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.
Campuses were pre-cyborg places. Campus and building design assumed all teaching and learning required face-to-face lectures. Interactions were within earshot and within arm’s length contact. It had been that way since students gathered in the shadow of a tree to learn from the master. You really had to be there.
Now
A shift has taken place. Students and faculty can be on campus by choice, rather than necessity. Some are never there, some only occasionally. A decreasing percentage follow the centuries-old tradition of being there. In the most recent year, nearly one-third of undergraduate students took some or all of their classes online.
Assumptions about time and place have changed for faculty and students. Instructors speak of the “nearly now” world in which they and their students juggle multiple streams of digital information even in the moments all are face to face. Courseware and content can be accessed regardless of location, season or time of day. Higher education functions in an increasingly asynchronous and placeless mode. This is a context that is as fluid as bricks are solid.
We no longer view instantaneous access to information to be remarkable. Students and faculty shift through time, backwards and forward to what passes for the present. All of us do this without alarm or awareness. Just as a fish does not see water, we are unaware of the difference. It is transparent.
What then are campuses? What is their purpose?
Campuses are places where time and place are stitched together on those few occasions when students and faculty share here and now. Campuses where classrooms and libraries are adapted and reimagined are responding to this new reality. In a few words, “managing a matter of solid, liquid and gas,” Den Heijer has defined the challenge for campus planners and managers in the 21st century. Considering the perspectives of students and faculty members existing in three timescapes:
- Traditional (solid)
- Transitional (liquid)
- Transparent (gas)
Traditional is the familiar solid state.
Campuses provide the physical setting for everything from interactions with an Oxford tutor to work in auto mechanics classes, with chemistry labs, design studios and violin lessons in between. While there are digital alternatives, these face-to-face, hands-on experiences require physical space and the presence of students and faculty members. This is the realm of architecture, engineering and real estate, from humble storefront classrooms to historic campuses with quads, dorms, and stadiums. For some the traditional, solid campus will continue to be the norm, the aspirational ideal. This version of higher education will grow increasingly expensive. For many it is already a luxury.
Transitional is the fluid state in which students and faculty members are occasionally present.
Presence is fragmentary and episodic. Students dip into these physical environments when the need arises as they assemble degrees, or courses they deem necessary and affordable. Even the traditional campus has some of this fluid character as face-to-face classrooms are an enhancement to educational experience rather than the exclusive site. Hybrid courses manifest these characteristics by synchronizing place and time, the scheduled class, for problem-solving, teamwork, and application testing. All the rest of the course, lectures, guest presentations and external resources, are asynchronous and placeless.
Transparent is the gaseous state in which the campus is seldom if ever experienced.
All course work is online, synchronous or asynchronous. For these students, the campus is little more than an iconic image, not a place of personal experience. Digital methods allow the student the power to reach and grasp beyond geographical limit.
Traditional campus planning strategies have not provided for the transitional or transparent students, any more than their increasingly adjunct faculty. It is as if we plan for the traditional, tolerate the transitional and ignore the transparent.
For the majority of students, presence on campus is a sometime thing. These students assemble their higher education from a range of alternatives. More than 35% of college students begin with courses from community colleges and add credentials from the brick and mortar name brands as necessary.
Successful campuses will be adapted, redesigned and managed for this emerging reality. The design solution is a campus that provides the right space for students and faculty when they are physically present, and resource-rich digital access when they are elsewhere. This transitional campus experience with its fragmentary presence, raises the stakes for campuses. They need to be places worth coming to. This is not a matter of aesthetics. Campuses need to provide an educational experience that is measurably better than the alternatives. They need to be a place of choice rather than requirement.
Next
Following posts will point to examples of making campuses worth coming to and suggest planning concepts for campus futures. I want to close this post by returning to where it began, with the words of an architect, an academic and a digital pioneer.
Bill Mitchell was at UCLA in 1969 when he saw the internet spark into existence. Years later he observed:
The shift to standardized, miniaturized, networked electronics marks a revolutionary change in lecture hall and seminar room dynamics, but not one that had happened overnight. It has emerged, in stages over decades.
The Wireless Grove, Placing Words William J. Mitchell, 2005
The shift Mitchell saw has taken hold. Time and place have fallen apart. As many times before, the palimpsest of the campus is being scraped and rewritten. The digital transformation of higher education is a rippling wave, rewriting campuses, their libraries, classrooms and the experience of place.
Campus in the Moment is adapted from an unpublished manuscript Campus Matters: Place in a Digital World
Michael Haggans, 2020
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Are campuses, as described herein, really a reflection of society overall?
There are some businesses (yes, education is a business) that are place-bound. These businesses come in the form of a factory where products from toasters to automobiles are produced. They used to be in the form of stores and shopping centers; these are rapidly disappearing in the on-line world likely for many of the reasons that the campus is changing.
There are also businesses that have transients to them. The are primarily service sector businesses where the product is a combination of knowledge and physical item. Maybe we can consider the design-construction industry in this model; there may be a home office but the work is done at a site that exists only for the duration of the project and then moves to a new site.
Finally, there are the ‘hot-desk’ businesses. They are knowledge-based and seldom require a home office or a fixed location. These are growing in the US and elsewhere. Employees move from project to project, may correspond with clients and each other in a virtual space and might only see each other face-to-face at a client location. Otherwise, they are completely ‘independent’ or place.
Education delivery is changing and driving the physical/virtual transition. No longer is the ‘sage on the stage’ the primary education delivery method. The ‘guide on the side’ model has become more prevalent. It too is transitioning to where the guide is virtual and learning experiences are transitory. Just-in-time learning, as one encounters a new problem where additional education is needed, is emerging. Don’t fill my mind with information I don’t need right now.
So as the business of higher education transitions to different modes of learning, the facilities needed to support the different modes must change as well. The campus has never been the reason for education. Education has been the reason for the physical campus. Now, education as we know it is changing from a 4-year immersive experience to a range of experiences some which can be delivered in one hour or less (think Khan Academy) videos to learn about the differential equations or other topic.
We have always seen changes albeit slowly and easily documented by historians. It seems now, changes are happening much faster to where historians can’t keep up. This blog is an excellent example of historical references and near real-time evaluation and assessment of the changes.
Will our architecture change? Will it retain some permanence if only on the exterior while the interior becomes infinitely flexible? Or will the need for any kind of unique (single client focus) architecture disappear to where we create small boxes that can be assembled, arranged, rearranged, or reassembled the same way we create apps and images on a computer (the boxes become an architectural byte).
It will be interesting.