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June 2008: TCEM Department “On the Move”
By: Betty Jones, PhD – TCEM Associate Professor
Six Tourism, Conventions & Event Management Department [TCEM] faculty members will move their offices to the 1200 Waterway Building at the start of June 2008—a 1.27 mile ‘trip’ north [per MapQuest] from current offices in the IUPUI Physical Education/Natatorium Building. The ‘space crunch’ on the IUPUI campus and continued growth in student enrollment and faculty positions in the School of Physical Education and Tourism Management [PETM] led to the move.
Relocating to 1200 Waterway will be TCEM faculty members Susan Alvarez, Susie Benko, Jim Bennett, Linda Brothers, Betty Jones and Kristen Woods-Norris. Remaining in the 2nd floor TCEM suite on campus will be Amanda Cecil, Yao-Yi Fu, Jinmoo Heo and Suosheng Wang. TCEM Chair Sotiris Hji-Avgoustis will maintain an office on campus and at 1200 Waterway. The office of a new TCEM faculty member , for whom a search is underway this spring, will be in the on-campus TCEM suite.
Besides offices, the TCEM area at 1200 Waterway will include a small conference room and kitchen area [can accommodate TCEM wine classes], a small reception area, and access to a larger conference room shared by the other IUPUI building occupant, the POLIS Center. An academic research center with a practical and applied orientation, the POLIS Center is affiliated with the IUPUI School of Liberal Arts and is known for projects such as the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis and the annual Spirit & Place Festival.
On April 18, the TCEM faculty will meet to discuss potential impacts of the move and to develop strategies for operating in a two-location environment. It is anticipated that one of the vacated TCEM campus offices will serve, at least temporarily, as a place for ‘satellite’ TCEM faculty to ‘land’ while on campus.
Growth and space reconfiguration have characterized PETM for over 10 years. The 4-member TCEM Department joined the School of Physical Education in 1994, and physically relocated from the School of Engineering & Technology to PETM in the summer of 2000. PETM had converted a Reading Room and Recorder’s office into offices for TCEM faculty and the School Recorder/TCEM secretary.
Within a couple years, the Recorder/TCEM secretary space was enclosed to provide another faculty office. PETM moved the Recorder to an office closer to the Dean’s suite, and remodeled the School’s reception area to house secretaries for both TCEM and Physical Education. In 2006, PETM retrofitted half of the Informal Learning Lab/Student Lounge on the Concourse Level into six faculty offices, three for faculty members in each department.
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