July 13, 2017
Dear Members of the Pittsburgh Campus Community:
I am delighted to announce the launch of a multi-year, $20 million initiative to renovate classroom and learning spaces, which will dramatically enhance the CMU experience for students across campus.
Over the last several years, our faculty community, academic leadership, University Registrar and Faculty Senate have made it clear that improving the conditions of our classrooms, labs and studios is a top priority for them. I share their sense of urgency. Our mission as a university depends on an educational environment that promotes innovative teaching and effective learning.
In response, last year I established a Learning Spaces Committee, a group of faculty and staff co-chaired by Marsha Lovett, director of the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation, and Keith Webster, dean of University Libraries. Their work, shared with and endorsed by the deans, department heads, Faculty Senate, and Board of Trustees, advances the university's strategic plan through a three-part strategy: repair, innovate and sustain.
After assessing nearly 100 centrally managed classrooms, the committee identified several dozen rooms that fall short of the quality standard of a world-class university. Through our $20 million investment, we will overhaul these learning spaces, including heavily used rooms in Baker, Porter, Doherty and Wean halls, Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall, Mellon Institute and the College of Fine Arts. This project also will include the renovation of 10 classrooms in Posner Hall that will become available to the University Registrar beginning in 2018, when the Tepper School of Business moves into the new David A. Tepper Quadrangle. These classrooms in Posner, representing more than 700 seats, will deliver more high-quality learning spaces to benefit the entire campus community.
Utilizing CMU’s research in learning science and technology-enhanced education, our renovations will go beyond essential improvements in lighting, comfort and accessibility to create innovative templates for our campus’s learning environments. Our upgrades will incorporate flexible furnishings to adapt to a wide variety of learning activities and instructional technology that will allow students to engage actively with course content, easily collaborate with their peers and interact with their instructors. Some technology enhancements will allow faculty to gather learning data and analytics in real time.
These ambitious upgrades will immediately revitalize the academic experience for the 13,000 Pittsburgh students served by these facilities, providing spaces where both students and faculty are empowered to do their best work. And to sustain these upgrades over the long term, we also are increasing our annual budget dedicated to classroom renovations and maintenance.
I am excited to report that preliminary work is already underway. In close coordination with the Office of the Provost, University Registrar and academic units across campus, Campus Design and Facility Development (CDFD) is preparing an aggressive schedule to move the project forward without disrupting classes. I invite you to read more about this initiative, which complements other efforts to improve learning and collaborative spaces on our campus, including the recent transformation of the Sorrells Library.
I am grateful to the members of the Learning Spaces Committee for their service, including David Baisley, interim chief information officer; Emily Blaze, CDFD senior space planner; Daragh Byrne, assistant teaching professor of architecture; Thomas Cooley, director of Housing Services; Jennifer McDowell, CDFD principal project manager; John Papinchak, University Registrar; and Raja Sooriamurthi, teaching professor of information systems. I especially want to thank Marsha and Keith for their thoughtful leadership as co-chairs.
Thanks to their work, we are proud to take this step to advance our strategic goal of cultivating an active, technology-enhanced environment in which each individual can grow and thrive.
Warm regards,
Farnam Jahanian
Interim President