March 10, 2017 – Miami Dade College

            Even before I came close to reaching this college it had already shared a great Idea with us.  As I pulled into a Starbucks this morning in Homestead some 30 miles south of Miami, to post yesterday’s blog entry (and drink bad expensive coffee) I noticed the following “I AM MDC” sticker on an employee’s car.  The sticker served as a parking permit for the college, but also did double duty as a marketing tool and brand identifier.  As I got closer to Miami I started seeing these stickers on all sorts of cars.  Every person who was currently or had previously taken a class at the college had a parking sticker and the stickers were infused through out the community on a staggering number of cars.  Start looking and you could see them everywhere.  Once your class was completed, you are still MDC, so by the numbers of stickers seen at stoplights it was obvious that former students did not rush to remove the identity from their cars.  And the cars were showing where the college really lived, within the students and graduates, each of them took the college home with them.

When I think of all the money we at CCSF spent on the “Future Focused” add campaign, and then think about how the union, students, and faculty, easily united under the much more robust and simple “I am CCSF” button and poster campaign during the accreditation crisis, it stagers my imagination that we have not been playing to our strengths as a unified college for some time.  Here in Miami something as simple as a parking permit becomes a talisman of identity that affirms not only the college institution but also the individual people who make it up.  (Why are we not bringing back the “I am CCSF” logo?  Oh right that was a union thing the union promoted so the college can’t support it right???)  Miami Dade has a great idea here and I think we should steal it, because…. we already have…

Now the college itself is large.  I mean massive.  It’s one of the largest, if not the largest community colleges in the country.  There are over 15,000 students served by the Biology Department alone.  By the time I got to the main Kendall Campus the stickers were on every car on the road. Architecture

The large main campus is laid out pretty much as most of the suburban college campuses are with parking lots and structures on the outside surrounding a core of various college building at the center of a square plot of land.  But here the scale is different, I mean massive.  Each building is multistoried with large open atriums on the lower floors giving access to well spaced out banks of elevators that take students and faculty to the upper floors.  Style of the buildings is unified in architectural concrete, and the lower floors of one building connect easily with one or two level wide covered passageways that connect one building to the next.  Think Batmall Hall on steroids and then imagine if the building itself went viral and started to connect to all other buildings on the ocean campus turning them into Batmall’s as well.

The amazing thing was how so many students were absorbed into the spaces and yet it never felt crowded.  The Parking lots were filled and yet the large open spaces on the first and second level entry floors were ample with seating and spaces to hang out and study.  On this hot day they were cool and sheltered, but never felt claustrophobic or interior.  Cool breezes were carried in through the large open spaces that also let in plenty of light.  I noticed many of the open spaces had large fans almost imperceptibly tucked into the concrete spaces above the cavernous pedestrian main floors.  These were turned off, being winter, but I’m sure in the summer the campus is just as comfortable as in winter.  The designers of these buildings created spaces that worked with the environment and the educational functions.