgiving break, I would like share my thoughts following our interactive, inspiring Fall 2021 CAPLA Futures Council gathering last month. I’d also like to set the stage for a conversation on growth for the college—really a continuing conversation that will be anchored by a presentation from Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Laura Hollengreen and Associate Dean for Research Bo Yang at the Spring 2021 Faculty and Staff Retreat on January 10.
First, Some Background
On October 25, Futures Council member Randy Deutsch, associate director for graduate studies and clinical associate professor of architecture at University of Illinois Champaign-Urban, presented “How to Dress for a Perfect Storm: 10 Questions We Ought to Ask Ourselves Now,” followed by breakout sessions and discussion.
The questions were provocative and led to an engaging discussion. Some ideas that were generated in the follow-on discussions are those which we are already working on: engaging data from the analytics team at the university and collaborating with Arizona Online to determine markets for our online offerings, for example. Other ideas were raised which we are beginning to address—including the big question of growth: Should we grow? Why? How? And how do we further build out our identity as a design school situated in the Southwest, on the edge of pressing social and climatic issues that face the world? Finally, there were ideas we have not previously considered, such that by alumna and Futures Council member Kendra Hyson, who suggested we connect to liberal arts programs at historically Black colleges and universities, which do not traditionally offer design programs.
In my summation following the Futures Council discussion, I noted that we must focus on three areas:
- Getting to know you again
- Meeting the students where they are
- Solving problems together
Getting to Know You Again
We know connecting to our CAPLA family during a pandemic has been difficult for new students, new faculty and new staff. While we have provided regular communications and have developed venues for exchange with both the faculty and staff advisory bodies in our drive for shared governance, now is the time to extend invitations for further dialogue with our students, faculty, staff, alumni, community, the professions and employers of our graduates.
But what do we want from this dialogue? I suggest two primary questions:
- What makes CAPLA distinctive and therefore what is our value proposition? Is it, for example, our smaller college dynamic, our culture of caring, our applied rigor, our location in the Southwest, our STEM designation…?
- How do we best serve our constituents?
Insights from these conversations will help inform many things, including the programs for, and messaging to, our prospective students. How are we responding to climate change in and beyond our desert location? Should we be engaging emerging technologies differently? What is our response to the border condition of our state? How do we respect the meanings of the past while planning for the future? What variety of things can a CAPLA student do with a design, environmental studies or planning degree?
Meeting the Students Where They Are
How might we diversify our student population as well as our faculty and staff? We have to be deliberate in how programs are delivered, what the audience for each might be and how we are diversifying our student body through this flexibility. The solutions are not just content-based, but also manifested in the way we deliver courses and programs as well as when and where we deliver. This must be part of the continuing conversation.
Meeting students where they are has led to innovations in our recruitment and hiring processes, but there is more to do:
- Building clearer links to our community colleges.
- Increasing our exposure to high school students in a variety of income ranges and locations throughout the region.
- Constructing deeper and broader pools in our faculty and staff searches. We are being asked to demonstrate the efforts we have taken to expand the pool of candidates which now include reaching out through our networks, advertising in places we have not done before and working through new networks such as Black Matters and the Deans’ Equity and Inclusion Initiative which brings together leaders of many similar colleges at institutions across the country.
- Identifying and addressing barriers to students who wish to study design and the built environment.
- Determining where the gaps are in terms of our curricula and then developing solutions, or perhaps new programs altogether, to fill those gaps, such as the Bachelor of Design. We can also educate those outside our college through exposure to design-oriented Gen Ed courses.
Solving Problems Together
Futures Council member and Shepley Bulfinch President and CEO Angela Watson said in our October sessions that the major skill their firm seeks in graduates is the ability to work effectively in teams. That resonates with me. How can CAPLA be known as a college that graduates students who work effectively in teams—students who know how to listen, to build on each other’s ideas, to seek innovation together? Our students must be able to work effectively with the complex issues of the built environment that demand a multiplicity of perspectives and expertise.
Fortunately, this interdisciplinary, team-oriented approach is underway right now at CAPLA in, for example, our combined Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Landscape Architecture Foundation studios. We are also launching an externship program, in addition to the internships we already encourage, to help students obtain the right mix of academic and practical experience.
We must continue to move this dial: seeking connections once again across capstone projects and across the graduate programs—and out into the community. My hope is the college’s new Graduate Executive Committee will be able to have those kinds of conversations, as will the new director of the Drachman Institute overseeing community projects that will demand multidisciplinary teams.
Thus, by getting to know you again, meeting the students where they are and solving problems together, we will be adaptive and resilient in a changing future.
Why growth?
But let me circle back to a broader question brought up in our Futures Council discussions: Why growth? Not because it drives us to be a bigger college with bigger revenues, but because growth helps us to serve our purpose as a land grant college of design and planning in several ways:
- Through growth, we expand the menu for students interested in design, giving undergraduate students, for example, options as we have done for years with architecture and now do with the expansion of programming to sustainable built environments, landscape architecture, design and more.
- Growth makes it possible to support our graduate students with more opportunities for teaching and research assistantships, especially as the university challenges the notion of graduate tuition waivers.
- Growth brings a rich mix of disciplines and perspectives to the college in how we view complex built environment issues.
- Growth raises our profile and the value proposition of design in the university and the broader community: changes happening here are coming soon to other parts of the country.
- Growth leads to greater research capacity in tackling grand challenges imposing on the natural and built environments.
- And growth inevitably leads to greater diversity and new opportunities for faculty, students and staff, powering creative thinking and problem-solving.
To realize the benefits above, we need a cogent plan for growth that incorporates hiring plans and dedicated resources for new faculty and staff. And, of course, ongoing conversations about growth must align with our values and strategic plan.
Be sure to join us on Monday, January 10 to continue our conversation. Until then, I welcome your feedback below.
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