Conflicting perspectives are at the core of every decision about the campus.  Is it a space or place?

Space is the domain of the facilities officers, the real estate managers.  Place is the domain of the participants, the users.  As the waves of fiscal and technological disruption wash over every corner of higher education cognitive dissonance will increase.

The Right Campus – For the facilities manager having the right campus is a question of resources and efficiencies:  minimizing operating costs per square foot, maximizing occupancy of classroom seats and eliminating under-utilized building area.  For the participants it is a question of preferences and performance:  reading in one’s own office or favorite study spot, effective learning and research environments, and convenient parking and transportation.

There is no such conflict at the for profit institution.  All space is real estate to be bought, leased or sold.  For the traditional institution space is a by-product of place.  Seldom is it considered to be merely real estate on long-term lease.

For the faculty and students of a traditional institution the campus is more than space.  The qualities of each place establish a unique identity and contribute to student recruitment.  For the faculty members there are implicit property rights and students are more like invited guests than renters.  They share understandings about place, not real estate.

The List – Until now it has been relatively easy to tolerate a non-utilitarian perspective.  There was always demand for more space, be it in the form of offices, teaching labs or parking garages.  In times of rising revenues, each new capital request has commonly been “put it on the list.”

Over time, even with the ebbs and flows of funding, the complement of space grows.  Another constant is the resistance of academic and administrative units to make any changes in their space allocation, much less accept a reduction.  Add to this the political and economic costs of actually making any change and you have an algorithm that favors squatter’s rights and provides additional space without requiring commensurate deletions.

The Algorithm – This algorithm and various strategies for gaming the systems are well documented in Tuition Rising:  Why Does College Cost So Much.  Ronald Ehrenberg, a former provost at Cornell describes a wide range of issues, including how institutions follow the course of least resistance when it comes to space management.  Simply put, this management philosophy has led to universities that have too much of the wrong kind of space.  To make matters worse, they lack the tools to quickly change course.

Every facilities manager knows the sacred cows – the special use facility that sits unused for all but a few days a year, or the building designed for a discipline that now has fewer than a tenth of the students it once had.  In the most difficult of these cases, the faculty remains largely intact, along with obsolete equipment.  You might consider these backwaters to be poignant reminders of a long-gone past, or if you were interested in the health of the institution, unnecessary and expensive artifacts.

Rather than address inefficiencies, it’s just easier to “kick the can” down the road to the next administration rather than encounter the opposition for the vocal interests that all of the relics have within public institutions.

The Problem – The problem is that this strategy that worked so well for nearly 50 years has now run its course.  In its wake are millions of square feet of underutilized facilities, rising operating costs and excessive environmental impacts.  This is not a sustainable condition.

In the drive to reduce the rising cost of higher education, facilities costs are and will be seen as more manageable than faculty expectations.  As a result the real estate perspective rationalized by cost per square foot is gaining more standing in traditional institutional decision-making.  At the same time there is still a widely shared but poorly quantified belief that the place should not be compromised, even as the real estate is made more rational and space is economized.

Toleration of the conflicting perspectives of space and place has been a course that has served traditional institutions well.  The unstable ground between the need for space and the belief in place has been occupied by few – those able to speak the math of real estate as well as the poetry of stone.  In days of fiscal challenge and disruptive change math counts and poetry is time consuming.  Resolving the challenges of the near future will require the ability to speak both languages, lest the place become merely space – real estate.

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