Leading by Example By Woullard Lett, School of Community Economic Development
Growing up in Pittsburgh, and Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, Dr. Chuck Hotchkiss, the School of Community Economic Development’s new dean, saw Midwest steel towns transform from shiny examples of American enterprise into the neglected, empty Rust Belt. He watched the jobs disappear and the social problems that accompany high unemployment emerge as mills closed, workers lost their homes and local shops shuttered. It was then that Hotchkiss “decided that I wanted to try and keep what had happened (there) from happening to other places.” Though he left the Rust Belt behind to attend Bates College, studying while nestled within the pine trees of Maine did not erase the images of boarded-up buildings, litter-strewn streets and cold, vacant stares he saw when the steel industry collapsed. Hotchkiss went on to earn a master’s degree in urban planning and later a Ph.D. at Cornell University. He became a housing policy analyst at the Rand Corporation and worked at the Argonne National Laboratory, dealing with energy issues. Hotchkiss crossed over into academia, spending 15 years at California State Polytechnic University as a professor and department chair of urban and regional planning. But he was pulled away by his desire to be a practitioner. “I gradually came to feel that neither I nor my students were doing much about the social justice issues – poverty, crime, powerlessness, etc. – that I had observed and that I wanted to address,” he said.
Developments in CED Faculty member Charles Hotchkiss is the new dean of the School of CED.
12 | The Extra Mile | Fall 2008