Welcome to the UMass Amherst Campus Planning Blog. We are pleased to announce the commencement of our first Campus Master Planning process in nearly 20 years and by far the most comprehensive process in the history of our great institution. It is the most comprehensive Master Planning effort because we intend to involve the greatest number of people in our Campus Community through an inclusive, transparent and open process that will include many targeted stakeholder meetings, open forums, interactive internet applications, facebook and this blog. We hope you will take the opportunity to join us on this journey into the future by sharing with us your ideas for making UMass Amherst the best it can be.
So why do a Campus Master Plan you ask? The Chancellor has provided us with a Vision, Mission, and Goals for our strategic academic planning in his Framework for Excellence available at http://www.umass.edu/chancellor/frameworks.html. But we need a plan to translate that vision into physical features on the ground for the following reasons:
- To ensure the look, feel and function of our campus is reciprocal with our academic mission. The spaces and places that we create on campus must not only foster the love of learning and pursuit of knowledge, but it must also attract the best and brightest students, faculty and staff.
- So our short term decisions are part of a long term vision for the campus. Each day there are many small and large decisions made by hundreds of people across the campus that have an impact on our future. We want to ensure that each dollar spent on the physical plant moves the ball forward in support of the University’s mission.
- To create a shared and supported framework which will inform our planning decisions campus wide. Through a highly participatory process we want to create a culture of planning on campus and get buy in and support for a plan that lives on through the changing of people on campus.
- To create a document which can help us meet our goals, raise our aspirations, and help raise funds. Creating a visionary planning document gives us a powerful tool to do many things, not least important of which is the ability to more effectively raise money. For example, once the University of North Carolina, Charlotte had developed a Master Plan, they used it to pass a statewide referendum bond bill that gave them over $3 billion to create that vision on their campus.
So, please give us your help and support in this process by getting involved. Send us your comments and ideas via this blog, or log onto one of our interactive online tools and tell us what you like and don’t like about the campus, or find out when our next open forum will be by checking the “contact us” section of our website.