The Council of Independent Colleges has launched the CIC Historic Campus Architecture Project (HCAP), a database of searchable information about significant buildings, landscapes, campus plans, and heritage sites of American higher education. The photographs, drawings, and descriptions "form a treasure trove for understanding the places where students have learned and professors have taught," says CIC President Richard Ekman.
The 23 institutions responding to an informal University Business survey about the CIC HCAP indicate that the site is already being put to good use, for: campus planning; promoting a school's presence to prospective students and staff as well as to alumni; sharing campus buildings' histories with the public; and seeing work by particular architectural design firms. Many schools provide a link from their own websites to their pages on the CIC site, www.cic.edu/hcap. -Melissa Ezarik
How will you use the Historic Campus Architecture Project site?
"[The site will reinforce] the case for the sustained development and enhancement of the university. Our strategic goals call for continued restoration and preservation of other important buildings." -Henry N. Tisdale, president, Claflin University (S.C.)
"As we seek to recruit students and faculty from across the country and globally, the ability to use resources like the HCAP website in our materials lends a level of credibility that entices students and faculty to further explore and research opportunities at Northwestern College." -Doug Beukelman, vice president for Financial Affairs, Northwestern College (Iowa)
"My hope is that campus administrators will use this survey as a way of inspiring high-quality architectural design and campus planning at their institutions and that in the current climate we can combine 'green architecture' and 'sustainability' with high-quality architecture, campus planning, and landscape design." -George Gorse, professor Department of Art & Art History, Pomona College (Calif.)
"The new website will give us an opportunity to see how an individual architect modified designs for various campuses or perhaps used a specific design on multiple campuses." -Thomas R. Kepple, president, Juniata College (Pa.)
"My sense is that higher education is in a more serious historic preservation mode, and having such a thorough site of historic campus architecture is essential to chronicling this effort. Such a resource will help all of us in the years to come as we ensure that our campuses evolve but still remain true to our individual pasts." -Jonathan Brand, president, Doane College (Neb.)
The Web of the Future
The University of Arizona's leaders believe that Web 2.0 technologies will be a driving force in the workplace of the future, so they're laying the foundation for teaching those skills to students. The school has partnered with IBM's Academic Initiative program to help students master such things as blogs, online social networking, and podcasting.
The program will help replenish the supply of skilled IT-savvy workers lost to the dot-com bust at the beginning of the decade. Computer science studies declined in the ensuing years, but now, with emergence of new technologies related to the Web 2.0 framework, businesses anticipate a new need to have employees with these skills.
"It's a natural evolution of the web," says Andrea Winkle, UA adjunct instructor and coordinator of early outreach for the MIS department. "They're going to have to learn to involve their customers more in their value chain and it's going to give those who do a competitive advantage."
Students will learn about the role of online communities in business, the common types of community tools and environments, and how to launch, populate, and grow communities. The course consists of traditional lectures, virtual class sessions, and real-world experiences. -Tim Goral
Dollars and Sense
From sales pitches for "v1@gra" to pleas for help transferring funds by the son of a former leader of an African country who was killed by his enemies, our in-boxes are full of spam mail.
But there's one e-mail message that people are reading. It's the "Financial Tip of the Week" from the University of Missouri-Columbia's Office for Financial Success. Written by OFS Director Mark Oleson, the messages are directed to students who have little experience with personal finance. The e-mail offers tips on eliminating debt, opting out of solicitations, negotiating a lower credit-card-rate, and understanding changes to student loan legislation. Oleson started writing the weekly tips six-and-a-half years ago when he was at Iowa State. The project is intended to give students unbiased, personalized information. More students will drop out of college for financial reasons than academic reasons, he notes. "I wanted to inform students about the available financial counseling services. If someone didn't know about it and could have benefited from it, that bothers me," he says.
The "Financial Tip of the Week" e-mail has grown to more than 43,000 subscribers nationwide, and it now has a companion blog (www.financialtip.blogspot.com), launched last August. "We were getting complaints from our 'computer people' about the large size of the e-mails and they asked us to use an outside service to disseminate our tip; thus was the birth of the blog," Oleson says.
Other schools may soon be following Oleson's lead. He says he's had inquiries from Northern Colorado University, the University of Alabama-Birmingham, Columbia College and DePaul University (Ill.) about the program. -T.G.
Engaged in Energy Efforts
When Virginia Tech's Office of Economic Development (OED) and Deans' Task Force on Energy Security and Sustainability organized an October forum for VA Tech energy researchers, organizers expected up to 100 participants. Close to 200 showed up. The amount of research "kind of overwhelmed us," says Chad Miller, an economic development specialist in the OED. Even within the same university, it's tough to know what everyone is up to.
