About the College

MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN

I am proud to introduce the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts’s next strategic plan.

This plan is the outcome of dedicated, thoughtful work by 
the Strategic Planning Steering Committee, who over the course of many months drew together a rich mix of ideas developed in the college community.

At the beginning of the strategic planning process, I 
charged the committee — faculty, staff, and students representative of CADA’s schools and units — to create 
a future vision for CADA and define strategies and actions toward realizing it in the coming years.

As an administrative umbrella for very different creative and scholarly disciplines, the college has a key role in setting conditions that promote success of our students and faculty and in advocating for creative work, both within the university and beyond. I asked the committee to think broadly about how CADA can fulfill this role in the future: to imagine not only how our college should evolve, but how our disciplines will continue to change. In my view, CADA must always be highly attuned to developments outside the academy, even as we have a hand in shaping those movements through our teaching and research.

We work from the knowledge that public education is 
a bedrock of democracy and that the arts are a vanguard force in human life. We also uphold that the college is a place for dissent and critique. From our varying and sometimes opposing positions, we are united in the commitment to expanding access to education in the creative disciplines. Together, we provide our students space to experiment and fully express themselves. We prepare them to reach their full potential.

At the heart of teaching and research across CADA 
is a recognition of the power of creative expression. Putting words to our ambitions for CADA revealed many passionately held views on how creativity works best and in what environments. In a draft of the plan, a commitment to “champion boundless creativity” was met with vociferous argument: “Creativity is fostered by constraint, not boundlessness! Boundless creativity is a mud pile!” We discussed and ultimately rejected many terms as buzzy corporate-speak. Some saw the entire enterprise of strategic planning as a manifestation of the increasing corporatization of higher education.

As dean, I continue to welcome all perspectives on the ideas in this plan. This document articulates strategies that will guide how CADA moves in the coming five years, 
but conversations about our shared values — how we both express and live up to them — are what invigorate our college.

As a theater practitioner, I believe in what the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks calls “rep and rev,” a term she uses to describe her use of repetition and revision. I hope that this plan puts CADA on a path of ongoing rep and rev, riff and riposte — an everlasting, collegial debate on how best to create new works and to train students — even as we deliver a strategic plan that strengthens the support we offer our community and renders us more visible (a project that in itself some may find objectionably mass-market).

As dean, I work on behalf of all CADA’s disciplines, 
and appreciate this plan as a roadmap. I remain thrilled by the opportunity to advocate for the arts and for this college, whose community and location in the vibrant city of Chicago make it an extremely special place.

I look forward to advancing the strategies contained in 
this plan, and I welcome all of you on this journey alongside me.

With gratitude,

Rebecca Rugg
Dean, College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts