Previous |
Next |
April 10, 2008, 04:32 PM ET
Can Small Be Beautiful?
Is “growing like Topsy” necessarily good for universities? Is it in any case inevitable? That is certainly the feeling I get when I travel from campus to campus. Each one seems more like a series of construction sites than a settled community, and there seems to be no end in sight to physical expansion.
I commented several months ago on the attempts of urban universities (Columbia, Harvard) to expand geographically. But I am in fact more interested in and concerned about the expanding built campus environment.
The Chronicle had an interesting piece on campus construction by Lawrence Biemiller yesterday: “Campus Construction Continues Despite Economy’s Woes.” Biemiller demonstrates that campus building has been surprisingly resistant to cutbacks due to the declining national economy. The building craze also continues despite the current inflationary pressures. Princeton’s vice president for facilities forecasts 7- to 8-percent price increases for construction annually, and expects the trend to continue. He says that Princeton “can afford to do less with the same resources,” but my untutored eye does not perceive any slowdown in new buildings on an already crowed central campus. Much of this building, at Princeton and elsewhere, is of course for new science and technology facilities — for which the universities doubtless expect return on investment. But of course the maintenance cost of additional structures steadily and vastly increases the fixed costs of doing university business.
I know that I sound like a broken record when I observe that the investment choices in expanding the built environment generally favor the sciences, technology, and athletics, and seldom do much to enhance the capacity of the humanities and social sciences. They also favor research over teaching. But I don’t think the point can be made too often.
I also wonder whether the educational functions of the university, especially the needs of undergraduate education, are not taking a back seat to what is considered to be “useful” science and technological research? Are we spending scarce resources on research that we ought to be spending on promoting student learning? Are we sending the wrong sorts of signals to undergraduate students? Are we maintaining the sort of proximity that is most conducive to community interaction?
Whatever happened to the notion that, in higher education, small might be beautiful?
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.