Yesterday our college newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, ran a piece by a bright undergraduate reporter named Matt Westmoreland (no relation, he tells me) headlined, “Universities to spend billions on expansion.” Matt tells the story that has become all too familiar, of wealthy and powerful universities investing significant resources for both real estate and new construction in order to expand their size and reach. The two most obvious examples are Harvard’s expansion into Allston (nine to 10 million square feet of new building), Columbia’s move into West Harlem’s Manhattanville neighborhood (nearly seven million square feet of new building), Penn’s Penn Connect project to extend the campus eastward to the Schuylkill River (after purchasing land and buildings from the U.S. Postal Service — a projected one and a half million square feet of new building), and the Yale residential college real estate project. Princeton plans to add between one and a half and two million square feet of new building over the next decade, though in our case this will all be on land already owned by the University.
The Princeton Executive Vice President explained to Matt that “The quest for knowledge takes more space. It gets more complicated with each generation. . . . [T]he common theme among expansion plans at the nation’s top universities is the need to create state-of-the-art, modern research space.” Well, sure, though both Penn and Yale have more diverse usage in mind for their expansion. Bigger, better, newer scientific and technological research are the drivers for most of this expansion, and there is no doubt that the rapidly proliferating possibilities for research in these fields creates both opportunities and needs.
But should we also be worrying about the limits of growth? At what point do campuses become too large to be communities? At what point does the expense of research become a self-fulfilling prophecy? At what point does the growth of natural and health science create an intellectually asymmetrical university? Is there such a thing as too big? And too rich? I think so, and I think we would do well to be careful about what the university wishes for — it might come true.
