How MIAD Has Grown Under President Jeffrey Morin’s Leadership
Photo by Sara Stathas
Every day, Jeffery Morin schedules a walk around Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design’s campus in the Third Ward – a daily pilgrimage. Each time, he takes a different path, or walks at a different time. It’s the MIAD president’s way of – amidst an onslaught of emails, meetings, brainstorms, one-on-ones, phone calls and projects – understanding what is really happening in the college’s halls and studios.
It’s been more than nine years since Morin began those walks; next May, he will celebrate 10 years as president. And it’s been a busy decade. Under his stewardship, the physical presence of the school has grown through renovations and expansions. The school’s presence in the community has expanded through new departments and programming initiatives. The student body has increased by nearly half, and grown markedly more diverse. The faculty headcount has increased, too.
And Morin has done it all in the face of growing but still constrained budgets, major headwinds for higher education and a pandemic that has created more barriers for students looking for a hands-on art and design education. “Where I think we’ve succeeded is that the school has a really clear mission,” says Morin. “Our focused ‘menu’ of majors all have strong paths to the workforce. I think our pragmatic approach is appealing to a lot of folks.”
MIAD’S ROOTS REACH BACK to the 1920s when Charlotte Partridge and Miriam Frink founded the Layton School of Art in an effort to create a progressive art curriculum rivaling the Bauhaus movement in Germany. Layton closed in 1974, but seven former faculty members opened the Milwaukee School of the Arts, now MIAD, that fall.
When Morin arrived 41 years later, just over 30% of students were dropping out or transferring after their first year – about 10 percentage points higher than comparable art schools. “I found it to be almost a moral issue,” says Morin. “If students start at college and start to incur debt, and they leave college before they have a credential to help them clear that debt, that’s a problem. Because all we’re doing is setting people up for failure down the road. So we started to work on issues to help retain students.”
That work found the most traction by focusing on underserved students. MIAD hired an equity and inclusion director and opened the Equity and Inclusion Center. “I was hearing from employers in the community that they were struggling to find Black and brown creative practitioners,” Morin says, “which told me that that part of the pipeline was not working, we were not succeeding.”
Photo by Sara Stathas
The center has developed several new programs and partnerships supporting students of color and queer students, including a bias incident reporting system, free group therapy through Black Space, and support groups through the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center.
“As we were growing, the makeup of our student body was changing,” says Morin. “It was becoming more reflective of the city, more reflective of the country. Because of that, we needed to pay more attention to how we were going to serve our students, how we would uplift them, how we would make them feel more visible and how we would tackle challenges on campus.”
MIAD enrolled in the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) fellows program that brings talented and diverse recent graduates of art and design schools to teach at other institutions across the country. The program helps establish a direct career path for the graduates, while providing the value of a diverse teaching staff to participating schools. In 2021, one of the college’s AICAD fellows, Morgan Bouldes, was hired as a permanent full-time faculty member.
“You can see the changes in comparison from 10 years ago to now,” says Rithi Punyamurthula, MIAD’s coordinator of equity and inclusion. “During alumni days, the thing I hear every single time is ‘I just wish something like this existed when I was here.’”
Recruitment and retention of students of color has increased. On the bottom line, Black, Hispanic and Asian students made up 27% of the student body in 2023, up from about 22% in 2014. Morin attributes those gains in great part to the initiatives and programs at the equity and inclusion center.
“I really think the only reason this space exists is because [Morin] really put in that energy,” says Punyamurthula. “He listened to our students when they were asking for it.”
Overall, MIAD’s enrollment has grown 43% under Morin’s tenure to the 890 students enrolled in fall 2023, peaking at 925 in 2020. That progress comes amid a slog for postsecondary education; higher-ed enrollment declined 8% from 2014 to 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
This spring’s disastrous rollout of a new federal financial aid form is the latest higher-ed debacle, leaving students unable to make a timely decision about their upcoming semester in school. With nearly 100% of MIAD students receiving some form of financial aid, this has caused a huge strain for students trying to finalize enrollment.
“It’s going to have an impact on us this year,” says Morin. “For the last four years, it has been one higher-ed challenge after another. There was COVID, getting through COVID, now this. But we graduated our largest class ever this May.”
MORIN, age 63, has short and neatly styled brown hair peppered with gray above colorful glasses and sharp suits. Just shy of 6 feet tall, he walks with a commanding but inviting presence. Born in Madawaska, a small, bilingual town at the northernmost tip of Maine, he was the first in his family to attend college. From a young age, Morin knew what he wanted to do with his life, feeling called to the vocation of art education.
His background helps to guide his mission at MIAD, particularly his emphasis on what he calls the “kitchen table conversation” – the initial discussion between a high schooler and their parents about college.
“Being a first-generation college student, I knew what it was like to have that kitchen table conversation about wanting to go to art school,” says Morin. “So I’m determined to find a way that MIAD can better equip high school students for that conversation at the kitchen table where they say, ‘This is what I want for my future.’”
Morin and others at MIAD believe one way to smooth that conversation is to provide easier and earlier access to art education. Every year, 500 high school students take classes taught by MIAD faculty to develop their portfolios and skills in an academic setting. “Our pre-college programs have grown a great deal,” says Corbett Toomsen, who leads the classes as MIAD’s director of youth and community programs. “Each year between 25% and 33% of our first-year students have taken a program in our department while in high school.”
Another addition under Morin is MIAD’s Design Internship program. Students build portfolios and workplace experience with paid, two-week internships at brand, design and architecture agencies including Harley-Davidson, Hanson Dodge and Cramer-Krasselt.
Marketing and branding agency CORE Creative has been a Design Internship partner since 2022. Senior designer Nellie Vance found the MIAD program as she searched for ways to create meaningful opportunities for students of color, and to create a pipeline for new designers to forge meaningful careers. “We’ve helped students pick courses,” says Vance. “I was able to write a reference letter for one of the students that got accepted into UW-Madison. It really does have a lasting effect.”
WHENEVER HE CAN, Morin finds a way to bring himself back to the classroom. Most recently, he taught a figure drawing and printmaking class.
“Being able to be in the classroom gives me more insights into the students,” he says. “If students know you as a teacher, beyond an administrator, they’re more likely to be outgoing, to pull you into conversations to engage more. I think they trust you more. And so for me, it’s been a way to build trust with students. It’s invigorating, it’s exciting.”
Getting back to his roots as an art educator is one of the ways Morin stays laser-focused on MIAD’s mission. After 40 years as an art educator, Morin is as determined as ever to make art and design schooling exciting, accessible and valuable. “Does MIAD have more potential today than it did a decade ago? Do we have more capacity today? Do we look more like Milwaukee? If I can say yes to any of those, I feel pretty good.”
