Goals
The College of Art & Design’s goals and strategic plan emerge from the four target areas of LSU’s Flagship 2020 agenda:
Discovery: Pushing our limits to generate and instill professional knowledge in the fields of art, architecture, interior design, and landscape architecture through transformative research and creative activities that address contemporary and enduring issues.
Learning: Finding a context for the future to enhance a faculty-led and student-centered learning environment that develops engaged citizens and enlightened leaders.
Diversity: Strengthening the intellectual environment by broadening the cultural diversity of the College of Art & Design to promote understanding others.
Engagement: Promoting engagement of faculty, staff, and students in reaching out to transform communities.
Objectives
The College of Art & Design will meet its goals through the following areas of concentration, representative of the college’s vision of design education and its role in the design fields:
1. Student Recruitment
- Recruit students representing diverse origins and cultural experiences
- Establish connections with regional “feeder” programs at both college and high school levels
- Create new scholarship opportunities to address targeted student populations
2. Student Experiences
- Participate in the development of an on-campus visual and performing arts residential college
- Provide off-campus cultural and geographic learning and travel experiences
- Offer enrichment through lecturers, seminars, workshops, and engagement with professional leaders
- Offer opportunities for interdisciplinary learning experiences
- Increase existing scholarship opportunities for deserving students
3. Faculty
- Recruit faculty with a diversity of background, educational training, divergent skill sets, and world perspective
- Retain faculty through external and internal support of individual creative and research agendas
- Provide opportunities for faculty exploration of individual areas of research, pedagogy, and creative activity leading to exhibitions, publications, and dissemination of research products
- Encourage cross-disciplinary pedagogy involving the college, the university, and the professional world
- Increase faculty lines to correspond with increases in student populations and expansion in academic curricula
- Increase endowed professorships to attract and retain faculty talent
4. Curriculum
- Maintain accreditation through established professional standards
- Elevate the interior design program from the status of a department to the status of a school and add a graduate curriculum
- Develop certificate programs in areas such as historic and cultural preservation, museum studies and arts administration, health-care design, and art therapy
- Promote interdisciplinary learning among programs and across the university spectrum
- Establish and maintain relationships with related design professions in order to respond academically to changes in the marketplace of design practice
- Revise curricula as necessary to respond to evolution in each design discipline
5. Facilities
- Update facilities to provide modern, efficient venues for academic activities and explorations
- Add new spaces for cross-disciplinary training among students
- Expand and improve studio spaces to reflect increases in enrollment and proposed changes in design pedagogy
6. Technology
- Maintain creative edge in academic settings through access to contemporary technology used in design offices and studios
- Create and encourage faculty and student research opportunities that respond to identified design issues and facilitate technological innovations for the design professions
7. Alumni Involvement and Pro Bono Community Engagement
- Identify and maintain lists of college supporters and community leaders in order to expose students to professional situations, projects, and work opportunities
- Facilitate internships in professional situations as part of design curricula
- Create relationships that encourage alumni and professionals to support college activities
- Secure external funding to create an archive of alumni works from all units and establish a venue for display/research
8. Entrepreneurial Activities
- Develop online classes for continuing education in the design fields
- Build on nascent ties with international programs to provide work and study opportunities for LSU and foreign students and faculty