“The Country School” | Winslow Homer
Can you imagine a more dreary subject than
regulatory risk leadership and management?
Enterprises in the business of reducing the cost of the secondary purpose of the academy need to brighten things up a bit. Reducing cost to build and operate public assets is never as glamorous as making money; a feature of the consumer finance sector that insurance companies have managed with lighthearted campaigns. AFLAC uses a duck. GEICO uses a caveman and a lizard. Progressive Insurance uses a lady in white.
With publicly owned assets, however, the price signaling is largely hidden–except in cases of catastrophic cost overrun stories that make their way to headlines. It is more often the case that price signals are conveyed into material and labor costs of construction project bid tabs or facility O&M recharge rates back to academic units which then find their way into the cost sheets of federally-sponsored research. Pretty dreary stuff for most people.
Standards Michigan tries to leaven understanding of the financial underpinnings of a large public sector with royalty-free images that enlighten understanding of the character of these “cities-within-cities” near the center of cultural and commercial life in every nation.
With our selection of images, we honor the settings and accomplishments of our colleagues in all colleges, universities and school districts. Of the five images we select every week one image features a college, university or school district K-12 facility, one image from an international institution, one from the State of Michigan and the remaining two from institutions of all sizes and affiliations within the United States. Sometimes we make exceptions to the general rule based upon which institution may be in the news.
We do our best to be respectful of intellectual property rights. If we fall short in this goal let us know immediately. Consensus standards are, after all, intellectual property. To the furthest extend possible we provide direct links to images that reside on organizational servers. We have plenty of content on our own servers and do whatever is possible to limit local storage. Simply clicking on the image should redirect you to its source. The same applies to logo policies.
Many images are also intellectual property. All images are obtained either from Wikimedia Commons or social media postings that are available royalty-free to the public at the time they were available. We have technical constraints — such as a 1920 x 720 pixels and resolution — that dominate image selection consideration. The vertical constraint of 720 pixels is a particular challenge.
We hope our colleagues and visitors will not be shy about sending us their high resolution photos (1920 x 720 pixels) to showcase their accomplishments.
University of the Virgin Islands | May 17, 2019 | Photo by Sphilbrick
University of British Columbia | May 15, 2019 | Photo by JoJo Das
Image selection is based solely upon the art and quality of the image. Image selection does not either imply an endorsement or intended to suggest a shortcoming in safety or sustainability. We maintain an accessible log of image use every 30 days.