You may not have yet read this Planning for Higher Education article from October 2010, so we've posted it here for you, and added this link to an experimental SCUP beta semantic analysis of the article, by Michael Rudden of DiMella Schaffer. Scroll down past the image to see a few bullets from the analysis.

Enjoy! And please share with campus colleagues. They don't often get to see what's in SCUP's journal. Thanks. 

P.S. Note this related SCUP workshop on July 23, near Washington, DC., Capital Projects in a Campus Environment: Organizing and Running a Successful Project Team.

• A review of ongoing campus facilities planning projects, coupled with a review of more than 30 recent campus master planning requests for proposals and the relevant literature, indicates that colleges and universities are finding innovative ways to do more with less in response to this challenging economic environment.
• By integrating their facilities planning with current strategic, academic, and financial plans-a key tenet of the Society for College and University Planning's publication A Guide to Planning for Change (Norris and Poulton 2008)-these institutions are better positioned to proactively evaluate and respond to economic challenges and turn them into opportunities.
• Integrating education technology planning with academic, financial, and facilities planning enables colleges and universities to explore and evaluate the potential impact of alternative pedagogical and technological approaches to delivering educational content.
• These distressed properties are being acquired by nearby institutions that plan to convert them (in some cases in partnership with developers) into, respectively, a hub for a new research venture, a technology education center, continuing education classrooms, a branch-campus expansion, an administrative office building, and short-term "swing space" with parking during campus renovation.
• These strategies include deferring or downsizing planned construction projects, using existing instructional space more intensively, reducing facilities operating costs by closing facilities, improving campus sustainability, and reducing information technology (IT) expenses.

One of the many good things about the society's annual conference is the opportunity to learn from recipients of SCUP's awards, either in formal professional development sessions or more informal settings.

The SCUP's 2011 Excellence Award recipients have been announced. Congratulations to you all.

We're taking this opportunity to once more bring out information about the 2010 recipients, via SCUP's 2010 Tribute to Excellence newspaper. It is a useful resource that some may overlook, as are the web pages about the recipients. 

By assessing its facilities using APPA's Facilities Management Evaluation Program (FMEP), Philadelphia University earned an award from APPA and gains further recognition via this article in NACUBO's Business Officer magazine. You may be able to view this video about the award. Below, more from the article:

We did this without significant infusion of annual operating dollars. We did, however, strategically focus our capital improvements in a way that also addressed or eliminated maintenance concerns rather than increasing their numbers. We are proud to say we now have a significantly more efficient deployment of manpower, are available to take customer calls around the clock, have made overall improvements to our physical facilities, and have cared for our grounds such that they are an enhancement to the campus.

You could say our plan was a leap of faith, since we did not have the funds to add extra supervision for the increased staffing to cover extended hours, but we moved forward anyway. We felt we had a good staff of responsible workers, and we put in the systems that would allow work to be tracked and assessed. We made customer service a priority, but did so in a way that ultimately allowed more dedicated time for facilities stewardship.

There is no question that winning the APPA Award for Excellence in facilities management in 2009 was in true recognition of all of our hard work and the university's commitment to make significant improvements. One of the best observations was to see how many other departments championed the physical plant department when the Award for Excellence audit team came to campus.

The results prove that once institution leaders know where they stand, where they want to go, and how to put the funding methodology in place to get there, the rest is a matter of communication, campus buy-in, and finally, execution. It was a testament to the willingness of Philadelphia University's administration and physical plant department to assess performance, and ultimately, implement new processes that achieved results and national recognition.

Charles A. Birnbaum says that there is a lack of landscape architecture criticim and media coverage, and, he says, writing in The Huffington Post, that's a problem.

Birnbaum is a keynote speaker at SCUP's national Campus Heritage Symposium next November 2-3 in Washington, DC.

Here's a game I like to play. Try to find decent criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design, particularly regarding public space, in any of the major US dailies. Go ahead... I'll wait why you think about that.

Actually it's no game... it's a problem, especially considering the role that landscape architecture and planning plays in shaping our communities and cities. We have no shortage of architecture critics (who on occasion cover landscape), and there are a fair number of garden writers, but criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design is essentially restricted to publications geared to professionals, and largely absent from major dailies.

So will design coverage in New York and elsewhere transcend traditional buildings as objects (Zaha's latest) or industrial design (sleek toasters and iPhones) and recognize the new possibilities that public landscape offers? The time is now for mainstream print and web to pick up on the signals in this white noise, because the future resides in systems-based design solutions that affect our everyday lives in new and sometimes unconventional ways. If not, design remains marginalized as a commodity and the public is poorly served.

University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection is available, as we publish this, to pre-order on Amazon. It is authored by Jonathan Coulson, Paul Roberts, and Isabelle Taylor and will be available both in print and Kindle.

If you read this book, please share what you think about it, below. Meanwhile, here is its editorial description:

The environment of a university – what we term a campus – has long been the setting for some of history’s most exciting experiments in the design of the built environment. Christopher Wren at Cambridge, Thomas Jefferson at Virginia, Le Corbusier at Harvard, Louis Kahn at Yale and Norman Foster in Berlin: the calibre of practitioners that have worked for universities is astounding.

This book comprehensively documents the worldwide evolution of university design from the Middle Ages to the present day, uncovering the key developments which have shaken the world of campus planning. A series of detailed and highly illustrated case-studies profile universally acclaimed campuses that, through their planning, architecture and landscaping, have succeeded in making positive contributions to the field. Drawing on these examples, the book turns to the strategies behind campus planning in today’s climate.

Exploring the importance of themes such as landscape, architecture, place-making and sustainability within university development, the book consolidates the lessons learnt from the rich tradition of campus development to provide a ‘good practice guide’ for anyone concerned with planning environments for higher education.