Projects honoring U’s top scholars, top alumni taking shape

What: Scholars Walk and Alumni Wall of Honor
Where: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Contact: Sue Diekman, University of Minnesota Alumni Association, (612) 626-4854
Mike Peluso, University Foundation, (612) 626-0502

Two privately funded projects that will permanently honor the University of Minnesota’s most celebrated scholars and its most distinguished alumni are taking shape near the McNamara Alumni Center on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus.

The Scholars Walk features a wide path flanked by monuments and Bur oak trees.

The Scholars Walk, a wide pathway featuring 40 bur oak trees and monuments, is designed to celebrate the research and classroom accomplishments of the U’s award-winning faculty and students, and for the first time provide a prominent, permanent memorial to those honored.

Among the national and international award recipients recognized are the U’s Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences winners, national academies inductees and Rhodes, Truman, and Marshall Scholars. University award recipients recognized include the Regents Professors, McKnight Distinguished Professors, McKnight Presidential Chairs, Morse-Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teachers, and the Outstanding Graduate and Professional Teachers.

A special faculty committee assisted planners of the Scholars Walk in determining the names of those to be included, according to Larry Laukka, ’58. Laukka is a volunteer executive with a non-profit group formed by the University of Minnesota Foundation, the University of Minnesota Alumni Association and the Minnesota Medical Foundation. This partnership also worked to build, and operates, the McNamara Alumni Center. The Scholars Walk and the nearby Alumni Wall of Honor are gifts to the University from the three organizations.

The Scholars Walk will be built in phases, eventually stretching from Walnut Street near the McNamara Alumni Center west to Appleby Hall and Pleasant Street. Once completed, it will become the major east to west walkway on the East Bank campus, complementing the beautiful Northrop Mall which runs north to south. The Scholars Walk was designed by landscape architect Gary Fishbeck of Hammel, Green and Abrahamson.

Most of the construction on the first phase, from Walnut Street to Union Street, was completed in the autumn and is now open to pedestrian traffic, though finishing work will continue in summer 2005. Completion of the second phase, to Church Street, and then across the Mall to Pleasant Street and Appleby Hall, is dependent on raising more private gifts, Laukka said.

The Alumni Wall of Honor is located along Oak Street adjacent to the McNamara Alumni Center.

The Alumni Wall of Honor, a landmark work of art designed by architect Antoine Predock in collaboration with sculptor Constance DeJong, will stretch more than 200 feet along Oak Street from the corner of Oak and Washington Avenue. The structure honors the winners of the Outstanding Achievement Award, the university’s highest honor for its graduates. All winners of the award will be listed on the wall.

The design of the Alumni Wall of Honor also includes an artistic interpretation of the stars overhead on the day of the university’s founding in February 1851. Construction of the Alumni Wall of Honor continues this winter. Final elements of the project, including landscaping that will make it ready for visitors, will occur in spring 2005.

A third project has been completed which improves the plaza between the Scholars Walk and the Alumni Wall of Honor; most of the crushed granite from the plaza orchard has been removed and replaced with turf and mulch, benches, tables and more trees, according to Laukka. The crushed granite was intended to provide durable groundcover for an area that was expected to draw large event crowds. “But that’s not how people used it,” Laukka said, “and the crushed granite wasn’t a popular material.” Instead, he said, planners regularly saw students congregating on the grassy areas, and took their cue from that. He said the grassy plaza will be a “far more comfortable and inviting place for students to come and spend some time.”

The Alumni Wall of Honor and the Scholars Walk are being entirely funded through private giving, principally through the generosity of the late Carlyle E. Anderson, ’32, whose charity also made possible the recognition of major donors to the university in the McNamara Alumni Center. Anderson was among the founders of the University of Minnesota Foundation and its first president. After a distinguished business career in the Chicago area, he was awarded the university’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 1959.

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