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Masonry.
Preservation Education
by Loretta Hall
One historic preservationist is preparing an application for listing a property on the National Register of Historic Places. Another is repointing a 19th-century brick wall with period lime mortar. Do both need the same educational background?
To one person, a historic preservation career means working as a Section 106 consultant, assessing the impacts proposed federal projects would have on historic properties. To another, it means repairing structural or ornamental components of deteriorating buildings.
However, while the field may be diverse, it is not one with clear distinctions. Some administrators like to be involved with devising repairs. Some craftspeople enjoy discovering and documenting the history of the building they are restoring. Preservation careers form a continuous spectrum from the paramount paper-pusher to the ultimate tradesperson.
So, what kind of education will best prepare someone for a career in historic preservation? “I think it’s all in how you see yourself processing preservation, which has become a really diverse field,” says Judy Hayward, director of the Preservation Education Institute in Windsor, Vt.
A career by degrees
For preservationists who are primarily oriented to research and office work, college is necessary. “It’s extremely important, now, to have a degree if you want to be taken seriously as a professional, because it is a field that has professionalized over the last 30 years,” says Dr. Ted Ligibel, chair of the National Council for Preservation Education and director of the Historic Preservation Program at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. “The trend is very definitely moving towards a master’s degree, and now we’re even seeing a growing number of Ph.D. programs popping up.”
Three dozen colleges and universities that offer bachelor’s or master’s degrees in historic preservation are NCPE members. As such, they are certified to adhere to that organization’s guidelines for minimum standards in preservation-education degree programs. Certification carries several benefits, Ligibel says. For one, potential students see it as a testament to the quality and reputation of a particular school’s program. In addition, he says, the NCPE has an arrangement with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation where member institutions can have their students attend ACHP workshops for a greatly reduced fee. “We have an annual meeting. We work closely with the National Trust and most of the major preservation groups,” he says. “Not all historic preservation programs in the country are members of NCPE. Some schools don’t even know about it, and others have just chosen not to pursue it. As we discover new programs, we’ll send them some information about who we are and why they might want to be a member.”
“Every one of the schools [offering degrees in historic preservation] has its own flavor,” says Hayward. “They run the gamut from programs that train really good preservation administrators to programs like the University of Pennsylvania, which is very lab- and diagnostic-based. I think each of those schools has a goal about the type of professional that they’re trying to turn out.”
Even though master’s degree students might be considered book-oriented academics, their programs often include some craft-level instruction. “The International Masonry Institute comes in and does a three-day session at our field school every year,” Ligibel says. “It’s a wonderful, hands-on session on mortaring and plastering and mold-making. They fly in experts from their national training center in Maryland, so it’s a really wonderful connection with the world of masonry.”
Dr. Kingston Heath, director of the graduate program in historic preservation at the University of Oregon, also endorses hands-on training. “One of the things we do is to provide hands-on training that gets our students in the field, particularly with building technology. We have three field schools that we run — one for the Pacific Northwest, one I’m just beginning at Virginia City, Mont., and one we’ve done for the last nine years in Italy — that deal with everything from hydraulic limes and log replacement to actually working with a master stone mason in Italy.”
Heath says that the University of Oregon’s program has just received a substantial donation that will enable it to bring in adjunct instructors for the next five years to teach classes and workshops in topics related to building science.
Crafting a career
A similarly diverse range of educational programs is available for craftspeople. “There’s been a diversity of approaches in the U.S. on how to do trades training,” Hayward says.
For example, the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, S.C., the country’s first four-year college dedicated to training artisans in the building trades, began its program in 2005. It includes instruction in preservation skills and will confer both two-year associate degrees and four-year bachelor’s degrees.
More common, though, are schools with two-year programs. “We teach a broad overview of all the preservation trades and a strong understanding of preservation theory and material science,” says David Mertz, director of the building preservation department at Belmont Technical College in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Graduates earn an associate degree of applied science in building preservation. “What we find out, generally speaking, is that most people who are active masons right now were trained to build new buildings,” Mertz says. “When it comes to the science of understanding why buildings fail and why material is failing, a lot of times those who are in the field don’t have that background, so they do inappropriate things to buildings.”
Getting the right training is the most important thing, whether that training results in a degree or just involves significant time with somebody who is practiced in the preservation trades, Mertz says. “There are a lot of different ways to achieve education. This is not a field where somebody says, ‘Let me see your transcript.’”
One advantage of going to a formal school is that it will have a tried and true system designed to help people get to the next level, he notes.
“I think the degree programs do a really good job if you have a person who can devote two years to learning,” says Hayward. On the other hand, the Preservation Education Institute concentrates on short courses ranging in length from one to four days, typically costing $125 per day. “The type of students that we have attracted in our program have been mid-career professionals who don’t have the luxury of stopping work, who need access to short courses so that they can learn information relatively close to home,” she says. She adds that her organization is willing to go wherever there is a need for education. “Our short courses are often driven by interesting on-site learning opportunities,” she says. In addition to their usual courses in the Northeast, they have responded to requests for training on specific projects in Louisiana, Oregon and Idaho.
Evaluating options
One important factor prospective students should consider is a program’s reputation. “I would suggest they look for what the graduates are doing and how they speak of the program,” Mertz says.
“We find that cost and quality are the two big factors that students are looking at,” says Ligibel. He adds that scholarships are available from many sources, including the schools themselves, various preservation organizations, community and corporate foundations, and service clubs such as Rotary International. Hayward says she sometimes waives workshop tuition for a student who volunteers to help with the class.
On-the-job training may even be a possibility. “The National Park Service looks for people who have a background in a trade such as carpentry or masonry or woodcrafting,” says Dorothy Printup, training manager at the Historic Preservation Training Center in Frederick, Md. “It’s a matter of experience rather than a certificate or diploma.
We have a three-year hands-on training program for exhibit specialists. At the end of the three years, they will be placed in parks where they will be responsible for projects restoring historic buildings.”
The future of the career
Finally, the need to consider sustainability suggests a need for career-long continuing education. These days, more and more jobs are opening up in areas related to historic preservation, Ligibel says. “And I think soon there’s going to be an explosion, because of the coming together of the environmental and the preservation worlds under the rubric of sustainability or green design. The environmental movement recognizes that the greenest building is one that’s already built, and the preservationists realize the importance of merging their interests with those of the environmentalists and even now the building trades.”
Heath agrees. “Sustainability is beginning to become a critical component to preservation,” he says. “We’re beginning to see the necessity of not just having LEED-certified buildings (where people) look at performance without thinking about the building’s historical integrity.”
Three dozen colleges and universities that offer bachelor’s or master’s degrees in historic preservation are NCPE members. As such, they are certified to adhere to that organization’s guidelines for minimum standards in preservation-education degree programs. Certification carries several benefits, Ligibel says. For one, potential students see it as a testament to the quality and reputation of a particular school’s program. In addition, he says, the NCPE has an arrangement with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation where member institutions can have their students attend ACHP workshops for a greatly reduced fee. “We have an annual meeting. We work closely with the National Trust and most of the major preservation groups,” he says. “Not all historic preservation programs in the country are members of NCPE. Some schools don’t even know about it, and others have just chosen not to pursue it. As we discover new programs, we’ll send them some information about who we are and why they might want to be a member.”