New Fay Jones School Dean Jim Stevens Approaches Leadership Through Engagement

When Jim Stevens was announced in June as the next dean for the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the U of A, he was teaching study abroad students at Clemson University's center in Genoa, Italy. Navigating the seven-hour time difference, he prepared for this transition over the summer. Once in Fayetteville in mid-August, he set up his office in time for the start of classes.

His position as the sixth dean begins the next chapter for the school, as it marks 80 years of architecture and design education at the U of A. Stevens was formerly a professor at the Richard A. McMahan School of Architecture at Clemson University in South Carolina, where he also served as director from 2020-2025.

Stevens, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, came to design through strong influences and mentors in his life. He was raised by a single mom who was a legal secretary in the North Carolina attorney general's office. In the 1950s and 1960s, his grandfather was a typesetter and advertising/marketing person for the A.E. Finley Corporation and had a keen eye for design. It was his high school art teacher and a well-known North Carolina artist, Bob Rankin, who suggested that he study architecture in college.

"Nobody had ever told me you could go to college to study design, art, architecture. And when I was in his course and I excelled in his classes was the first time that I felt like I excelled at anything academically. I also felt very at home in this kind of creative studio environment," Stevens said.

He first attended community college, learning drafting and the emerging digital programs, and then completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in historic preservation at Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, and a Master of Architecture at North Carolina State University College of Design in Raleigh. He completed his Ph.D. in architecture and urban planning at the University of Ferrara in Ferrara, Italy, with a residency at Polis University, in Tirana, Albania.

Stevens comes to Northwest Arkansas from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains — also rich in forests and waterways. Prior to Clemson, he taught at Lawrence Technological University's College of Architecture and Design in Southfield, Michigan, where he was also founding director of the makeLab, a digital fabrication lab.

Since 2011, he's been an international faculty member at Polis University, where he's led annual workshops and been involved with curriculum advising and thesis advising. He also has led digital fabrication and other design workshops around the world, in locales such as India, Romania and France.

As director of Clemson University's School of Architecture, Stevens oversaw eight graduate and undergraduate degree programs, including architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, and historic preservation. Clemson also has a fluid campus model, much like the Fay Jones School, that requires design students to study abroad — in Genoa, Italy, or Barcelona, Spain, as well as a domestic option on the Charleston campus. Stevens added a fourth location, the first in 25 years, in the Dominican Republic. Now in its second year, this experience is specifically focused on ecology and landscape architecture. 

New Mission at the U of A

The U of A was a clear choice for Stevens when making a career move, largely for its land-grant mission. He gained his own graduate education at a land-grant institution, North Carolina State University, and Clemson University is one as well. And, importantly, these universities serve states with predominantly rural communities.

"I believe in the power of design in our rural communities," he said. "It's something in my career that I've felt pretty strongly about. So, for me to be able to lead in a place that can't not care about that, it has to be their primary focus, is super exciting."

He said the Fay Jones School's new Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation serves as an umbrella for many ambitions — with the mass timber industry, the future of timber design and construction, and the need for research and teaching in these areas. The center's work will serve the state, as well as the entire southeast region and beyond.

With the fabrication spaces and equipment in the Anthony Timberlands Center and in Vol Walker Hall, Stevens sees the faculty and students embracing new technological innovations that support and advance design in the built environment, while impacting the state's residents and economy. This involves work that drives innovations in mass timber, in community planning and design, and in areas of ecology and landscape architecture.

"There are so many evolving and emerging technologies that I think not only do we have to engage in, but we have to lead in," Stevens said. "So, I know we can do that — we just have to work together and make the right investments to do that." 

Cultivating Engagement and Sense of Place

Stevens approaches leadership through engagement and conversations with faculty, staff and alumni. Once he's had a chance to talk with these groups and gain more insights, he plans to lead the school through a multi-year strategic planning process. The U of A's three strategic pillars of student success, research excellence and employer of choice will guide the school's plan. He said a school of architecture, landscape architecture and interior architecture and design education is well-suited to address these areas.

"In fact, we're perfectly suited to lead in those areas. We just need to state for ourselves how we will contribute to the three pillars through the voice of a designer," he said.

Before that plan is formed, Stevens is already confident about some focus areas. He sees the school community working together to identify the inherent strengths and weaknesses of its programs and extend the school's impact on the state. And he sees the faculty collectively evolving the curriculum to address technological, social and environmental changes. He views his leadership style as tending, like tending a garden.

"One thing that I know that we can do is tend to, improve, work on and collaborate to build a teaching and learning community," he said. "I think when the school is operating at its highest level, the students are teaching the faculty, the faculty are teaching the students, the staff are teaching the administrators."

In particular, Stevens aims to streamline what can be streamlined and organize operations so that faculty are able to focus on teaching, designing and collaborating. "I think that designers work really well in their best form when you design systems in which as much of the noise can be removed from them as possible."  

Keeping in mind the U of A's land-grant mission, Stevens wants to cultivate a culture and pedagogy for students so that everyone feels like they belong. Because students who feel safe and supported are going to be creative and more likely to succeed, he said.

"Maybe it goes back to me and the art room in high school, right? For the first time, I felt like I belonged there, like this is my place. And I want them to feel that way when they're in our buildings," he said.

Evolving Design and Studio Culture

The Fay Jones School excels at the hand-to-brain connection through sketching and making, Stevens said. He considers this aspect of design thinking one of the most important things taught in an architecture and design school, and it was a big attraction to the job.

"There's no computer program or AI that will ever take that away, because it's a side of our own evolution as humans, and how we understand the world through touching, feeling, shaping, crafting. And if that's with a pencil, a pen or a table saw, a CNC machine or a robotic arm, it doesn't matter. I think we have to have our students working digitally and physically and drawing simultaneously, always from beginning to end. I've seen it over and over how well it works," he said.

Digital fabrication is important to Stevens as an educator and a researcher. These technologies give designers the opportunity to have a greater influence over the fabrication, construction and assembly of the final product. Designing something in a studio and then fabricating it at full scale is a proof of concept for young designers.

"In many ways, this brings us closer to making. It brings us closer to material, and any time that happens with students, it's important. Any time their projects are kind of faced with a material reality, they learn more," he said.

A special connection to the U of A for Stevens is the Fulbright Program, which operates in more than 160 countries worldwide. Stevens was the 2015-2016 Fulbright Scholar in Albania and was selected for a Fulbright Specialist Program award in 2025 to spend six weeks in Arequipa, the second largest city in Peru. 

His project at the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa (UNSA) in Peru, in summer 2025, was aimed at exchanging knowledge and establishing partnerships benefiting UNSA students, faculty and community through digital technology. He helped them develop their curriculum for their undergraduate architecture program and led a 10-day digital fabrication workshop with students.

For his months-long term as a Fulbright Scholar at POLIS University in Albania, he brought his wife, Brooks, and their two teenage children — providing a transformational experience for the entire family. There, Stevens helped establish a digital fabrication lab from scratch, with funding support from European Union grants. The lab was the first of its kind in a design school in the western Balkans, and he's since visited there more than 20 times to continue that work.

"It cemented me at an institution in a country that was building the pedagogical foundation for architecture in the country, and I was able to be a part of that from the beginning," he said. "And now they're flying on their own. It's incredibly rewarding to see how far they've come and how hard they've worked — and to be a part that, which had everything to do with Fulbright. If it wasn't for Fulbright, I wouldn't have had the funding or the time to do it."

Making that connection even more meaningful, the Fay Jones School dean's office — the nerve center for the school — happens to be the space once occupied by J. William Fulbright when he served as U of A president from 1939-41, and when Vol Walker Hall was the then-new campus library building.

As the first day of the fall semester approached, Stevens readied the light-filled, wood-paneled office and arranged comfortable chairs around a low glass table to invite conversations about writing the school's next chapter.