Bridging Divides: The Origins of the Beckman Institute at Illinois

6. Bringing the Institute to Life

................. Bringing the Institute to Life . . . . . 57 6 BRINGING THE INSTITUTE TO LIFE I n the wake of the inauguration excitement, it was time to do the many things necessary for the institute to become effective. Among them was putting together a staff. By this time the Beckman Institute had an annual state budget for operations, with understandings of how maintenance would be shared between the institute and the university’s physical plant. A great many things that would pass for ordinary in other facilities required special attention in the institute. For example, the flooring in the atrium was polished stone, much of which was covered with large carpets. Maintenance of the carpets and the other special features of the building cost more per square foot than corresponding standard-issue fixtures in the rest of the university. How many physical plant personnel from trades such as carpentry or electrical would be assigned to the building? What sort of storeroom facility should be housed in the institute? These and many other items needed 58 . . . . . Bridging Divides to be resolved, and they occupied the time and energies of Bruce and Sarah as well as me. Our annual state budget for operations and maintenance was a bit over $2 million.Those funds were needed to pay the salaries of staff and provide for supplies and various other expenses.We needed to hire staff for the computer networking in the building. We coordinated design and implementation of the network with the campus computing office. Our network needed to be compatible with the campuswide system and at the same time meet the high-speed requirements we desired for the building itself.We needed to hire secretarial support staff for the faculty who would be moving in. It was expected that many faculty members would choose to cover some or all of their secretarial needs with funds from grants and contracts,but we had to make sure that the service level was adequate for all faculty. This meant establishing secretarial pools at select places in the office wing and assigning the personnel there to specific groups. We needed to hire general building support staff to handle audiovisual equipment, move furniture on the many occasions when the atrium or other rooms in the building needed to be set up for a lunch or some other function,shipping and receiving,and various other activities.Funds, albeit not large,were available in the budget for initially setting up special facilities and for purchasing computer networking hardware. We also needed to hire technical support staff for the service facilities that were to serve special needs—the electron microscopy and optical visualization suite being a prime early example. In addition, as activity increased in the building,services connected with grants and contracts required more people. We also needed to deal with building security. Because it was not a classroom facility, the institute’s traffic flow would differ from that of most campus buildings. During regular hours many people besides faculty,graduate students,and other researchers working in the institute would have occasion to come to the institute: undergraduate students working on projects, volunteers for human subject studies, people attending lectures and seminars, and those wishing to avail themselves of the Beckman Institute cafeteria.After about 6 pm,however,the building would be locked. The main entry under the tower and the heavily trafficked east entry were outfitted with magnetic card detectors, to permit Bringing the Institute to Life . . . . . 59 access to the institute for those who were authorized to have an access card.The cards were individually coded to create a record of who entered the building and when.The Beckman Institute may have been the first general campus facility to be equipped with such special access. We felt that it was desirable because the institute would contain much expensive research equipment. Besides, the presence of laboratory animal facilities rendered the institute susceptible to attack by radical animal-rights groups. To handle the issuing and tracking of access cards, deal with other security matters, and maintain a buildingwide patrol, a security person was on duty twenty-four hours per day. All these concerns seem rather mundane, but they represented departures from the usual way of doing things, and successfully working through each of them was important for the institute’s prospects. As just one example from the larger community, voices of discontent were heard from some in the largely African...