Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Message from the President

Dear Colleagues, 

The deferred maintenance challenges to our campus buildings are well-known to our employees. The state legislature, which wrapped up its session on Monday, did carve out significant funds for deferred maintenance for the state’s colleges and universities in the years to come. That will certainly help, but it will not solve decades of disinvestment that has contributed to aging infrastructure that is expensive to repair and maintain. To put it bluntly: our faculty, staff and students deserve better. One approach that we are undertaking is to reduce the number of buildings that our campus community occupies, not simply to capture those operational cost savings, but to ensure that all employees and students can be assured of a reliably comfortable environment in which to work and learn. 

In consultation with Facility Services, the reconstituted Space Utilization Committee has been engaged in this work. The committee weighed factors including the age and state of buildings, urgent need for repairs, number of affected personnel, and quantity of specialized spaces that would be difficult to replicate elsewhere on campus. The committee provided a recommendation to decommission Milneburg Hall and that recommendation was approved by a majority of the Executive Cabinet. I have directed the Space Utilization Committee to immediately begin work on a plan of action that will relocate occupants during the fall semester with the goal of vacating the building by the end of 2024. We will not schedule any classes or campus events in Milneburg after this summer. 

A key part of the committee’s work will be to develop a timeline and process so that affected faculty and staff will have the opportunity to provide input. Among the key commitments are to find space that will suit the present and future anticipated needs of the unit, to ensure that faculty and staff in a department will remain in close proximity to each other, and to maintain specialized spaces, such as archives and labs. 

In addition to the practical considerations of teaching a class, keeping an office or operating a lab in a particular space, I recognize that there are also emotional implications to decommissioning a building. My goal is to be sensitive and supportive as we transition our people into their new homes on campus. Please direct your questions about the Milneburg decommissioning to Associate Vice President Mark Pyle at mpyle1@uno.edu. 

Sincerely, 

Kathy Johnson, Ph.D.
President
The University of New Orleans