On the Campus

In early summer, on warm days, students and staff sit on the grass in the quad with the portico as a backdrop, eating their sandwiches. Sometimes students from the art school are there, sketching. The windows on the surrounding buildings are open. Walking through the campus, crowded with students hurrying between lectures, you pass the historic names of departments and faculties carved in the stone pediments. Tacked, less attractively, to the outsides of the building are the various complex services required to support the labs and facilities that have been shoehorned into every available corner. Vertical surfaces are festooned with posters announcing talks and denouncing injustices. I love it. The campus is the university from the quiet of the old library to the early morning drifts of abandoned paper coffee cups.

For most academics this is true, the fabric of the university and the institution of the university are bound together. Certainly, the ramshackle, vaguely chaotic, buzzy, compressed mixture of buildings and subjects is my university. The campus is where scholars meet and where students both gather to learn and where they learn to be adults.

Yet increasingly there are problems. Across the world successful, older, research-intensive institutions are out-growing their campuses. The problems are particularly acute for institutions that are located in cities or urban settings. Compelled by increasing numbers of students, new forms of pedagogy, the demands of research and ever more complex laboratory and equipment infrastructure, these institutions are acquiring new campuses and exploring ways of increasing access through the use of technology.

These are necessary steps, but perhaps it is worthwhile examining the challenge to the campus. As much as the campus provides a comfortable and practical setting for interaction it is also an exclusive space. Whatever steps are taken to avoid this, it is necessarily an 'ivory tower' ruled off, physically, from the community that surrounds it. The campus looks inwards rather than outwards. It is not simply a space within a city, it is a space set aside from it. This is not only a problem for public engagement, it is more profound.

Further, the needs of research and other pressures such as security, have led to an increasing segregation of student spaces and those occupied principally by faculty. This is damaging to the conception of a research intensive university in which teaching and research are supposed to be a harmonious whole.

Thought leadership, research and analysis are not restricted to academics much, perhaps most, cutting edge work is dependent upon partnership and involvement of industry, public sector bodies, charities and 'non-profits'. This is not a new situation but it is given greater sharpness by an increased emphasis upon 'impact', that is research in the direct service of societal benefit. The preferred partner is now less likely to be in an adjacent office but elsewhere, organisationally and physically, perhaps globally.

This analysis has led some people to argue that the campus is outmoded, destined to be replaced by some digital equivalent. I think this is is not true, and I firmly hold the view, based on personal experience, that physical collocation is necessary for research, collaboration and learning. I also believe that the setting, architecturally and in terms of facilities is of significance for the effectiveness of that collocation.

So what we require is not more of the old model of campus but a new type of campus (or way of thinking about a campus). It must be open and porous. It must be the setting for partnership and in an urban setting must be woven into the fabric of the city forming an intellectual infrastructure.

A few casual assumptions about the nature of university spaces  need to be discarded. Of these the assumption of permanence is the most important to challenge. Subjects and activities are in ebb and flow. New interdisciplinary possibilities open up, work through their agenda, and move on. We need to build this dynamism into a new model campus. We also need to avoid recreating outmoded space usage models: the separation of teaching and research, the separation of administration and academic work, the separation of fundamental research and industrial exploitation, for instance.

We need to look at what is essential to a university, an atmosphere of scholarship, a space for discourse, an environment in which risks can be taken and the physical resources for discovery in the sciences and engineering. We must preserve what we know works - quiet private personal spaces for study and individual discussion, common rooms, libraries, space for lectures ... yes, lectures ... and space for living. There is good reason why these have always been an intrinsic part of great universities. We need to understand that a university is not an 'office', or at least not only an office, nor is it a complex of serviced 'meeting rooms'. It is a theatre, an assembly hall, an art gallery, a kitchen in a great restaurant (without the food, I regret), a club - a place for creative encounters and where global talent is welcomed and nurtured.

There are many ways to make a great campus and no single model is right. Indeed, a research intensive university probably needs to operate many campus models concurrently - Georgian houses and industrial units. Rethinking the campus and its spaces is a key academic challenge. It cannot be left to happenstance or to an economic calculus that ignores the creative role of the campus. After all, the campus is the university.