Category Archives: Futures

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

Campus Futures – Two Insightful Voices

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Academia Next scans beyond the horizon to lay out possible futures for higher education.  Campus of the Future recognizes the evolving physical state of campuses. Both books will be available in early 2020.  Filled with insights into the future of campuses, each is the result of years of study.

Academia Next by Bryan Alexander considers the morphing of higher education with particular attention to technology and the near-term consequences of demographic and economic trends.  Before making the daring move of imagining higher education beyond 2035, he lays out seven scenarios for the near-term.

Scenarios

Alexander draws these scenarios from current trends and his work with scores of colleges and universities.  All these institutions are dealing with the consequences of the last 20 years of transformation in higher education.  All are facing existential crises for the next 20 years and beyond.  Alexander offers no glib answers.  As he sees it, “much of American higher education now faces a stark choice:  commit to experimental adaptation and institutional transformation often at serious human and financial costs, or a painful decline into an unwelcoming century.”

“Peak Higher Education” is baked in current demographic and economic trends, plausible and not particularly hopeful, with American higher education in decline.  More hopeful trajectories are found in “Health Care Nation,” “Open Education Triumphant” and “Renaissance”.  These three rely on a public consensus that higher education is a public value rather than a private good.  “Retro Campus” posits institutions that intentionally reject technology in order to find better ways of teaching and learning.

As a former university architect, I am most intrigued by “Siri, Tutor Me” and “Augmented Campus.”  The first imagines the benefits of artificial intelligence combined with advances in learning analytics.  In this scenario traditional face to face instruction would be valued to the extent that it “either differs from software or reproduces the “tutorware’s best features.”    Many will find this a scary prospect, but continued improvements in tutoring software and learning analytics are on the way.  Many students may find them most attractive, particularly when compared to current alternatives.

From my study of the digital transformation of higher education and what it means for traditional campuses, I find Alexander’s “Augmented Campus” most compelling.  In this scenario, institutions dive more deeply into digital means and methods.  The distinction between on-campus and off-campus, classroom instruction and on-line learning are blurred to a vanishing point.  At the same time, the physical matter of campuses must be adapted to this new reality.  In the Netherlands, Alexandra den Heijer has found just the right metaphor to help understand the augmented campuses that are already taking shape.

Campus of the Future

Campus of the Future by Alexandra den Heijer has an exquisite sub-title:  managing a matter of solid, liquid and gas. In those few words, she has captured the physical consequences of higher education’s existence in the 21st century. She comes at this from the vantage point of the Delft University of Technology.  TUDelft has become a global institution with more than 2.5 million students world-wide, including 25,000 attending on-campus.  It is well on a path of experimental adaptation and institutional transformation.

Her recent inaugural address (here) as Professor of Architecture and the Built Environment, den Heijer summarizes her theory and practice of shaping the future of her institution and others in Europe.  Campus of the Future frames the existence of the institution in three states of matter:  solid, liquid and gas:  campus (exclusive and territorial), network(interactive and shared), and virtual (place independent and personal).  All three states are part of the planning and design problem facing TUDelft and other 21st century universities.

This is the seventh book in a series addressing the issues of the 21st century campus.  A single data point shows the power of this work.  In the last 25 years, the traditional student body of TUDelft has increased by 113% while the net building area has increased by only 2.5%.  This is an astonishing result accomplished by 1) modernizing heritage buildings, 2) demolishing obsolete structures, 3) adding net new space sparingly, and 4) efficient management of space and time of use.

These strategies are grounded in the belief that better is better, not bigger is better.  American campus planners and facility managers have much to learn from the work of der Heijer and her team.  Among other things, they have developed Smart Tools utilizing a wide range of data-driven efficiency metrics for the management of space and time. These tools have informed the creation of 21st century-appropriate student and faculty centered environments.  At the same time the carbon footprint of the institution has been reduced.

Voices worth hearing

Both Academia Next and Campus of the Future will inspire fresh ways of thinking about the future of higher education; at once familiar and strange, different than we might have imagined.

The approaches and perspectives of Alexander and den Heijer could not be more different, geographically or professionally.  One is based in the wonkiness of futurism and the other is grounded in the stone and steel of place.  They both understand the forces changing higher education and point to the campuses that will result.  Their voices are worth hearing.