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.

Program Change  The facilities program and performance requirements for the campus and its buildings have changed.  Building programs describe activities and spatial relationships and performance requirements for air quality, temperature and humidity. The new programs require changes in occupant density, control of ventilation, and expectations for fluid digital access.

While we may be in mourning for the campus of the before-time, we should begin the adaptation of campuses for the mid-21^st century.

These program changes are analogous to the re-configuration of airports after 9/11.  This is different than assuming we would simply return to the existing environment and carry on.  The institution has changed, while the bricks and mortar have remained mostly static awaiting the return of normal time.

Transformation  We will continue to learn from the ’20-21 academic year as institutions become digital first.  Four observations about future campus planning and design are clear:

1. Some things should not return to campus.
2. Hybrid models will be normal.
3. Campus presence will be both more transient and more valuable.
4. Higher education has been changed. Campus adaptation will follow.

Higher education was being digitally transformed before the start of the pandemic.  Then in March the use of online higher education jumped from 10 to 15% to 100%.  Since then, hybrid models have gained acceptance, overcoming the inertia built into existing systems.  Campus adaptation will follow.

Some things should never return to campus.  Large in-person lecture classes were never good teaching mediums.  They developed to satisfy financial models serving large numbers of undergraduates at the lowest possible cost.  They did not exist before the middle of the 20^th century, and these types of classes were grounded in finance, not pedagogy. All of these large classes went online in March 2020.  There is no need for them to return.  Ever.

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, and none will return unchanged.

Hybrid models will be normal.  When all instruction went online in March, it was a shock to the majority of faculty members who had resisted evolving digital and hybrid forms for decades.  In an instant they had to learn new and unfamiliar methods of connection with students.  Some of the efforts were amateurish and poorly received by students.  Many teachers and their institutions lag far behind the quality provided by those working on these methods for decades.

Among all of the success stories, the hyflex model stands out.  Developed over the last 15 years by Brian Beatty and others, the hyflex model provides a clear glimpse of the new normal.  In its ideal form, student participation flows back and forth from online to in person.  Classes are both synchronous and asynchronous.  Designing courses to exist simultaneously in all these forms requires rethinking place and time.  The classroom is a studio for student engagementwhere the work of the faculty member is amplified and available online, synchronously and asynchronously.

Campus presence will be both more transient and more valuable.  Before the pandemic, campus presence was changing.  Even at the most traditional institutions “on-campus time per degree” was already declining.  This trend has been dramatically accelerated by the pandemic.  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.

Students and faculty members have been spending less time in formal campus settings like classrooms, as more information became available online.  This trend was abruptly accelerated.  When campus life is safe again for students, faculty, staff and visitors, we should not expect pre-pandemic normality.  There will be fewer folks on campus, as many have seen the advantages of the digital alternatives.

Time on campus, engaged in small group discussion and personal mentoring will be more valuable.  Since the earliest days of colleges, this is how it worked.  Only in the middle of the 20^th century did large classes and industrial models of higher education gain prominence.  Paradoxically the pandemic has provided an opportunity to make on-campus time more valuable.

Higher education has been changed.  Campus adaptation will follow.  Looking past the inevitable “shake-out” of institutions made fragile by declining enrollments and hemorrhaging finances, the survivors will be different institutions.  Their campuses will need to exist only as they add value to the mission, rather than perpetuating ages-old patterns dressed up in new clothes.

The increase in quantity and quality of online educational options has been decades in the making.  The consequences for the physical campus are becoming clearer.  I have long made 6 recommendations for the future of campuses.

• 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.

The last two are more important for the post-pandemic campus than ever.

Taking sustainable action means reducing the campus carbon footprint below zero.  Campuses are perhaps the largest designable object on the planet to be able to do this rapidly.  Carbon per credit hour will be a good starting metric.  Making decisions with that measure in mind will make planning and design choices clear.

Making campus matter 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.

Sometime in the ‘21-22 academic year, it will be possible for classes to meet without masks and plexiglass.  Crowds will reconvene to participate in both grand and intimate events, but campus will be forever changed.  Institutions will function digitally first and as a physical place second, rather than the thousand-year old tradition of the other way around.

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 ever.

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