This week Lesley Lokko announces her resignation as Dean of Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. After her appointment in June 2019, there was a lot of excitement about her plans and goals for the school under her leadership. We spoke with Lokko back in November to for an exclusive Archinect Deans List interview. She spoke of her journey towards architecture, her path as an educator, and her pedagogical approaches for the school.
During Dean Lokko's appointment, the world was struck with a pandemic that impacted everyone around the globe. Academic institutions did their best to navigate these challenging times, however, visions for the 2020 academic year were dramatically altered. In a statement shared with the Architectural Record, Lokko explains, "My decision to leave Spitzer after less than a year is fairly straightforward: I was not able to build enough support to be able to deliver on either my promise of change, or my vision of it [...] It's hard enough to build social capital in a new place without having to do it over Zoom. Part of it, too, has to do with the wider inflexibility of U.S. academic structures. In an incredibly bureaucratic and highly-regulated context, change is as much administrative as it is conceptual."
My decision to leave Spitzer after less than a year is fairly straightforward: I was not able to build enough support to be able to deliver on either my promise of change, or my vision of it...
Dean Lesley Lokko will be participating in an upcoming Archinect virtual event, The Future of Design Education, on October 19th. This upcoming panel is one of many virtual events Archinect will be hosting as part of our Parade platform launch this year. Listen in as we hear from Lesley Lokko (CCNY), Hernan Diaz Alonso (SCI-Arc), Harriet Harriss (Pratt), Mónica Ponce de León (Princeton), and Michael Speaks (Syracuse) as each dean discusses their thoughts on the state of architectural academia today, and how that inform the future direction of education.
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The rigid bureaucratic structure of the post 80s architecture profession inhibits architects from making real change in the bureaucracy of media, government, politics, technology, etc. Just get those letters after you name and pretend you have made it.
Lesley Lokko should also be interviewed separately from the Design Education event. The statement points to problems that are larger than the snippets of time allotted to individuals in these group settings.
I've been chatting with Lesley since the resignation and she's told me that everything she can say right now was included in her statement that AR shared. She has confirmed she will be addressing her resignation during our panel on October 19th, however, so please make sure to RSVP while there are still spaces available.
Thanks.
this is a shame - architecture needs more leaders who write well and can inspire future professionals to speak persuasively about complex ideas without jargon.
This is very disappointing. I hope to learn more about her reasons. Mentioning Zoom meetings as a factor seems very odd to me. We're in a pandemic. It's not the school's fault or the students' fault that communication and social interaction is limited. I'm very curious to hear more about what these bureaucratic limitations were. I feel bad for the students who are already experiencing a lot of disruption because of the pandemic, and now on top of that they are seeing their top administrator abandon them.
"No job is worth one’s life and at times I genuinely feared for my own."
Wow. This sounds horrible.
bummer and timing not great in general...
did a crit at jury there probably close to a decade ago. was looking for teaching work at the time. I figured this being the least prestigious of the NYC schools (no offense) maybe I could get a teaching gig there. the life long educator and practitioner who invited me basically told me I had to know someone...I said - I know her and what about something as back office like digital support? she went on about how NOT easy it was to get in. ended up teaching at a better school and had a hook-up at the Ivy league one but that seemed more complicated to even having a shot...
as a white male I just figured it was the usual architectural inbreeding cliquish bullshit. you know how many openings exist at every architectural school every year and how many wanted adds are NOT posted?
I am a current student at Spitzer, and this statement from Dean Lokko is puzzling to me. I would like to make clear that if she was a victim to any act of discrimination based on her gender and/or race, I feel for her and would like her to come forth and explain the situation in detail. These are things that can and could be harming students, faculty and staff and should not be brushed aside.
However, I have a problem with the rest of her statements. First of all, she sent students an email saying she would resign, vaguely citing health and her family as the reasons. Completely different from the statement above. If things were so severe, why not address your students first instead of venting to a magazine? Back when Dean Lokko and the other candidates for the dean position visited our school last year, she made us believe that education and architecture were her passions, and that she was overqualified for the job given her experience in other schools across the world. Is resigning, less than a year after being appointed, showing that passion?
Dean Lokko came to our school in January trying to change everything about our school: name, branding, educational system...Change is good and often necessary to move forward. I don't think any student opposed to change just for the sake of opposing her. It is true that coming to a new school and a new educational system is hard. But instead of trying to understand the student body and understanding that change takes time, she expected the school to change overnight. The new unit system being implemented on graduate students started out this semester so of course students are confused about how it works. None of them have worked in this system before. And yet, you expect them to just flip a switch and suddenly be experts? Respect is a two way street: If we ask students about how you treated them, what would they say?
The saddest part about this is that Dean Lokko can say these statements and leave Spitzer like nothing happened, damaging our school's reputation further. The dean position at Spitzer is obvious just another title to add to her resume. For us students, the reputation of our school affects our careers and opportunities.
Well stated @student
That is really too bad. For me, her statement raises more questions than it answers. Life in the pandemic has been hard, really hard. I wonder if she realized just how stifling the last 6 months has been on every industry. For most of us, shear survival is the goal. If she really expected to make significant change during this time, perhaps she was a tad unrealistic. In any event, truly too bad for the students at Spitzer.
A leadership In architecture academia basic requirement one must be a jargon-juggling master or fuggeddaboudit. Academic architecture jargon is constantly evolving as it is a mish-mash of gene/meme-jumping old-hat French Poststucturalism (Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault), Critical theory (see: WOKE-ism) / garden variety PoMo (Jencks, Jameson, Venturi) and a smattering of tidbits from usual suspects: Loos, Wright, Corbu, Mies, Vidler, Colquon, Rowe, Koetter,Thom Mayne, Wes Jones (see: Heidegger) and jargon-salad from today's tech-world of Ai, 3-D printing, All computer-visualization systems/software and be a Freud-level babysitter / psychiatrist for faculty while ensuring the school maintain all NCARB demands AND most of all - be willing to beg alumni and all possible charitable organizations for money 24/7/365. All this while training/fooling/fleecing a cohort of young people to train for a profession that will be vaporized by Ai in 5 years. Ivy league architecture grads wont make enough money in a remarkable career to repay student loans and this makes CCNY architecture grads future Starbucks barristers living in mom and dad's basement. Smart rats are on the yardarms. Dean Lokko saw the light and skedaddled. There is only one architect in the world qualified for the job of dean and that is me....and I don't want it.
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