Academic Affairs Administrators, April 19, 2011
Academic Affairs Administrators:
Jim Kuhlman, University Librarian; Pat McClellan, Asst. Provost; Patrice Mitchell, Dean of Admissions; Archer Gravely, Dir. Institutional Research; Melissa Himelein, Professor & Director of Center for Teaching & Learning; Gwen Ashburn, Dean of Humanities; Jeff Konz, Dean of Social Science; Ed Katz, Associate Provost and Dean of University Programs (separate consultation, 3/31/11)
Working Group listeners:
Eric Boyce, Director of Public Safety; Gregg Kormanik, faculty; Christine Riley, Chief of Staff
1. Consider aspects of the previous Master Plan that are still valid for us [see website at http://www.unca.edu/about/strategic-plan/campus-master-plan/background-documents].
2. Are we looking to acquire the church property on Edgewood?
3. Do we own the Botanical Garden property? Is there additional potential for that space?
4. We need to identify the land we own and intentionally don’t develop – add signage.
5. Is there a good use for the land between Zeis Hall and the W.T. Weaver Blvd traffic circle?
6. How well used is the North property, and can we reserve it for research? Concern that too much undeveloped land will be considered for development. What’s the right balance?
7. Consider creating a ‘back door’ to the library to connect the AC Reynolds Green to the Quad and the rest of campus. Not as a pass-through, but as a hub, to affirm the Library’s central role in our mission and practice. Consider computer labs [or peripherals], wider variety of food. Compactable shelving in Library [and other places] could save up to 40% of the space.
8. When we renovate Lipinsky Hall, we could connect it to the library with a causeway, further connecting ITS to the Library functionally as well as geographically.
9. Constituents in buildings should relate to one another and to their respective functions. Those departments that have a public purpose and need to be found by visitors should not be hidden in the center of campus in the midst of other functions (Super Saturday, for example).
10. The Quad should be surrounded by academic buildings with primarily academic functions in them. Lipinsky, for example, should be exclusively academic space.
11. In terms of academic space, we need more classrooms and offices. We need more variety of classroom sizes, especially in the larger sizes where we can teach higher enrollment courses. We need to replace HLH, and possibly to have a space sized in-between HLH and LH.
12. We need to renovate the Art building, and expand its space to include facilities for craft studies and practice (discuss options, including the CCCD on our campus).
13. We need to look at where the Admissions office is located on the campus. How do students & families find it, park, and navigate. It is an important function that needs to be accessible. Admissions should be in a sort of welcoming entry point to the university.
14. We should expand our physical space through aggressive purchase of property when possible; e.g., I would try to buy the Momentum property as they have filed for bankruptcy.
15. We should use the currently undeveloped space in the North and South Campus areas. In the north, for example, we could develop a sort of environmental focus with combined sustainable residential and classroom/outdoor learning lab sorts of space, combined with a developed trail system which would take some of the edge off of the negative reaction that developing there will no doubt raise. Development in the North end could all be low lighting, environmentally oriented to minimize impact on our neighbors. In the South Campus, consider combined student-faculty housing with the faculty housing as the buffer between students and the neighborhood.
16. Carmichael Hall—I am concerned about too many different shops in that one building, particularly in the combinations of academic/instructional and administrative units I have heard discussed for that project. I think that we should try to build as much building as we can and that it should be instructional in focus.
17. Perhaps a building on the periphery of campus or a building even off campus devoted to graduate programming, so that we can develop in that direction without diluting the undergraduate liberal arts focus of this campus.
18. We need much more residential capacity.
19. We should have an enhanced downtown presence if possible.
20. We should “in-fill” to create density on campus, with the exception of the quad.
21. I value the landscaping most and hear positive comments from parents and visitors on this feature of the campus. Generally, the architecture does not have a liberal arts feel. I think that the best buildings to look at from the outside are Zeis, Highsmith, and parts of the Health and Wellness Center, particularly the stone. That could be our own liberal arts look—a sort of rustic Asheville/WNC liberal arts feel that we could connect (kind of) to the Black Mountain College idea. We need to preserve the view of Pisgah from the library and create other views of it if possible.
22. I think that students value the “natural feel” of the campus, created by the landscaping (though they may not notice this explicitly). I think that they value the intimacy of the campus, which can be maintained even if we expand, by creating density.
23. Need to create a “Franklin Street” connecting UNC Asheville to downtown to provide a more social experience off-campus for students, faculty and staff.
24. Academic buildings need open gathering spaces for students with tables and comfortable chairs, perhaps even with access to food.
25. If we had an empty campus, where would we put things? This is the perspective we should have when re-thinking which functions/departments/offices go where. What would it look like if our spaces were mobile, wired/tech savvy, with gathering places, good signage, etc.?
26. ECU’s central campus feels smaller than it is because of how it is laid out. Some functions are off campus, allowing others to congregate well.
27. We need better storage/archive solutions. Valuable real estate is taken up with boxes of paper archives.
28. We need to get a comprehensive inventory of all of the spaces we have on campus and identify what it is used for.
29. Campus boundaries need to be clearly marked, and campus entries need to signify more clearly that you are coming onto our campus.
30. Do we need a visual or geographical icon on our campus?
a. The view of Mount Pisgah from the library steps is most often cited as our equivalent of an icon. The library steps could be reconfigured into an outdoor terrace that would be a better gathering space. It could be architecturally ‘tied in’ to more of campus with native stone. Alternatively, it could be reconfigured into an amphitheater that could be used for both gathering spaces and performances.
b. An icon does not need to be a building or an artifact; it could be a design principle or architectural theme [native stone, etc.].