Swinford joins Goody Clancy as higher education planning practice leader

Boston, MA Dennis Swinford has joined Goody Clancy as the firm’s new higher education planning practice leader. Most recently, Swinford was director of the office of campus planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he led a team responsible for master plans, campus system plans, precinct plans, facility feasibility studies, and campus open space design, setting the course for campus investments totaling more than $500 million.

“Dennis will strengthen and expand Goody Clancy’s capabilities to serve the needs of colleges and universities in a rapidly changing education environment,” said Goody Clancy president David Spillane AICP, RIBA. “His career has been dedicated to guiding change on campuses in ways that foster teaching and learning, and he’s been a leader for public and private institutions and within planning and design firms. Dennis will join forces with our Practice Area leaders in Business Schools, Student Life, and Science and Technology, creating great synergies for our current and future clients.”

Swinford has led or been a senior member of campus planning teams for almost 30 years. Prior to his role at MIT, he led campus-wide master planning, facilities planning, and capital planning processes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as the Director of Campus Planning, and was a Principal Planner at Harvard University’s Allston Development Group.  Earlier in his career, Dennis worked at leading design firms in Chicago and Boston, including several years at Goody Clancy as Director of Campus Planning.

Swinford’s campus plans have helped set the course for research, teaching, housing, transportation, and administrative investments. He also directed the facilities programming and design of projects that resulted from the plans he helped establish, guiding their implementation to support plan goals, the needs of the users, and the missions of each institution. His leadership has provided vision, guidance, and support for projects through each institution’s governance, funding, and resource development processes. As part of this work, he served as the key liaison between campuses and their host communities, securing broad-based support and approval for each project. 

“I look forward to helping our clients ‘build campus’, which is accomplished by planning and designing each investment in the physical campus to contribute powerfully to the college or university as a whole,” says Swinford. “These synergistic moves enable an institution to support its mission and contribute to the future of its learning community.”