DEANS Q&A
Kent Kleinman
Dean Kent Kleinman with, from left, Mauricio Vieto, B.Arch. '13, Joshua Rolon '13, and Julie Casablanca, MRP '14, on the Ho Family Bridge in Milstein Hall.
What are you most proud of in your first term as dean?
I was thinking I'd say the obvious – the facilities – but that's actually not the case. It's really the people. I came in 2008, which was a particularly tough time for higher education due to the economic downturn. When I reflect back, what I'm most proud of is that we were able to continue to attract an exceptional student body and recruit a steady stream of new faculty. I'm an architect, and one might think that it would be easy for me to say buildings matter over everything else, but in the end, our past and future greatness rests on the quality of the faculty. If we have fantastic facilities and don't have fantastic faculty, we will not be a top-tier program.
What's the biggest obstacle to success for your college right now?
It's funds – funds to continue to bring in the best faculty and continue to allow the best students to come to Cornell. At the undergraduate level, there's a profound and noble principle at Cornell regarding financial aid, and anything we can do to continue our need-blind admissions and need-based aid programs is essential. But equally important is support for graduate students. Our disciplines – particularly architecture but also art and planning – are often misunderstood as professional disciplines only, but they really have many components of a liberal arts education and, quite frankly, compensation after graduation commensurate with other graduate research programs.
Kleinman with architect Richard Meier '56, B.Arch. '57, in 2012 during Meier's visit to campus. See larger image
Our graduates are frequently cultural critics. They are engaged in the public realm, they're advocates for social equity and often serve as public intellectuals. Our curricula have many courses that are not merely professional in nature. Our graduate professional students need financial support to be able to pursue diverse career paths after they graduate, because they're not going to Wall Street. They're going to work for communities, they're going to work for international government agencies. They're becoming artists, they're working for small architecture firms doing speculative competitions. They need to be able to afford the education we provide without the promise of high salaries after they graduate.
Has Milstein Hall, now approaching two years old, fulfilled all that it promised to be?
What I would say to Ezra readers is they have to come back to campus and experience Milstein Hall, because anything I say is inadequate – it's spatial and material and it has to be experienced firsthand.
From my perspective, and I think I speak for most of the faculty and staff and probably all of the students as well, it's fantastic. It's brought us together in ways that we were not able to imagine before. It's not just a building, it's not just an addition – it's a uniting fabric. In terms of the future way that the disciplines of architecture, art and planning will need to work collaboratively, having a building that unites, especially a structure that encourages ad hoc interactions, is priceless. I say priceless deliberately because it wasn't the cheapest building! But it has been transformative for us.
Do you think planning and art at Cornell have the opportunity to achieve the status and visibility that AAP's architecture programs have?
Yes – because the world is urbanizing. More people are living in cities than ever before, cities are bigger than they ever were, and they're more complex than previously. The importance of the urban is undeniable. It affects every walk of life; it's changing cultural patterns, changing living habits, changing aesthetic practices, changing our sense of identity. Planning is the disciplinary glue for conceptualizing the city. We have a distinguished planning faculty, very strong students, and the department already enjoys international visibility. It's a very highly ranked [No. 2] graduate program, and I predict it's going to become even more important as an area of research and study as the city dominates our attention. How does one manage and provide for a high quality of life in cities of over 20 million people? That is an almost intractable question but a very real and urgent issue. Planning departments will inevitably be at the center of that conversation.
On the art side, this is somewhat bold, but I think the next big jewel in the Cornell crown has to be the arts. Across the university, we have many individual students and artists doing scholarship in the arts – and by this I mean advancing our understanding of the human condition via material, visual, formal creative practices. People in fiber science, in landscape architecture, of course in the fine arts at AAP: somehow their individual activity hasn't coalesced into a strong identity for Cornell arts. I think it can and should. The model of an artist going to an atelier [studio] and waiting for inspiration and making a mark on a canvas – that is a completely antiquated model, if it ever really existed.
Artists today are publicly engaged, theoretically reflective, intellectually informed, creatively innovative. Art making is a form of inquiry just like other academic modes of producing new knowledge and insight. What better place to educate talent like that than a top research university?
You mentioned the campus being like a work of art. Do you have a favorite spot on campus, inside or out?
Many people focus on the buildings, and there are certainly beautiful physical structures at Cornell, both historical and contemporary works of architecture. But really what's quite extraordinary are the spaces where there are no structures – the gaps between buildings, the quads, the vistas. So I would say that one of my favorite aspects of the campus is how intelligently the negative space, or open space, has been configured. It has a palpable presence, almost as if it were made of material. The balance between the physical structures and the residual space is a very deliberate one. I think that's what makes the campus such a delight.
The DeanKent Kleinman, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning At Cornell since 2008 Dean since September 2008 Area of expertise: 20th-century modernism College of Architecture, Art and PlanningPopulation: 56 professors, 493 undergraduates, 278 graduate students Major areas of future growth: New York City program, B.F.A. dual-degree program, urban design concentration Endowment: $62.1 million (as of March 2013) Cornell Now campaign goal/amount raised so far: $30 million / $13.6 million (as of April 2013) |
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