Next year, Jeff Morin will celebrate ten years as the president of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design – known as MIAD. The school’s roots go back to the 1920s when the Layton School of Art was founded to create a local progressive art curriculum. When Layton closed in 1974, former faculty members opened MIAD that same year.
Forty-one years later, Morin arrived from UW-Stevens Point to lead MIAD. At the time the school faced a significant dropout or transfer rate and struggled to reach new students in the city. Morin’s tenure would see that trend shift with increased enrollment and changes to how the school served its students.
Morin was recently profiled in the latest issue of Milwaukee Magazine in an article called, The Man Behind the Mission. His journey into the art field started early.
"I knew in kindergarten what I wanted to do," notes Morin. "I've got vivid memories of saying it out loud and that I wanted to be an artist and an educator. And really, neither of those things were in my immediate family, so it came from something of the sky."
Growing up in Madawaska, Maine, Morin's first artistic outlet was drawing on excess sheets of paper in his parent's auto body shop. "We would get rolls and rolls of seconds paper from the paper mill that my dad used to tape up cars for paint. There were always big rolls of paper around and it was one thing that we just didn't have to be frugal about," he recalls.
By the time Morin was ready to pursue higher education, his interests in artistic expression were wide and varied. "When I went to art school in Philadelphia, I was one of a very small handful of people who majored in what was called Interdepartmental, majored in everything," says Morin. " [I] had classes in glass blowing and printmaking and graphic design and illustration and photography because all I wanted to do was make things and really, quite frankly, it didn't matter. I just wanted to make things."
Morin spent 19 years at UW-Stevens Point, and after reaching the point in his career where he wanted to be involved in the crucial decision making process, he came to MIAD.
"We had what I would call a disconnect," notes Morin. "People spoke passionately about what they did at the college ... and yet we seemed a little blind to the fact that a little bit over thirty percent of our students were leaving from the first year to the second year... Where were we failing? And that really became a conversation with the faculty and the staff."
Within two years, 85% percent of the first years were returning and enrollment overall has grown 43% under Morin’s tenure. He notes there have been improvements to technology, student services and more pointed outreach to high school students who are interested in pursuing art.
However, like most higher education institutions, the progress made was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, with more colleges closing regularly Morin admits that the work they're doing "feels like work done without a safety net."
"We have to think about every investment that we make. But I also think in the simplest of terms, there will be schools that will be successful and schools that won't," explains Morin. "We know who we are as a college, we know who we want to serve. We offer a very limited menu of academic programs, and we try to map out what success would look like for a graduate in any of those programs."
"Because of my personal background, I take it personally. I want people to know where they can go with this," he adds. "And we’re not perfect at it, we’re not necessarily perfectly consistent at it, but it’s what we’re striving for."
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