You can read the original article, MIT Borrows for the Long Run, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The following is a new kind of SCUP Summary of the article. Please let us know your thoughts, terry.calhoun@scup.org, about this kind of summary.

betaSCUP Observations

1.	success of the MIT deal-a banker familiar with the transaction said fuel more interest in the use of century bonds by other universities, particularly those that are treating debt, like their endowment investments, as a permanent part of their capital structure and financial-management plans
2.	MIT will pay interest rate of 5.62 percent on the bonds
3.	MIT "century bond" deal could herald similar transactions by other universities
4.	they invest proceeds from taxable bonds than with the proceeds from a tax-exempt bond issue
5.	bonds be repaid not over 30 years, the usual term for capital borrowing by universities, but over 100 years
6.	MIT "century bond" deal would be rare even for blue-chip businesses like the Coca-Cola Company
7.	proceeds finance projects in its MIT 2030 plan, which calls for renovations and for several construction projects, including a new energy and environmental-studies building, a performing-arts center, and a nanotechnology fabrication center
8.	growing number of institutions been looking at taxable bonds
9.	this week plans by issuing taxable bonds
10.	MIT issued 30-year debt

betaSCUP Summary

betaSCUP Key Terms Map

 

Interviews with four SCUP members have been compiled into a Building Design + Construction magazine article offering advice to professionals who work with higher education institutions. 

---

In response to these concerns, we recently spoke with four veteran university architects responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of construction at their institutions: Barbara White Bryson, FAIA, Associate Vice President for Facilities, Engineering & Planning, Rice University; Pamela Palmer Delphenich, FAIA, Director, Campus Planning and Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Maxwell Boone Hellmann, FAIA, Associate Vice Chancellor and Campus Architect, Facilities Design and Construction, University of California, San Diego; and Alexandria Carolyn Roe, AIA, Director of University Planning, University of Connecticut. ...

“Another one of my pet peeves is dealing with architects that don’t know who the [real] client is,” adds Delphenich. “I’m not only the representative of the institution and the budget watchdog, quite often I’m working with end-users who aren’t financially responsible for the outcome.” End-users—faculty members, program directors, department heads, etc.—may want features that the budget can’t support, and if the design firm believes that a certain costly feature favored by the end-user is best, that puts the campus architect in an uncomfortable position. “To play the stakeholder against the client [the institution’s architect] is a real mistake,” says Delphenich. “But I don’t see that as much as I used to. I think our role as campus architects is becoming better known, and I think people realize that they need to work with us.”

Roe (at left) was recently a member of SCUP's Board of Directors and currently services on SCUP's North Atlantic Regional Council.

Delphenich, who also serves on SCUP's North Atlantic Regional council, is currently co-chair of the national Campus Heritage Preservation Symposium scheduled for November 2–3 in Washington, DC.

In College Planning & Management magazine, William S. Harris uses case studies of MIT's Building 10 and Brown University's Lyman Hall to illustrate how "renovations of iconic campus environments can look great and perform well without breaking the bank."

Both institutions had limited budgets and schedules fixed to the summer recess, since neither institution could operate without these facilities in active use during the school year. The task and challenge of each project was therefore to exercise restraint, prioritize a menu of possible improvements ranging from structure and infrastructure to layout and function, and to implement those within the tight budget and schedule. In addition, being iconic and treasured buildings in an academic environment, there was no shortage of input from administration, faculty, and students.

Despite the challenges and differences in programs, sizes, and budges, each project was approached in a way that balanced their myriad competing priorities and resulted in success. This process can be distilled into the following guiding principles.

Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.

---

And don't overlook a closer, more intimate opportunity: SCUP's North Atlantic Region's 25th annual conference, at MIT March 24–26.

---

What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT.

Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’

It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works.

That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed.

Want to learn about some of MIT's leading-edge learning and technology pilots? In Innovate: Journal of Online Education, James Morrison interviews Phillip Long about MIT's "iCampus," a leading-edge collaboration with Microsoft which began in 1999. Long says that the most important results came from uses of technology to facilitate team-oriented active learning projects. MIT is now moving iLabs to a number of locations with a funding consortium to extend its life.

"Okay. That sounds reasonable. People have been putting experiments on the Internet since the Internet came into being; there's nothing novel about that. The problem has been that in the past, they chose idiosyncratic strategies for doing so. It was a cottage industry in that regard; we had not yet thought carefully about how to create an architecture, design, and tools that were easily replicable and sustainable. Every faculty member chose what to do based on what he/she knew—for example, a certain programming language or a particular design approach—and that instructor put something up and it was great; it worked as long as the graduate student who was there when it was built stayed.

MIT went down that same path. We built a bunch of experiments and then put them online using these same idiosyncratic methods. And sure enough after a short period of time, they all started to bit rot in one fashion or another. Each time we put one up, we gained very little in terms of benefit for implementing the next one. We thought, "There's got to be a better way." iCampus gave us the funding to explore that through a project called iLab. Then Hal Abelson, a colleague, made the point that we should be thinking about this from an architectural point of view; that is, we should be thinking about how to use standardized services that all experiments can use to meet common needs."

Read the full article here:
http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=666&action=article