Perry Mason and Steve Kelly

Various reports of the Dean for Budget and Planning detail activities carried out in response to each of the recommendations in this area. Rather than repeating those details here, we will provide merely a list of those recommendations followed in each case by our present recommendation in that regard, as well as a small handful of additional recommendations and suggestions about the College’s physical environment.

I. Status of the 1998 recommendations:

[Note: The recommendations from the 1998 report are in bold italics, with the committee’s 2003 recommendations immediately following in normal font.]

General recommendations concerning the physical environment:

Planning, including broad participation and communication

Continue the excellent progress made in this regard.

Accessibility

Continue a plan to make all campus buildings handicap accessible on as

aggressive a timetable as finances will allow.

Campus grounds

Continue efforts to enhance the pedestrian character of the campus proper, to provide adequate parking capacity as unobtrusively as possible, and to integrate the various elements of the campus, including the relationship of the main campus to the Arboretum.

Relationship of the Arboretum to the rest of the campus

Carry through plans to integrate the Arboretum with the main campus.

Develop a long-range maintenance plan and integrate that plan into the [specific] facilities recommendations

Continue to develop and to follow an ambitious long-range plan of capital renewal of all facilities.

Begin the process soon of planning to determine the fate of several as yet unrenovated older buildings (preeminently, Laird Hall, Old Music Hall, and Willis Hall). Renovation? If so, for which uses? Replacement? If so, by what?

Specific recommendations:

Develop a Center for the Arts

Continue along lines that developed after 1998, in which plans for a single integrated complex for the arts were dropped, in favor of the following plans:

· to construct an Art Museum,

· to raze the current Music and Drama Center and replace it with a complex jointly for Music and Theater & Dance,

· to provide space for Media Studies in coordination with appropriate academic departments.

Expand the capacity of the library

Carry through plans to expand the capacity of the library, including an addition to the building.

Ensure a sufficient number of high-quality classrooms

Continue to monitor the stock of classrooms and to provide rooms that support the varied pedagogies used in the College.

Develop a Center for Modern Languages

Completed.

Construct additional on-campus student housing

Construct an additional 50 units of on-campus student housing, in the form of a 10-12 unit experimental "Eco House" and three additional, conventional townhouses.

Consolidate several offices into a single Student Administrative Services Center

Forget this cockamamie idea.

Develop and improve space for departments in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary programs

Offices, classrooms, and common areas have been enlarged and improved for departments in the humanities, and adequate facilities must be a factor in upcoming reviews of interdisciplinary programs. Some over-crowding in Willis Hall for the social sciences will be alleviated by the move of Sociology-Anthropology to Leighton in 2004, but attention still needs to be paid to classrooms designed specifically for pedagogies employed in the social sciences remaining in Willis.

Review needs of interdisciplinary programs as those programs are themselves under review, and provide adequate facilities as needed on programmatic grounds.

Renovate Burtonkitchen, serving, and dining areas

Continue plans for renovation.

Renovate Scoville

Continue plans for renovation.

Renovate Goodsell, perhaps as a Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

Continue plans for renovation.

II. New recommendations that surfaced in our 2003 discussions but have not yet had extensive discussion:

Complete the initial phase of restoration work in the Arboretum and establish a plan for maintaining the restored areas, one that includes the integration of the restored landscape of the Arboretum with the landscape of the main campus.

Define and, as needed, secure the boundaries of the College, with special attention to the eastern boundary of the Arboretum (including the northeast corner and provisions for any additional bridges over the Cannon) and to the relationship of the campus proper to the residential and downtown commercial areas to the south and along the Cannon River upstream of the Arboretum.

III. New ideas that have surfaced:

(These ideas have had only minimal discussion by this committee and are included here merely as information about what various persons on the campus are thinking about in this area, not as our recommendations.)

Make the College a "greener" operation, by:

• developing a system of wind-powered electrical generation, as feasible,
• constructing an experimental, sustainable living student residence,

• making sustainability a factor in all construction and renovation plans.

Replace Sayles Hill with a new campus center or at least improve Sayles Hill.

Provide a new, purpose-built facility to house all the social sciences together, with classrooms designed for pedagogies used in that area.

Enlarge Boliou so as to include facilities for Media Studies integrated with those for Art and Art History.

Establish a program of landscape renewal for the main campus, including the addition of appropriate memorials and other “special places”.