This past year for us will be seen as one of transition and it could well be the last time I stand before you giving the State of the School of Environmental Design.  It is most likely that next year we will be here to celebrate the accomplishments and the great opportunities that the College of Environment and Design brings. But first let’s briefly recap some of our changes and accomplishments. 

Only weeks ago Pauline Nicholls passed away after a long illness. I mention this because she played a significant role in our journey as a school.  As the spouse of our second dean Bob Nicholls she influenced the school’s development in its earliest years.  I am grateful to her for that wonderful work and for her involvement.  She was a special lady with a great sense of humor.  We will miss her.

Deanna Kent retires this year after 24 ½+ years of great service to the School.  She and Tilda Wall were the staff in the 1970’s and both were here as the core of a larger staff when I returned in 1996.  I am told by the graduate alumnae in particular that Deanna is fondly remembered as the source of information and support that helped so many passing through here.  Thank you, Deanna!  

The year 2000 saw the undergraduate program easily win reaccredidation and I thank Scott Weinberg and the self-study report team he put together for their very successful effort.  

In just three years we may have begun a new educational tradition the summer studio thus far led by Leo Alvarez.  In 1998 it executed a plan to convert DW Brooks Drive into a south campus mall and this year architectural plans are being drawn which will implement the plan in the next couple of years.  In 1999 the studio tackled the east campus where it coined the term The Arts Acropolis.  Next year the University will commission the architectural design of the $35 million Art School to finish the acropolis where the music school, art museum and performing arts center stand.  The University’s first new residential structures in thirty years are likely to be started on the east campus as planned by the studio. In 2000 the studio took on the athletic precinct in the areas of Stegmann coliseum where it planned parking and academic buildings.  The same year, after the studio plan was completed Senator Paul Coverdell was memorialized by a planned $40 million research building.  The building, an accompanying parking structure and an athletic academics building will be constructed very shortly and they will all closely follow the studio plan.  

Public Service and Outreach continues a remarkable growth, which provides a great service to the state, a great exposure of our school’s abilities and worth as well as an extremely effective service learning environment for our students.  For every dollar we invested in that program eight dollars were added through grants and contracts from outside sources.  It is our best real world design laboratory.  Pratt Cassity is to be commended maybe even taken out for a glass of wine at the Globe.  Pratt and James Reap have taken public service internationally.  Work in Ghana and Eastern Europe provides us new doorways to the world and in March 2002 ICOMOS (The International Conference of Monuments and Sites of the UN) will hold its international conference at the University of Georgia.  

Elsewhere was an international year for us.  Bill Mann managed our Cortona studios, Allen Stovall along with ecology faculty led a group to Costa Rica and Richard Westmacott took a group to Eastern Europe and Dresden.  Here today is Professor Toby Tourbier with a team of his students from Dresden.  This summer Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson and Pratt Cassity will host a student group in Cape Coast in Ghana.  

These international experiences are wonderful, absolutely necessary to build an appropriate future environmental design perspective and only the beginning of what we must set out to do!  

This year we introduced for the first time an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.  Bruce Ferguson has taken on the day to day management of our school’s teaching mission to free the dean to address longer-range school development, strategic planning and fund raising.  

The State of Georgia supports higher education costs at an unprecedented level.  Our school is one of the very best in the country and the UGA as a whole has risen to join the elite in public research universities.  Among the very best can be improved upon but we cannot hope for added public support.  In fact, in less than prosperous times we can assume that such high levels of public support may drop.  The excellence we seek must be financially supported by other sources of funding.  Sources we can earn both through grants and contracts as well as endowments.  I think that it is particularly appropriate that designing sustainable environments and cities is central to our teaching mission.  Likewise, it is also appropriate that sustainable funding be sought to underwrite school excellence and to assure the continuation of our mission.  We welcome Janet Kane, to our team as our first full-time development director.   We are scrambling to build a culture of giving and support at a time when the University will begin its first capital campaign in many years.  Our present endowment, now at $2.5 million affords the school $125,000 in sustainable annual dollars to support scholarships, travel, assistantships, faculty development, visiting lectures and field trip support.  

In a final point of transition this is the last year of graduation from the quarter system.  Next year our first graduates of the semester system will complete their bachelor’s degrees. 

I only briefly mentioned what we’ve accomplished.  This is not to say that it was an ordinary year. Quite to the contrary, it was extraordinary in as much as the groundwork for what can come was laid out.  I want to address the opportunities and great possibilities, which are on our doorstep now as well as those which, can follow.

There are two parallel, complementary paths I will address.

The first deals with the continued efforts to raise the excellence of the School and its degree programs. The second is the initiative to form The College of Environment and Design.  Our successes in the first instance only assures excellence in the new college initiative.   

We are the largest school of landscape architecture in the country (and perhaps the world). The good news is that it has a diverse and very distinguished faculty, which is a great resource and we accept the challenge of our profession to increase the numbers of practitioners for the future. The bad news is that we are strapped for resources for such a large undertaking and that faculty are maxed out in teaching loads.  Last year’s challenge by our students, which we address now, was the academic homogenization of so many students of different capabilities.  My response was not to perform academic triage on those with lower grades because in passing courses, and committing to five years of effort they have in fact earned the right to graduate.  They will contribute to the profession as well.  Rather, we should be taking the top 20% and challenging them to reach higher levels and in so doing raise the excellence of the school as a whole.  One of our distinguished graduates and an eminent educator Jot Carpenter dreamed of educating a new design leadership for the future.  The University of Georgia through its Foundation Fellows and Honor Program serves as a good model for us. 

Why not build a leadership studio, one that our top students can aspire to, compete for and graduate from a more challenging academic experience, a broader perspective, a more intense set of exposures and  a graduate certificate that represents those accomplishments. 

Already Scott Weinberg and Gregg Coyle have initiated an extended internship of a summer and a semester.  They have reworked course requirements so that those leadership studio students will graduate with their peers.  

A second leadership studio initiative is to develop an off campus academic term for the students.  Ideally it should be a studies abroad experience for the studio as  whole or at least a studio wide design project, which takes places on a distant site for an extended period of time.  

An undergraduate research project might be offered as an alternative to the senior capstone requirement.  

Other special short courses, Maymester events, charrettes and classes with distinguished visiting practitioners would lead to a design leadership certificate, which accompanies the graduation with special recognition.  

Ultimately we recognize that a sustainable funding base needs to be built to underwrite the off-campus parts of this effort in undergraduate excellence without detracting from the strengths of the rest of the program.  I can see a travel scholarship fund directed toward underwriting part of the expense of each leadership studio student’s participation in a summer in Cortona, for example.  

On the subject of studies abroad and, in particular, the Cortona program, efforts are being made to allow SED students to qualify earlier in their time at the school so that all students will have a studies abroad opportunity before the fourth year internship requirement.  We believe that participation in studies abroad along with the required internship will definitely broaden our graduates’ perspectives and abilities and make them much more attractive to employers.  

I believe that both of our graduate programs will be the principal beneficiaries of the creation of the new college.  The environment and opportunities for interdisciplinary work alone will make the initiative worthwhile at the graduate level. The single most effective initiative we can undertake to raise the excellence of the graduate programs whether or not there is a new college, is to double and even triple the number of assistantships available to the students.  In addition, these assistantships should be gradually raised to become equivalent with the financial levels of the university-wide assistantships.  With this scholarship environment we can establish a culture of assertively recruiting the very best and once they arrive and are financially covered, they will enrich the research, service and teaching activities in the whole school.  

There is a great need in this state to document all of its historic resources county by county and to maintain that database for all of the development and heritage related purposes for which this inventory was legislated.  I have always believed that our school was the best hope for the development and maintenance of such a historic resource inventory if it is ever to be accomplished and if we are given the resources to do it. Such an undertaking would have excellent service learning potential in historic preservation as well.  We are now working with a major utility company to structure sustainable funding to underwrite a core effort to do this.  I know that with such a funded beginning along with  a few complete model counties, that additional grants and service contracts will follow.  This initiative will fund assistantships in Historic Preservation.  

Also included in graduate matters is the growth of numbers of practitioners in the region who wish to continue their education at the MLA level.  Many of them are our graduates and many others represent the full gamut of our sister institutions of Landscape Architecture and Architecture.  Business colleges have been providing for executive MBA programs for years why not executive MLA ?  This coming year we will test the market further and design such a concentrated program for design practitioners using traditional as well as emerging distance learning technologies at a site such as the Gwinnett Center which best fits our constituent student needs.  

Synergy in a graduate design program can be gained by developing and implementing closely related and complementary design degrees.  Architecture with a context and sustainable emphasis is one of them.  We are presently in a cost study stage with the University to determine the feasibility for a masters degree program in Architecture similar to size of the MHP  and MLA programs.  Our approach will be to implement this initiative only if it can sustain itself without drawing on the precious resources of existing programs.  

We are a professional school in function but not yet in fact.  During the University’s conversion from quarter terms to semester terms there was a drop in the number of credit  hours taken by  each student which is difficult to explain.  The drop was great enough so that even with the addition of 1600 students in the University, the full time (15 hours) equivalent of students dropped by over 1000.  The state funds the university through a formula tied to the production of credit hours.  Freshman and sophomore credit hours (lower division) pay a lower formula rate than junior, senior or fifth year credit hours. They in turn are worth less in the formula than graduate hours.  Professional school credit hours are by formula worth considerably more than upper division course hours.  Professional schools such as law, pharmacy, and some programs in education and forestry recognize that smaller class sizes such as labs or studios are necessary in preparing students for those professions.  We meet those criteria and many others not mentioned.  I intend to proceed, following a broader faculty discussion, to apply for professional school designation for the SED.  It does not effect the broader Environment and Design College initiative but it will speak to the small studio nature of our education and to the larger numbers of faculty necessary to conduct such courses.  The designation also permits differential tuition and specific admissions criteria.  As previously stated it also generates significantly higher credit hour incomes to the Board of Regents.  I also think that there is a very simple issue here we are a licensed profession and a professionally accredited school why shouldn’t we academically and organizationally go ahead and recognize the professional academic designation?  

An immediate and very concrete improvement for our school and in particular the undergraduate program will be completed this summer.  We have made tremendous strides in expanding  both our computer lab resources and our design studio space in the lower level of Denmark during the past few years.  Yet it has not been enough all of our undergraduates need to be assigned their own studio space.  It is a very significant part of the learning environment here.  THAT LAST PIECE OF THE SPACE AND EQUIPMENT PUZZLE WILL NOW BE PUT IN PLACE. 

The Broad Street studio in the former NAPA Auto Parts building encompasses 11,800 square feet.  Its area is slightly less than all three-studio spaces in Caldwell Hall combined.

We are planning a new 20-unit computer lab in one half of the basement next to a large new classroom/crit space.  On the main floor in an open ceiling/warehouse setting will be a large design studio for the fourth year students.  Restrooms, a break area and a faculty office will be included.  At the front of the building will be our expanded public service and outreach program which already plans to provide space for the Institute of Ecology’s public service and outreach program.  It will also include a studio area for students working on public service projects.  The building will tentatively accommodate personal computers at studio desks with a wireless network.  We are finalizing an end of year adjustment to our budget of over $200,000 to purchase the desks, computer tables, lockers, computers and other furnishings to outfit the new studio.  On alumni weekend April 7th I hope to hold a preview of this space in progress and will welcome all of you.

What makes this project even more exciting is that the Dixon’s Bicycle Building (next door) will house the School of Arts entire program in Interior Design.  The next building to the west (the Futon Store) will house a painting studio.

As a segue to the final topic the new college let me address an exciting and appropriate continuation of the summer studio tradition.  The provost has funded this year’s $28,000 summer studio which will tackle the program and planning issues surrounding building an academic, research and service campus for the proposed College of Environment and Design.  The studio will include faculty and students from both SED and Ecology.  It will go beyond the idea of green buildings to what I would call green geography.  What good is a sustainably designed building if you have to drive your Lincoln Navigator to get to it?  The site to be studied will be the area between Jackson Street and the Oconee River at O’Malley’s.  This triangular area stands to connect the University, the Oconee River greenway and Athens downtown.   

It overlaps roads, parking garages, bicycle ways, public transit and the future commuter rail.  It spans a continuum from riparian greenspace to a vital mixed use urban downtown.  It affords historic restoration, adaptive reuse and infill opportunities.  It provides the space to accommodate an academic village which can grow with the college providing as many outdoor and indoor spaces to encourage meeting, discussing, collaborating and other interdisciplinary undertakings.  It could result in our practicing the very things that we preach that we might live where we go to school and that there might be places to eat, recreate, purchase goods within or at the village’s edge. It could be that the best ecological, environmental, and sociologically designed solutions that we can teach are the very spaces and places we teach in. This might be too large of a charge to put to a single summer studio but we could begin to develop some of these possibilities.  The College should be a model in setting as well as academic concept.  Bill Ramsey will be the SED faculty member for the studio. 

And  now finally to the centerpiece of what our future might be The College of Environment and Design.  All  of you have heard the adage that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.  For the past two years numerous committees have met.   The camel was assembled and more recent committees have cut its humps off.   I believe that we now have got a pretty good looking horse.  My experience both inside and outside of this university tells me that this initiative to combine with the Institute of Ecology and to form an interdisciplinary academy is the very right thing to do and it is timely.  Few if any have yet taken an initiative such as this and there are no models to follow.  Few if any are addressing the comprehensive problems of the natural and built environments encompassing many disciplines.  Few if any are preparing practitioners and scientists to understand and solve the problems we all know to  exist as well as a growing number of problems to come.  I believe that the initiative is so timely and so logical that the College has great potential to be very visible, effective and useful from the day it is begun.  As such, it stands to attract significant support and demand which in turn increases the probability of greater success and utility and so on. 

It does not come without risk.  A great idea poorly executed historically becomes a failure only to the analyzed and derided.  I believe that a greater risk is to fail to seize the opportunity.  The greatest risk is that we fail to comprehensively take on environmental problem solving itself.

To date,  two years of processes have given us an outline proposal showing the college’s core entities being the School of Environmental Design and the Institute of Ecology. The cores are surrounded by an academy within which interdisciplinary relationships are built with faculty from other colleges, schools and even outside institutions to address specific research, teaching or service initiatives.  The academy can expand and contract based on needs and resources and may contain permanent centers established to address known and on-going environmental issues such as community design and preservation or watershed studies particularly in water resource management.

The faculties of Ecology and Environmental Design have voted in favor of proceeding.  The Faculty Senate of the College of Arts and Sciences has likewise voted to recommend approval of the College on behalf of the Institute of Ecology.  Yesterday the proposal advanced to the Curriculum subcommittee of the University Council.  The Council will likely consider it in the spring.  Last week the Council approved the establishment of the completely new School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA)  which involve more complex administrative and resource challenges than what we propose.

The formation of the College in this circumstance can be quite simple.  The Institute of Ecology is administratively moved from the College of Arts and Sciences to the School of Environmental Design.  The new unit then goes to the Board of Regents for approval of the name change and the establishment of the surrounding interdisciplinary academy. Specific Centers of Excellence in the academy later proceed as they are conceived and developed through the normal University and Board of Regents approval processes.  As a result the restructured unit still has the founding date of 1969.

Our faculty vote was close 15-10 in favor with two other yes votes following the deadline.  I have visited with a number of the faculty who remain concerned that implementing the College may jeopardize the independence visibility and quality of our School.  I respect those concerns, and know that they are genuinely based.  I ask that each of you keep these concerns constructively positioned to assure that we do nothing to diminish the excellence that we have.  In fact I strongly believe that if the implementation of the College does not in fact allow us to significantly raise our level of excellence it should be considered failure.

I can clearly see many centers of excellence in the new Academy. 

The water basin initiative that is already well articulated is absolutely on target to take on Georgia’s very recently recognized water resource challenges. 

A Center for Community Design and Preservation long on hold should be a merging of the many related efforts already on this campus.  Addressing city and community design issues as well as historical preservation is an undertaking, which everyone in this room knows is critical to quality of life initiatives in Georgia and everywhere.

A Center for Ecological and Environmental Site Restoration can span the gamut from scientific assessment to restoration design for sites such as local quarries to international industrial brownfields, eroded former rainforest areas and nuclear disaster sites such as Chernobyl.

In partnership with forestry and agriculture why not a center for rural preservation? or with forestry, the development of urban heat island research or the development of comprehensive urban reforestation methods.

A center that address the historical nature of buildings and landscape could apply the strengths of the Historic Preservation programs through the interdisciplinary outlets of the academy.

In conjunction with the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication we can build a Center for Environmental Journalism which can take the complex and interrelated issues of ecology and environmental design to educate the public where information has the greatest impact in an understandable format.

Our strategic plan’s call for a series of degree programs in Environmental Design now make even more sense in partnership with Ecology.  The plan’s vision of a graduate degree in Landscape Studies should be facilitated through the academy’s interdisciplinary connections to anthropology, geography, archeology, and geology and history.

A challenge for all of us will be not to forget the necessities of basic research of the natural sciences and the pure art of design as we focus also on developing, testing and applying knowledge to solve environment problems.  

A challenge is to stay focused on enhancing the excellence and integrity of  ecology and environmental design  that have brought national stature to each of the core units and not  blend them into a singular critical academic mass.             

A challenge is to implement this initiative well so that it earns and attracts the resources it will need  both from within and outside the University that the College will need to thrive.

A challenge will be to build the College so that it can be flexible and change to meet the needs of a rapidly changing greater environment.  Remember that each of the core programs were the work of great visionaries of the 1960’s.

A challenge will be to build the College so that resources are spent on relevant and needed initiatives, excellent research and not cumbersome institutional structure.  Let efforts be created to meet demands and challenges and then let them expire when done or change them when it is time. 

There is so much more that can emerge when we proceed as I expect we will.  It will take time and a considerable amount of effort.  This really merits all of our concerted advocacies and I for one am committed to take this initiative on and see it to our future.