Academic staff members share observations on moving their department from one building to another.
Anyone who has ever moved their possessions from one home to another will confirm what we all know: Moving can be one of life’s most stressful events.
Now imagine for a moment you’re not moving just yourself or your family into a new home, but an entire academic department into a brand-new building. A little daunting, a little stressful? Um, yes, you might say so.
The eight academic departments in UW-Madison’s College of Letters & Science moving into the new Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall sometime this July are finding ways to navigate the attendant stress and chaos. This is thanks in large part to the academic staff members who have been charged with coordinating the move and making the transition as smooth as possible for their departments.
Located at the corner of University Avenue and West Johnson Street, the 26,000-square-foot Levy Hall will soon be home to the departments of History, African American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, Chicanx & Latinx Studies, Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, American Indian & Indigenous Studies and the Asian American Studies Program. Designed to create opportunities for community and collaboration between its new tenants, the five-floor Levy Hall serves as a modern replacement to the aging Mosse Humanities Building.
The Asian American Studies Program, a group that includes 14 faculty and staff members, will occupy the building’s third floor, sharing it with the Department of Chicanx & Latinx Studies and the Department of African American Studies. Jessica Montez, the Asian American Studies Program Administrator, has been coordinating the impending move. Some of the challenges she has faced have been, to say the least, unexpected.
“Since this spring, it’s been this countdown to, We’ve got to move, we’ve got to purge,” Montez says. “And I think that’s been one of the most challenging things: going through all these files from when the program began [in 1991]. Do we keep these? Also studying all the policies, like the retention schedules, because I never really had to do that before, and [learning] how long to keep all these things, and how to dispose of paperwork.”
Many of the physical aspects of the move are being handled by campus contractors. Staff members aren’t expected to schlep desks, chairs, or filing cabinets from one building to another. But while they don’t have to carry their own boxes of books over from the Humanities Building or Sterling Hall, they still must pack them onto carts.
For the Department of History, the biggest tenant moving into Levy Hall, history faculty will occupy parts of all five floors in the new space. According to Zach Fithian, the Main Office Coordinator for the History Department, books were one of the main stumbling blocks as the planning process progressed.
In addition to the books, the Humanities Building itself presented a problem, notes Fithian.
“Our historians have so many books, and they all had to go in these big wooden library carts. But our building is very narrow, and there aren’t a lot of spare rooms or open space where you can store those carts,” Fithian says. “I had to coordinate with the project management team for the move and figure out how we were going to get these big wooden carts into the building physically, but then how we were going to get them out of the building to a staging location.”
James Warwood, the Student Affairs Program Coordinator for the Department of African American Studies, got drafted into the role of move coordinator last September.
“It’s kind of how it feels when you’re moving just yourself to a new house, where you start big, and you’re thinking you have this future date where you have to have everything packed by, and you kind of start working backwards,” he says. “And then, as you run up to that moving date, it starts going a lot faster, and you realize that you didn’t leave yourself enough time, and everything’s really stressful.”
Like Fithian, Warwood had to deal with a book problem—specifically, his department’s extensive library space, which included more than 1,500 books and a sizable collection of dated multimedia material (think CDs and VHS tapes). While their new home in Levy Hall does include library space, Warwood and his departmental colleagues knew it didn’t make sense to save and move everything. So they donated a curated portion of the collection to Madison’s new Center for Black Excellence and Culture. Warwood’s team of student workers still ended up packing nearly 100 boxes full of books.
All three move coordinators are keenly aware that the pre-move stress will dissipate into an appreciation of the new space once the boxes are all unpacked. Montez and Fithian have been part of the cohort of academic staffers that have been giving tours of Levy Hall as it nears full construction.
“It’s been hard to visualize, but now that I’m seeing it and going through these tours, I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really there, there’s my desk, there’s my space,’” Montez says. “It’s better when I can see it.”