RISD Students Save Vital Link with Community
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Students at the Rhode Island School of Design held a rally on campus yesterday warning that their school was close to severing a vital link between their work as artists and the community.
That link is the Office of Public Engagement, which, despite a small staff made up mostly of student workers, has a broad impact on campus and beyond.
The office connects hundreds of RISD students to 40 community service programs throughout the state—everything from environmental advocacy to after-school programs to work with students who have autism and developmental disabilities, according to Sarah Kern, a senior and one of the student workers.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST“Whatever we do as designers, we need to be engaged with people in the community,” said Jane Androski, a second-year graduate student who works in the office. “We cannot be designers in a bubble.”
Androski said the Office of Public Engagement was one of the reasons she decided to come to RISD. “The key thing the office does is provide continuity so that when students come and go the office holds the relationships,” she said. “To take away the office would do irreparable harm to these relationships and RISD’s reputation in the community.”
RISD John Maeda president announced the office would close in a meeting with students on Tuesday. Students then launched a last-ditch effort to rescue the office and were planning an aggressive campaign to fight the school over its closure, complete with stickers accusing RISD of standing for the “Rhode Island School of Disengagement.”
But late Thursday night Maeda issued a campus-wide e-mail saying that the school had found some grant funding for the office.
Students decided nonetheless to go through with a toned-down rally on Friday, coinciding with two meetings of the school board of trustees. “We felt it was really important to still come and still talk to the trustees and still show why this office is important,” Androski said.
University spokeswoman Jaime Marland would not confirm that the office had been slated for closure. She said it was funded through grants and that a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation had been found to keep it open for another year.
But students said the school needs to put the office on a better financial footing to ensure it remains a part of the campus for the long term.
