Faculty + Staff

Clint Hewitt

For almost 30 years, as an Associate Vice President for Physical Planning and Campus Master Planning, Clint Hewitt helped shape the physical development of the University of Minnesota. This included not only its campuses in the Twin Cities, Crookston, Morris, and Duluth, but also its research and experiment stations and other landholdings. During his tenure he managed the planning, design, and construction of well over one billion dollars worth of new and renovated facilities, as well as developing master plans and coordinating the planning process for the physical development of the entire University system. In addition, Hewitt has had the opportunity to work closely with some of the America's most famous designers, including the landscape architects William Johnson and Carl Johnson, James Van Sweden, Michael Van Valkenburgh, and Julius Fabos as well as the architects Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Antoine Predock, Ralph Rapson, and Gyo Obata.

Hewitt's career is also distinguished by his efforts to encourage and support the involvement of African-Americans in landscape architecture. Throughout his education and professional life, he has often been the first and/or only African-American in his department. In 1976 Hewitt chaired a task force for the American Society of Landscape Architects to investigate ways to recruit more minorities to the profession. At the time, the task force was able to identify only nine practicing African-American landscape architects nationwide. Hewitt was subsequently instrumental in helping to establish a landscape architecture program at North Carolina A & T, a historically African-American school.

After earning his bachelor's degree in Ornamental Horticulture from Virginia State College (now University), Hewitt enrolled in the landscape architecture program at Michigan State University (MSU). It was there that he first encountered campus planning, during summer work in the Department of Physical Plant Planning and Development. In fact, he was able to join a team preparing a master plan for the campus at MSU-Oakland (now Oakland University).

After graduating from MSU, Hewitt got a job at Southern University in Baton Rouge as Superintendent of Campus Grounds, and where he was also invited to teach in the architecture department. While at Southern, Hewitt traveled to a national conference about campus planning at the University of Illinois. During one of the presentations--by a planner from the University of Michigan--Hewitt, being an MSU graduate, good-naturedly challenged the planner about the quality of the University of Michigan's campus. To Hewitt's surprise, the planner invited him to tour the campus and weeks later offered him a job. Hewitt subsequently left Southern and became Assistant University Planner at Michigan.

"Those were exciting times," recalls Hewitt. He explains that during that time Michigan was widely known for being at the cutting-edge of campus planning. In fact, the preeminent national organization for campus planners, the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), was founded at Michigan. (Hewitt later became president of SCUP, the first African-American to do so, and he has also received its highest honor, the Founder's Award for Distinguished Achievement in Higher Education.) While at Michigan, Hewitt began the active civic involvement that he is known for, eventually serving as chair of Ann Arbor's City Planning Commission. In 1972, the University of Minnesota recruited Hewitt to join its planning staff.

Hewitt is currently an Associate Professor in the department of Landscape Architecture. In addition to teaching in design studios, he is also researching and documenting the physical history of the University from 1972-2002. "Places at institutions are the memories of people," Hewitt says in explaining the importance of the work, a lesson he learned from concerned alumni every time the University proposed changes to "places" on its campuses. Hewitt also gives lectures nationwide about campus planning and space management, and he is on the faculty of the Facilities Management Institute of the Association of Physical Plant Administrators of Colleges and Universities (APPA). "I've been teaching long enough in the Institute that nearly every major college or university physical plant in this country has an administrator who has taken my course," Hewitt laughs.

Hewitt is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the University YMCA, the Minnesota Architectural Foundation Board, the Hope Community Board and Chair of Membership and Retention in the Minneapolis/University Rotary Club.