November 14, 1996
Dear Diana,
Thank you for your kind note. It was a pleasure to get to know you better, and the committee and I were honored that you gave such a beautiful dinner party for us.
I know we sounded like a chorus of Cassandras when we met with you at the end of the following day's work, but the truth of the matter is that the beauty of Wellesley's campus design is slowly being compromised. The recommendations of the College's consulting landscape architect have been deferred many times, and there is no comprehensive long-range management and restoration plan to guide personnel policy and capital and maintenance expenditure on the landscape.
Wellesley has performed remarkably during the recent tumultuous years in college education, maintaining the very highest academic standards and an enviable reputation. It has managed to modernize its physical plant--its buildings--to keep pace with changing technology and certain fundamental needs of its faculty and students. It has not, however, done a good job of maintaining and improving its picturesque rural campus, one of our greatest assets and a strong marketing advantage. The College is in fact living off of its splendid landscape inheritance, but the estate (our campus) which we pass on to our heirs (future generations of Wellesley students, alumnae, professors and town residents) is being spent down and not replenished.
We think that you and the Trustees have an opportunity to gain broad popular support from these several constituencies for a major initiative to restore the campus landscape and put in place a management system that will ensure that it doesn't decline again. We think that, with your leadership, financial support can be developed for this initiative. Ask any alumna. The name "Wellesley" may evoke a collection of friends, a favorite professor, the choice of a major that became a lifetime field of interest, or the first rung on the ladder of a career, but above all else, it will evoke memories of a particularly beautiful place. Alumnae share that memory and treasure it. They realize, too, that Wellesley's institutional excellence is integrally linked to its special beauty. Alumnae will rally with enthusiasm to support a plan to restore and maintain the landscape as a necessary component of Wellesley's educational mission.
Let's look as the visiting committee did at what is wrong now. The pines and colorful maples of a New England fall reflected in the placid mirror of Lake Waban and the College's collection of distinguished historic and new buildings still make Wellesley an unusually impressive campus. But the lack of systematic tree pruning and clearing of overgrown understory vegetation, an inadequate budget for the necessary annual maintenance and replanting of shrubs and groundcover, the loss of meadows by planting trees willy-nilly in the wrong places, the multiplication of dirt trails ("desire lines"), soil compaction and erosion, eyesores like the access road near Bates and Freeman to the cellular phone towers (themselves encroachments upon the campus grounds) and the Davis Museum and Cultural Center parking lot (avoidable through site planning within the context of a comprehensive landscape plan), the forlorn and seedy appearance of the residential quadrangles, the entitlement of automobiles to a great deal of roadside parking space and the gradual eating away of former green space by parking lots--all these campus "woes and wounds" filled us with dismay. Together these examples were ample evidence that Wellesley lacks a comprehensive blueprint to guide its land use, maintenance and budget for the campus grounds.
The attached report makes the case for administering a process in which a landscape architectural firm and team of related professionals are commissioned to undertake a management and restoration plan--something that is both more visionary and systems oriented than Wellesley's current master plan, and which involves the participation of College personnel in both its planning and design agenda and the development of necessary maintenance routines. The investment of an estimated $250,000 in such a plan will produce some badly needed data and survey information that will enable the administration to make more informed decisions and day-to-day managers to do their jobs better. It will also produce a set of recommendations and attendant budgets that ensure that everything from the most obvious remedial work to the planning and siting of future campus buildings occurs within a rational framework that respects the integrity of the campus' design and the visual dialogue between works of architecture and the surrounding landscape. Further, it will go beyond the present "needs list" to embody its recommendations as a series of plans and perspective drawings. This will give both a visual concept for the renewed campus as a whole and a series of schematic designs for individual projects within that overall plan, allowing you and the Trustees to make informed decisions and solicit donor support more effectively.
You have an opportunity now with the retirement of Tony Oteri to rethink the position of Assistant Director. As you will see in our report, the committee and I feel that the current managerial structure is lean, to say the least, and does not afford an adequate voice for the landscape needs of the campus. Some institutions have a Director of Facilities with both an Assistant Director of Physical Planning and Assistant Director (Manager) of Plant and Services. The physical planning role ensures a voice for land use and the landscape. It also ensures the active participation with the administration of a person capable of assessing the physical consequences of all decision making and long range planning, someone who has a comprehensive perspective upon the campus as a whole and can relate the goal of its health and beauty to the several goals contained within a strategic plan for the future of the College. Given Wellesley's current organization, and the circumstance where the Assistant Director for Grounds reports to an extraordinarily talented Assistant Vice President with an avid interest in engineering and building systems, you may be short-changing the campus' landscape maintenance needs. We submit that the structure and attendant job descriptions should reflect the sense that the grounds are integral to the buildings, not residual.
If you decide to move forward with the development of a management and restoration plan, you will need someone within the administration who can supervise a team of professionals and put in place a management structure that can maintain the improved campus landscape. That person will necessarily become the spokesperson for the vision of a restored campus and should therefore have the capability to communicate effectively. Listening to students, faculty and administration and taking several differing views into account is an important part of the communication process. We believe that whoever is in charge should have a mandate from the President and Trustees to create and implement the management and restoration plan, to hire and supervise consultants and contractors, as well as provide administrative oversight for campus maintenance.
Whether or not you feel that the creation of an additional administrative position is feasible at this time, we recommend that at the very least you rename the Physical Plant Department the Buildings and Grounds Department, reflecting the Trustee committee of the same name and the "portfolio" of the department. The position now occupied by Mr. Oteri should be renamed Assistant Director for Campus (Grounds) Planning and Maintenance.
We have outlined summary job descriptions for that position as well as for a proposed new position of an Assistant Vice President for Campus (Grounds) Planning and Operations. We are coupling the idea for a new administrative structure with a passionate plea for additional funding for maintenance, a suggestion that volunteers, while no substitute for a well-trained full-time workforce, could become a helpful resource for campus maintenance in the future.
The visiting committee felt strongly that all capital solicitations for new buildings or internally funded renovation of existing buildings must be accompanied by requests for landscaping a significant "spatial envelope" around them and that specific landscape maintenance endowments, as well as an overall landscape endowment fund, should be sought. Endowment for landscape maintenance should be applied on top of a base-line maintenance budget, not used as budget relief. An adequate budget for campus maintenance will allow you to get the college back to a system in which individual gardeners are given responsibility for discrete sections of the campus. The proposed management and restoration plan should help Wellesley make the case for going outside the ranks of the union to recruit campus maintenance workers with horticultural expertise; kitchen staff are not necessarily qualified for the job unless they show special aptitude and receive additional training.
Our report goes on to provide an agenda for a management and restoration plan. As you can see, there is a base of data which needs to be gathered and mapped in order for you to begin thinking about the campus in an integrated fashion. The "needs list" of the present master plan is an excellent one, but you are still missing the critical inventories and analyses that will help you undertake a long-range campus restoration program, prioritize projects within a comprehensive framework and address new needs as they may arise (buildings, additions to buildings, parking, etc.). You are further missing an assessment of maintenance needs and the detailing of exactly what is required to keep each section of the campus in good condition.
None of this should dissuade you from taking action now. To begin some of the obvious tasks even as a management and restoration planing process gets underway will only convince everyone of the seriousness of your presidential initiative. Having a strong vision that embodies a clear set of restoration goals and a plan for implementation over, say, a ten to twenty-year period will, we believe, elicit strong support for rebuilding the Wellesley campus. Most important, the process of developing the plan, which should be conducted in the context of a dialogue with the Wellesley community, will build understanding for the campus as a work of landscape art as well as an educational and recreational resource.
That understanding will foster a new ethic of stewardship for the campus on the part of the Wellesley community, past and present. This ethic will strengthen one of Wellesley's most important legacies--its physical magnificence and the lasting memories of generations of women who learned in its midst and from it. If the plan is really followed and given the force of policy, such things as additions to existing buildings, new construction, solutions to parking problems, planting programs and the siting of outdoor sculpture will no longer occur in a piecemeal, ad hoc fashion, but as part of an overarching vision of Wellesley as community, an institution in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
What the College does now will make a difference to all alumnae and to generations of students yet to come. It is a real joy for all of us to assist you as you ponder ways in which Wellesley can maintain a tradition of unmatched academic excellence on the most beautiful campus in America.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers