NMC’s $34 Million Facelift

By Patrick Sullivan | Aug. 5, 2017

Since 1951, Northwestern Michigan College’s quiet corner under the pines has seen many changes, but perhaps none so substantial as those happening now. With two major construction projects underway and a massive one in the works, the community college’s campus will never be the same.

Much of the Northwestern Michigan College campus is a construction zone this summer. A 21st-century residence hall is almost finished, and the completion of a glass-walled addition to the Dennos Museum that will double the amount of display space isn’t far behind.

The biggest project hasn’t even commenced: construction of a new library and “innovation center” is set to begin in the spring and will cap $34 million in projects that will transform the campus.

The projects come amid declining enrollment and strife between administrators and the school’s faculty unions. NMC President Tim Nelson said the projects are necessary to make the school resilient for the future. He believes that in order to offset declining enrollment, the school needs to attract students from across Michigan and around the world.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF DORM
North Hall isn’t your father’s dormitory.

The $8 million, three-story building (rendering pictured above) will house 136 students in 36 four-bedroom suites. That means each student gets her own room. There are laundry facilities, a fitness center, and study rooms on the second and third floors.

“These are set up with four bedrooms, each with their own locks, two bathrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and the facility has an attached fitness center that’s usable by the people in the residence hall and also the rest of the college community,” Nelson said.

North Hall is scheduled to open this fall at the north end of campus. For three years, the school rented a nearby motel, located south of campus, to house students. Nelson is pleased the school can now offer a modern dormitory.

“We were renting that because we were at capacity,” Nelson said. “Those rooms served our purpose for what we needed at the time, but it really wasn’t what our students would be looking for. As a long-term solution, they are hotel rooms, and what we built in North Hall has the ability for students to cook — and our international students, they look for that type of amenity, to be able to cook their own dinner when they want to.”

The school has long needed space to house more students on campus, but administrators didn’t want just any space. They wanted housing that would attract students. So far, North Hall has done that. It’s already 90 percent full, said Vicki Cook, vice president of finance and administration.

Campus housing is filled with mostly students from the area, however, leading Nelson to believe the college should build another residence hall like North Hall to house the increasing numbers of out-of-area and international students. He hopes to do that in the near future.

“We’ve had waiting lists for three or four years. We have programs that are attracting people from outside the area,” Nelson said. “Vicki’s office would have people coming in every week, asking if there’s some place that they could move into.”

Programs that offer specialized degrees, such as the school’s unmanned aerial systems program or the culinary institute, attracts students from far and wide, but finding them a place to stay once they get here has proven difficult.
“We could recruit somebody and say, ‘Okay, come to college, [now] go find some place to live,” he said. “Given the current status of rental property in our region, that’s not a realistic option.”

Nelson would also like to see a greater portion of the student population live on campus. He recalls when he first worked at NMC in the mid-1970s, he managed West Hall (it was demolished in 2009) and the campus apartments. At that time, 25 percent of students lived on campus; today, five to 10 percent of students live on campus.

“You know, having people live on campus changes the tenor of the place,” Nelson said. 

DENNOS: ONE LAST PROJECT
Gene Jenneman came to NMC to build the Dennos Museum. A quarter century later, he’s put off his retirement a few years to oversee its major expansion.

The new-and-improved Dennos is slated to be complete in mid-October, and the museum will open to the public a month afterward.

“I think it’s going to be an amazing facility. I go through there about every two weeks,” Nelson said. “It was already a world-class facility, but these additions, I think people are going to be blown away.”

The renovation was made possible by a $1 million gift from Barbara and Dudley Smith III for expansion of the Inuit art area, plus $2 million from Diana and Richard Milock for adding exhibit space to show more items from the Dennos’ permanent collection. Fundraising is underway to make up the balance of the $5 million cost.
Jenneman is excited about how the building is coming along.

“This is something I’ve wanted for a long time. You know, I came here to build this place,” he said.

Jenneman, who previously had worked at museums and planetariums in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Alpena, Michigan, was hired at NMC to oversee the design and construction of the Dennos. Over the years, as the museum’s permanent collection expanded, he started to think about how the building could be bigger. In 2006 he went to Michael and Barbara Dennos, the philanthropists who made the museum possible.

“I said to them, ‘We need to define the next phase of the museum — what is it going to look like? — or at least conceptualize the idea, so that we can prepare for that to happen in your lifetime, so you can see the evolution,’” he said.

The Dennoses donated money so that initial expansion plans could be drawn up, but then the recession happened, and Jenneman’s wish for the couple to see their legacy’s evolution went unfulfilled: Michael Dennos died in 2012, and Barbara died the following year.

The gifts from the Smiths and Milocks restarted the project’s momentum, but it was Jenneman’s announcement that he intended to retire in 2015 that kicked the museum expansion into high gear.

Nelson had asked him to delay retirement, and Jenneman said he would, on one condition: The expansion of the Dennos. “I told him, ‘Well, you know what I want.

Until the president says we should move forward, you know, it’s not going to happen.”

Now that the expansion is almost complete, Jenneman’s retirement is again on the horizon. He plans to stay on for one more year to pass the institution to new hands. He also wants to take some time to appreciate the new space, which is topped with towering ceilings and enclosed with banks of windows that shower the exhibition rooms in natural light.

The added space will better integrate classrooms into the museum.

“Part of the goal here is that having the permanent collection in its own galleries will allow faculty here on campus to look at the permanent collection and define works that they can teach to,” he said.

Before, instructors would retrieve works from the collection and show them to students in the museum’s multi-use room; now students will be able to go back and look at the works again and again.

“How often will those galleries change? It will be determined by what the requests are from the faculty and how often we want to change them just to refresh them, which will probably be on a yearly basis,” Jenneman said.

A NEW KIND OF LIBRARY
Like resident halls, college libraries are not what they used to be.

What’s currently dubbed the West Hall Innovation Center and Library is expected to break ground in spring 2018. The $21 million project will replace the decades-old Osterlin Library and aspires to become the heart of NMC’s campus, Nelson said.
“Our vision for that is that it can be open 24/7, and people can use the library, they can use the meeting rooms, there will be access to food,” Nelson said. “It will be a place where students and community groups can … create more of a community center.”

The new facility will be built around the existing cafeteria, book store, veterans’ conference room, study area, and the WNMC radio station. It’s undetermined how much those existing facilities will be renovated in the construction or whether anything will be moved to new locations, though the cafeteria will remain and be remodeled to be integrated into the new building.

Nelson sees the facility as a center for students and people in the wider community to meet up, work, and hang out together.

“You have various technology groups, maker spaces, hacker spaces, things of that nature,” Nelson said. “If they have a home, then it’s something else our students can get involved in, and so rather than having this separation between college student and community activity, we create spaces where those groups can interact.”
Given its intended purposes, the center won’t resemble a traditional library, even though there will be stacks and a reference desk and books that can be checked out. Libraries are no longer what they were in the 20th Century.

“They are completely different,” Nelson said. “When I went to school, you went into a library to be quiet, and study and do research. You go in libraries today, and people eat, people have computers, they are alive, there is sound. That would have driven librarians of my day crazy, because that wasn’t what they were for.”

How do you design a 21st century library? NMC administrators visited community college libraries that were recently constructed, they surveyed staff and students, and they worked with designers and architects.

The building will be constructed to be adaptable because the previous decades have showed that there’s no telling what’s going to be needed in the coming decades. 

That’s why, when an estimate for renovating the Osterlin Library to meet modern needs came in at $4 million, with no guarantee the facility could be adaptable in the future, NMC administrators decided to start from scratch and build more than just a library. They learned a lesson about adaptability several years earlier, when architects determined nothing new could be done with the dormitory wings at West Hall, which were ultimately removed.

“These should be long-term buildings, so these are being designed with … fewer hard interior walls. That was one of the problems with West Hall. We looked at trying to convert it to other things,” Nelson said. “In that late-1960s style that it was built, there were very short-spanned walls; everything was concrete. There was really not a lot you could do without massive, massive, and expensive renovations.”
The Osterlin building will likely be renovated after the West Hall project to become a central location for student support services.

DECLINING ENROLLMENT AND LABOR STRIFE
Brandon Everest, a sociology professor and faculty association president, said he and other staff are excited about improvements, but he hopes that administrators are just as serious about the well-being of faculty. He said it is frustrating that millions of school budget dollars have been dedicated to construction when the future of some faculty is in doubt.

“I think it’s hard to imagine any teacher not being excited in investment in their school,” Everest said. “But under the circumstances … it throws the question of budget priorities into light.”

Administrators have offered retirement buy-outs and have floated the possibility of layoffs in order to reign in a budget deficit, he said, and faculty are frustrated that instructors who leave are often replaced with adjuncts who are paid less yet able to do less for students.

“That they seek to balance the budget on the backs of faculty is a hard pill to swallow,” Everest said.

Nelson said faculty and staff had a voice throughout the planning process for the projects, and he hopes for better administration-faculty relations in the future.

“It’s going to be up to us as a group, as a total group as a college, to go to the future, and I’m expecting that we’re all going to do that, and there will be bumps along the way,” Nelson said. “We can’t get there without faculty, and we can’t get there without support staff, so we have to. And we have traditionally worked together, and I have confidence we’ll do that again.”

Nelson said the school needs to evolve in the face of declining enrollment.

Not only are there fewer traditional 18-year-old students at NMC (and at community colleges everywhere), but enrollment of 25- to 35-year-old students is also low. Nelson said fluctuations in enrollment based on the economy are predictable, but there is something else happening across the country that’s causing fewer young adults to enroll in college, and he isn’t sure what it is.

“I don’t think anybody has an explanation yet,” Nelson said. “Some of it could be demographics, depending on the part of the country, but when you look at the country as a whole, I don’t think that that’s a sufficient answer. Part of it could be the way colleges and universities deliver their programming, and we’re in the state of transformation. … The way we did things for many, many, many years won’t be the way we’re doing them in the future.”