The shifts being felt by colleges and universities are not limited to evolving educational technology.  The challenges to higher education include threats to business models, questions of legitimacy, and doubts about cost effectiveness.  Even if the promise of digital transformation is overstated, the consequences of the changing context will require campuses to adapt as rapidly as they ever have.

The bricks will need to be different, and in most cases fewer bricks will be needed.

Provosts, deans and department chairs already see and feel these shifts.  Facilities managers and design professionals are just now beginning to see their work change. The changes are becoming visible in classrooms, libraries and offices.

Classrooms – Faculty members forced to use traditional 500-seat lecture halls are being as ill-served as their students.  Developing pedagogies that blend the synchronous active engagement of students and faculty with digital “pre-class and post-class” products are being rapidly adopted.  Existing classrooms were not designed for these methods and are not up to the challenge.  They need to be bigger (having more floor area per person than traditional lecture settings), faster (providing exceptional connection speed) and flatter (allowing frequent and easy reconfiguration).  At the evolutionary extreme, such classrooms will begin to resemble black box theaters.

Libraries – The digital scholar needs the search functions of Google, the ubiquitous availability of Amazon and the physical service ambience of Starbucks.  Long at the center of the academic diagram, libraries need to be much less museum and much more “Goog-Azon-Bucks”.  Institutions that have made strategic investments in this trajectory are well positioned.  Those that are burdened by curatorial responsibilities for vast collections are at risk of not being able to adapt quickly enough.

Offices – The transient occupancy of faculty offices is leading to pressure to rethink assignment of private offices.  The stakes are high since office space can be as much as 30% of campus floor area.  By concentrating on functional requirements it should be possible through “hoteling” and other sharing methods, to provide faculty support without individual ownership.  However, since assignments of private offices are typically included in contract letters, it will be almost impossible for some colleges to achieve better-balanced space utilization.  As cost pressures increase, it will become necessary to move to accommodation of officing requirements rather than assignment of office space.  Since this change impacts personal identity and faculty privilege so directly, it will prove to be the most difficult challenge for academic administrators and their facilities colleagues.

Summary – The physical campuses that thrive in 2030 will be reconciled with the virtuality of the institution.  For some with modest digital presence, the place may seem unchanged.  For some with a primary digital presence, its “campus” will be more like the current leased real estate models of the for-profits.

The institutions that survive in between these extremes will need to be more carefully crafted.  Rather than the historical collection of artifacts from prior technology plus new artifacts from new technology, these campuses will be right-sized and re-purposed to meet the needs of a community of transient students and scholars.  Reaching this point will require changing trajectory, rather than tolerating the slow facilities accretion of the status quo.  In the process, sacred cows will fall.

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