Campus – Climate Action and Inaction – Part 2

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Climate action on campuses is far too slow to help avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Only 35% of college and university campuses are taking the necessary steps to be carbon neutral by 2050.  Another 30% will lag by 15 to 25 years.  All the rest are hardly moving.  Worst of all 35% of all undergrad and grad students attend institutions that have no climate action plans.  When will these campuses be carbon neutral?  Nearly never.

Here’s the snapshot.

Half of all US undergrad and graduate students attend institutions that will not achieve carbon neutrality until 2065 or later.  Almost all institutions tout sustainability as a core value, but for most this is a concept without a plan or measurable goals.  Much of US higher education has talked the talk but is failing to walk the walk.  Criteria and Methodology can be found here.

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Campus – Climate Action and Inaction – Part 1

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How rapidly are campuses carbon footprints shrinking to zero?  Some have already made it, while others are not just slow, they are in denial.

Sparked by a question from Bryan Alexander, I set out to try to answer this question, or at least get the lay of the land.  My idea was to see how well the institutions fit an innovation diffusion curve.  The concept is that diffusion of ideas and innovations (in this case shrinking a campus footprint to zero) fall into 5 cycles or cohorts from initial Innovators to Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and eventually Laggards.

Since there are more than 6,000 higher education institutions, I chose to look at 4-year public institutions, of which there are more than 800.  I narrowed the group for this preliminary estimate to the largest 42.  They enroll about a tenth of all undergraduates and graduate students.

I searched each institution’s website to see if they had a climate action plan.  I also used sustainability as the search term.  From these queries it was possible to determine if there was a current Climate Action Plan, what the planned carbon reduction targets were, what specific actions were planned, and how much progress toward the targets had been made.

Slightly more than half of the institutions are Innovators, Early Adopters, Early and Late Majorities. [graph] All have current climate action plans and are making varying levels of progress in shrinking their carbon footprints.  Another twelve percent can be categorized as Laggards.  They do not have current climate action plans but are working on them.  Unfortunately, after reviewing the data, I had to add a 6th category, even later than Laggards.  I’ll call them the Nearly Nevers.

The Nearly Nevers were one third of the group.  None of them have current climate action plans.  Many are members of various sustainability organizations such as the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education  but have taken little or no action to reduce their carbon footprints.

Perhaps some of the Laggards will accelerate their work.  Perhaps some of the Nearly Nevers will become Laggards in coming years.  Most of the Nearly Nevers have faculty members who study climate change issues, and have added sustainability content to their curriculum and student activities, but for now those institutions have demonstrated little or no action to reduce their carbon footprints.

In subsequent months, I will expand the number of institutions in my database to be able to make a more comprehensive assessment of campus climate plans.  As of now the answer to the question, “how quickly?” is: not quickly enough.  While the majority are moving in the right direction, nearly a third are making little to no progress.

Earlier posts on climate change

Campus Adapting

Campus – Accelerating to Net Zero

Campus – Adapting

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The first 21st-century pandemic, digital transformation and climate change are altering assumptions that have shaped physical campuses for hundreds of years.

Campuses are palimpsests, places on the earth reshaped layer upon layer, always in the process of becoming a different place.  Adapting a physical campus is a slow, incremental process. Pieces of earlier layers are retained as the whole is modified to meet changing requirements and environmental conditions.

The most visible adaptations accommodate growth in enrollment, research and new academic programs.  Other adaptations are systemic and virtually invisible.  Early steps in digital transformation and hybrid pedagogies were visible in bits of hardware popping up here and there.  Energy conservation was rarely visible while movement to zero-out carbon has only recently begun to change the physical appearance of campuses with living buildings.

State of campuses – Since early 2022, I have talked with scores of former colleagues and planning professionals about the physical state of campuses.  My sense of a changing campus came into focus from these conversations.

Everyone was emerging from constant pandemic threat.  The masks and plexiglass were disappearing, but no one was returning to a pre-March 2020 world.  As disruptions became long-lasting, the expectations of students, faculty, and staff for their campuses and their buildings were shifting.

Some building projects continued as if nothing had changed.  Other projects were paused to allow adaptation to hybrid pedagogies, remote officing, and more intermittent campus use patterns.  Nearly all my colleagues recognized the changing patterns of faculty, staff and students.  None were certain of the downstream consequences.  At the same time, they shared a growing awareness that the extremes of flooding and drought, air quality and heat of a changing climate were just beginning.

I share my colleagues’ uncertainty about how to respond to these converging forces, but we can begin to see a path in adaptation of existing and future facilities projects, building performance requirements, campus infrastructure, and land use.  Here is my take on these adaptations.

At the scale of the campus – Existing and future buildings are being redesigned to support hybrid pedagogies.  Underutilized classroom and office space is being reallocated for students and faculty, for those occasions when they find value in being on campus.  Building envelopes and systems are being redesigned to account for increasing temperature extremes and reduced air quality.  Offices for many administrative functions were moved off-campus years ago, and now are moving to hybrid models and home offices.

Climate action plans are reducing the carbon footprints of campuses. Land use impacts are ranging from divesting unneeded real estate to consideration of migration to higher ground.  Campus infrastructure is being modified to be more resilient to the consequences of drought and flood, heat and wind, and power and communication disruptions.

All these adaptations are happening incrementally, none quickly.  For example, while a classroom renovation project might take less than a year, major building projects usually take 5 to 7 years from inception to occupancy.  Infrastructure replacement and adaption projects can extend for a decade or more.

Beyond new construction, the physical changes to the parts and systems of the campus can go largely unnoticed.  The confluence of climate change, digital transformation and post-pandemic patterns may increase visibility as infrastructure and adaptation projects evolve.

Adaptations are underway in classrooms, study space and libraries, and faculty and administrative offices.  Many campuses are moving to carbon neutrality and resilience.

  • Even in the digitally hybridized future of higher education, there will be classrooms. They will be used by choice and when it makes a difference. 
  • In the future of higher education, there will be libraries and places for people to meet to share ideas, technology and visual forms of communication.
  • Patterns of campus use by students, teachers and staff have been ruptured. Physical presence has become a choice rather than a requirement.
  • Colleges and universities have an obligation to honor their mission and commitment to the future by urgently respond to climate change and becoming more resilient.

In the long history of campuses, adaptation to changes in design requirements and expectations has been constant and gradual.  As we approach the middle of the 21st century acceleration of both digital transformation and climate change is leading to different campuses. The physical campuses that continue to thrive will have reduced their carbon footprint to zero, adapted to changing climate and the hybridization of the institution.

Until recently the physical campus was the same as the institution.  They were the same organism, as shell and snail.  The campus was a direct reflection of the institution’s mission and scale.  The institution required physical places for all its students, faculty and staff.  These assumptions began to dim in relevance in the last decade of the 20th century, but the change was barely noticed.  Building programs were still tied to the rules of thumb and patterns of the past.

The disconnect between traditional building programs and the physical needs of the digitally transformed institution were laid bare in 2020.  The pandemic disrupted well understood patterns of use which were the reasons for campuses in the first place.  This disruption is changing building programs, the use of existing facilities and the campus itself as an expression of the institution.  The snail has escaped its shell.

The specifics of adapting the campus will be unique for every institution, and none of it will be easy.  There may be some with no climate threats and a willingness to ignore their carbon footprint.  These campuses may seem unchanged.  The band will play on, perhaps for a long time. For all the rest, campuses will be rebuilt to be carbon-zero and more resilient to the effects of climate change.

Campuses prepared for the middle of the 21st century will not be collections of historical artifacts relying on prior technologies plus new artifacts with new technologies.  These campuses and their existing buildings will be adapted to meet the needs of a community of increasingly transient students and scholars in a changing climate.

Campus planners are beginning to realize they are planning campuses for a planet that is measurably different. This adaptation will be an existential challenge for generations of students, educators, facilities professionals, administrators and boards.

It will be like rebuilding ships while at sea.

Campus – Accelerating to Net Zero

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Colleges and universities have the responsibility to accelerate to net zero carbon footprints.  A few are already near these goals, but more need to take the matter seriously.  All need to move more quickly.

If you are reading this, you know that time is running out.  You understand that our species has damaged the planet.  Our task is to stop damaging and begin repairing.  Movement in the right direction has started but is far slower than necessary.  Campuses are among the biggest and best places to act.  They are able to make their own carbon neutrality real. Continue reading →

Post-Pandemic Campus

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It seems realistic to anticipate the safe return of campus life sometime in the 21-22 academic year, but the post-pandemic campus will not be the way things were in March 2020.  What will the post-pandemic campus need to become?  How will it differ from the thousand-year tradition of place-based higher education?

Colleges and universities have been changed by the pandemic.  They are now always digital and occasionally physical.  Teaching, studying and working remotely will continue to be available and an option preferred by many.  Time on campus will continue to be both more transient and more valuable. Continue reading →

Campus:  Reboot and Redesign

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RebootImagine reoccupying a physical campus.  It will be like trying to reboot the command module of Apollo 13, and you are Ken Mattingly (played by Gary Sinise in the movie).  You are in the command module simulator on the ground.  You have to decide what to turn on and in what sequence, without crashing the computer.

Everywhere teams of “Ken Mattinglys” are working on plans to reboot their campuses.  Many have come to realize the campuses they have may not be the ones they need.  All original design assumptions have been changed.  They are now working with a new design program suited for the both/and world of physical and digital presence.  This post is written for these teams.

Mattingly had a manual.  He knew the amps drawn by each system and he was working on a single spacecraft.  He knew how many astronauts he had to consider.  You don’t have a manual.  You don’t know how large the crew will be nor a time for splashdown.  Academic administrators are considering a wide range of scenarios and postponing decisions as long as possible.  Meanwhile, the expected number of on campus undergraduates is eroding.  The uncertainties of timing and target make your challenge almost impossible.

Scenarios

The work of Edward J. Maloney and Joshua Kim lays out 15 scenarios focused on teaching and learning.  UC Davis and others have published draft plans for ramping up on-campus research. Purdue, Brown and many others are preparing to return to normal, albeit with enhanced health monitoring and infectious disease response programs.  Even the most optimistic scenarios of “Back to Normal-Fall 2020” assume smaller incoming classes and fewer existing students returning.  The only exceptions are those already in online programs.  Most of the planning concepts start with assumptions that there will be fewer students on campus and more online programing than pre-pandemic levels.

An insightful whitepaper by Eliot Felix and his colleagues at Brightspot is a good starting point for everyone thinking about the post-COVID peak campus.  There are links to relevant articles by other higher education experts and data on trends.  Accelerating trends include the convergence of online and on-campus education.  Decelerating trends include travel, particularly international.  The piece concludes with recommendations including assessing how facilities are used and rethinking operations and staffing.

Reboot

What do you turn on first?  What do you leave turned off?  These questions are valid if the start date is August 2020 or January 2021.  Think of this as a much needed change in trajectory, an opportunity to redesign campuses for the realities of 21st century, rather than the traditions of the 20th century.

I made 6 recommendations for the future of campuses in 2013, as I assessed the logical consequences of increased use of online learning.

  • Build no net additional square feet
  • Upgrade the best; get rid of the rest
  • Manage space and time; re-think capacity
  • Right-size the whole
  • Take sustainable action
  • Make campus matter

All are still valid.  Managing space and time and rethinking capacity has been important for a long time.  Now it is urgent.  It is the first step for the teams of “Ken Mattinglys.”

Manage space and time; re-think capacity

The need for social distancing requires a different set of metrics and different models of space management.  The economics of the institution may be based on maximizing the number of on-campus students.  Over at least the next academic year, the potential capacity of campus will be reduced.  Residence hall potential capacity will be more than 50% less than pre-pandemic levels.  Classroom and lab capacity will be lower still.

If enrollments are low enough, space will not be a constraint.  If enrollments are high enough the changed metrics will create constraints.  The answer lies in adding time to the equation.  Expanding the classroom hours per week will increase potential capacity.  Hybrid courses will offer the most significant opportunities.  They combine online and on-campus synchronous sessions with asynchronous content.  Any version will challenge pre-pandemic norms and ingrained management practices.

Make campus matter

With so much of higher education available in digital and largely asynchronous forms, the justification for a campus must derive from something more than “we have always done it this way.” As the pandemic spread, instructors and administrators were forced to consider the pedagogical requirement of face-to-face classes.  Many scrambled for digital alternatives, previously dismissed as substandard.

Some faculty members have found the advantages of teaching parts of their courses online.  Other faculty members will not return to face-to-face teaching until vaccine protection is available.  All have learned to teach with more intention.  Many of their courses will not return to campus this academic year, and none will return unchanged.

Even at the most traditional institutions “on-campus time per degree” was already declining.  The pandemic has dramatically accelerated this trend.  This change in convention makes the support of increasingly limited face-to-face time a strategic value, rather than an assumed byproduct of traditional campus life.

Sharing time and place

There must be something significantly better about “live performance” and it needs to be more than “sense of place.” I believe it is a function of sharing time and place.  Whether in the form of agenda driven or serendipitous conversation, “live” interactions among students and instructors have a bandwidth that exceeds current digital alternatives. This is a luxury, no longer to be taken for granted. To justify the expense of a campus, this luxury must be exploited to improve the value of the outcome, not simply to increase the price of admission.

The specifics of rethinking the campus will be unique for every institution, and none of it will be easy.  Over time some campuses may see demand return for its residential college experience. For many others, the prospects are not rosy. Regardless of the setting, after all the layers of tradition and place are stripped away there is one irreducible condition – the campus is where students and scholars share time and place when ideas are at stake. Without this condition, the institutions would not have existed in the first place. Without this condition, there is no need for the physical campus.

I began this post in late March as the magnitude of the threat to place-based higher education began to emerge.  Since then I have had conversations with more than two dozen higher education colleagues across the country.  Each added to my understanding of the challenges.  I am grateful to all.

Campus Closed – Why Campus Matters

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It is just a matter of time until your campus will be closed.  It will probably be temporary, perhaps only for the rest of the semester.

Whether by snow and ice, wind, fire, flood, civil disorder, bankruptcy or global pandemic you may be certain that your campus will be closed at some point. It is just a matter of when and how long the closure will last.

Closures provide a real time test of higher education without the assumption of shared space and time. Instructors and administrators are forced to consider the pedagogical requirement of face to face classes.  Many academics are now engaged in an exploration of digital alternatives, previously dismissed as substandard.  A global pandemic is a gut check for higher education.  Faculty, students, and their institutions will learn from this experience and be better prepared to live on a planet with 7.8 billion people.

Why does campus matter?

Is a closure affecting your learning, your teaching, and your scholarship?  Here is a link to share your thoughts (in about 250 words or so) on Why Campus Matters to you.

Please consider writing three times:  1) as you first grapple with the absence of the old normal, 2) after you adjust to the new temporary, and 3) after you have returned as close as possible to the old normal.  Let’s call that the new normal.  What will that new normal be?

Please share this link.  Why does campus matter to you?

Why campus matters

Frisson – the sudden passing moments of insight and shared community that are at the core of the lived campus experience.  It is the recollection of a fleeting moment of understanding colored by the light and sound of the place.  It is an awareness of shared presence, such as of the cellist before, during and after any sound.  It is a feeling of community and yet it is personal.  It is made possible by shared time and space.  It is there for students and teachers.

 

As we move further into the digital stream, we will better understand the importance of sharing time and space.  That common experience of place has been assumed in the design of courses, curriculums and campuses.  It has been that way since students gathered in the shadow of a tree to learn from the master.  You really had to be there.  Frisson.

Michael Haggans, March 11, 2020

Campus Closed was originally posted September 2, 2014.  This post has been adapted from an unpublished manuscript  Campus Matters:  Place in a Digital World

Michael Haggans, 2020

 

 

 

Campus in the Moment

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In the shade of a tree

Life in pre-cyborg places was a very different experience.  You really had to be there.

         City of Bits, William J. Mitchell, 1996

Time and place have drifted apart.  Campuses were built for a pre-digital age long before we could extend our reach and grasp by digital means.

The connection of education to place has become fluid.  Alexandra den Heijer says it is like “managing a matter of solid, liquid and gas.”  Campuses are just beginning to recognize this new reality.

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Campus as Palimpsest

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Scraping and Rewriting

What Time is this Place?    Kevin Lynch, 1973

Campuses are palimpsests, manuscripts from which previous writing has been scraped to make way for newer writing.   They are physical palimpsests – places from which many prior buildings and landscapes have been removed to make way for subsequent waves of priorities, technologies and design thinking.

Campuses are unfinished stories with pieces written at different times in different languages.  Some have grand chapels, remnants of a time when the language of religion was central to the life of the place.  Most have libraries in prominent locations speaking in the language of collected secular wisdom.  Later, campuses added layers speaking to science and still later recreation centers and athletic stadiums that would erase previous gymnasiums and sports fields.  At the same time students migrated from rooming houses to residence halls.  Through it all, each campus gained a unique founding mythology and visual history of a particular spot on the earth.

Divergent narratives

Campuses, when seen by different writers, produce diverging narratives. Christopher Alexander considered campuses to be organic, growing as new or different needs emerged. Paul Turner saw successive waves of architectural style written in brick, stone and steel. Perry Chapman saw a more experiential nature of campuses as sites of maturity and personal pilgrimage.

Generations of higher education leaders have used campuses as a way of speaking about the importance of their enterprise.  Politicians see campuses as a means of economic development and physical demonstration benefiting constituents.  Facilities managers see them as machines of building space to be maintained and optimized.  Alums fixate on a gauzy memory at the mention of places frozen in another time.

More than appearance

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, our understanding of campuses is formed by more than physical appearance.  After all, colleges and universities are cultural institutions.  Their campuses are expressions of multigenerational effort, rather than transient commercial enterprises.  They may seem to be static and immovable yet they are evolving all the time.  Sometimes evolution is signaled by bulldozers and cranes.  More often it is at a granular level, room by room, floor by floor, as existing buildings are made more consistent with present expectations.  Stewart Brand spoke of this type of constant evolution and improvement in How Buildings Learn.

Old Main and the Power Plant

Campuses are the result of many actions and many actors.  These are places created year by year, decision by decision.  Prior decisions restrict future decisions.  Let’s use two examples – Old Main and the Power Plant.

Many campuses have some form of “Old Main.” Richard Dober provided a loving account of these earliest vestiges of American campuses.  The location of Old Main was usually the first important decision.  The site was chosen for cultural reasons that were salient at the time.  Often these concerned some form of prominence such as the highest point of ground, relationship to other cultural artifacts, and/or ability to frame a campus green.  That first building was seldom demolished.  It became the first stake in the ground around which all else revolved.

The site of the first “Power Plant” was the second important decision shaping and restricting later decisions. The location of the first coal-fired steam boilers often determined future building sites.  As campuses grew, it made sense to extend the existing system of underground tunnels, pipes and power lines to serve new buildings.  New buildings were sited where they could be served through the extension of the first distribution systems.  After a few waves of expansion, the power plant site was no longer peripheral.  It became part of the core of campus.

Palimpsest

Over generations, the earth is scraped and re-scraped.  Streams are turned into storm sewers.  Obsolete buildings are repurposed or demolished.  Roads and parking lots are laid down and later reconfigured.  When the capacity of existing systems is exhausted, additions or wholesale redevelopment is required.

Through it all, the palimpsest of the campus sees multiple scrapings and rewriting.  The digital transformation of higher education is the most recent wave leading to scraping and rewriting.

Campus as Palimpsest is adapted from an unpublished manuscript  Campus Matters:  Place in a Digital World

 Michael Haggans, 2020

Do Campuses Have a Future?

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“The campus reveals the power that a physical place can possess as the             embodiment of an institution’s character.”                                                                                           Campus: An American Planning Tradition      Paul Venable Turner, 1984

Campuses adapted to a digital world will have a future.  It is likely that others along with their institutions will wither into irrelevance.

When I began my work on this topic about ten years ago, it wasn’t clear that any campuses had much of a future.  Analogies to the growing demise of newspapers and shopping malls were widespread.  Digital transformation was underway.  Online courses were growing in quantity, quality and popularity.  Competition from digital alternatives was growing.  Seeing these conditions as existential threats seemed to be reasonable and not overly dramatic.

Some observers were confident that more than a third of existing higher education institutions would close.  Others believed that changes wrought by digital transformation were just another twist in a long history. After all, colleges and universities had gone through multiple periods of change and transformation since their emergence almost 1000 years ago. Each time, institutions adapted and some survived.

It’s a wrap

As I bring my work to a close, it is good to note the errors I have made.  The first was failing to distinguish the implications of financial and demographic pressures from those resulting from technological evolution.  The second error has proven more problematic:  failing to distinguish campus from institution.

Digital Transformation in a Thicket

Through conversation with many faculty and administration members, I came to realize the operational complexity of colleges and universities.  I saw more of the moving parts and I began to appreciate the changing financial and demographic environments in which they operated.  Technology was only one of many forces threatening traditional higher education and changing its campuses.

The challenge became to identify consequences of digital transformation that were hidden in a thicket of issues influencing higher education and its campuses.  While technology has caused, allowed and/or created changes in higher education, I came to understand that these changes were difficult to separate from the bigger waves of demographics and financial patterns.

This realization more than anything explains how a single question led to a decade of work.  I read from a flow of books, research papers, articles, blogs and revisited the history of higher education.  I worked with my students on understanding the planning and design of campuses.  Most important were conversation with faculty, administrators and consultants working in and with colleges and universities.  All helped me to see and understand what was evolving on the ground, within the moving parts.

What was happening?

Pedagogy was changing as faculty members experimented with the potential of online resources.  Coffee was coming into libraries.  At the same time, librarians found the need for more people space and less onsite book storage.  Expectations for study and group workspace was increasing across campuses.  As online resources improved, students and faculty spent less time in classrooms.  Most importantly institutions were less bound to their physical place, the campus.  Several were becoming national and global without any increase in physical footprint.  There’s a lot to unpack there.  I will devote several upcoming posts to do that unpacking.

Campus and Institution are not synonymous

My second error has proven more problematic:  failing to distinguish campus from institution.  The campus, the physical place, is not the institution any more than a religious building is a religion.  In both cases the place/building is a physical expression of the institution/religion.  In early writings I fell into the common practice of making campus and college or university synonymous.  Lately I have become rigorous in using the term campuses only when speaking of physical places in much the same way we distinguish a snail shell from a snail.

To wrap up my work on the future of the physical campus, I am continuing conversations with valued colleagues. I am updating my campusmatters.net blog posts.  Finally, I will be identifying patterns of adaptation and describing the types of campuses taking shape in response to the digital transformation of higher education.

Do Campuses Have a Future?   is adapted from an unpublished manuscript         Campus Matters: Place in a Digital World              Michael Haggans, 2020