Search The Site
 
More options | Back issues
Home
News
Opinion & Forums
Careers
Multimedia
Chronicle/Gallup
Leadership Forum
Technology Forum
Resource Center
Campus Viewpoints
Services
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
A weekly special section
Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Stan Katz

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?

Posted at 03:32:51 PM on April 10, 2008 | All postings by Stan Katz

Comments

  1. Small is beautiful, especially with respect to the organization of university life. The way to retain the virtues of smallness within a big institution is through a residential college system, as Dr. Katz knows from Princeton. Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson was one of the first people to recognize the coming massification of higher education at the beginning of the 20th century and to recognize that residential colleges were the solution. Now, 100 years later, Princeton is putting his plan into place. (Things move slowly there.)

    But Princeton is just one small instance. The creation of residential college systems (or house systems) to counteract educational industrialization is a growing international movement, spreading to institutions large and small, public and private, across the country and around the world. See the many news reports on the Collegiate Way website for examples, including a helpful overview in the New York Times last year. We are in fact in the early stages of an unprecedented period of college-founding — not of independent institutions, but of internal residential colleges within larger universities.

    One of the most ambitious such college-founding projects is taking place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which recently announced the establishment of its fifth new residential college. In university organization, as in many other things, the US may well be left in the dust by visionary folks in China.

    — R.J. O'Hara · Apr 10, 04:44 PM · #

  2. Six years ago, “State University of New York officials repeatedly violated university rules and twisted the process of selecting consultants so that they could award contracts to an architect who is Gov. George E. Pataki’s next-door neighbor and a relative by marriage.”
    (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02EEDF1F3BF93AA15750C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all)

    I suspect that the real reason for much of the building in higher education indeed involves these sorts of inter-locking directorates — of construction companies, of equipment manufacturing companies, etc.

    After all, as a 70’s student publication once quipped: “Welcome to Yale, where Frigidaire and Bulova are both a product and a person; unfortunately, the product is usually more fun at parties.”

    When it comes to non-profit higher education, there’s plenty of “profit” to go around.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 11, 07:13 PM · #

  3. This whole issue reminds me of pastors who regularly lament that no one pays attention to god anymore—since he is all powerful, we should pay more attention to him, is the thrust of their lament. The humanities seem to have a highly similar lament—our values are all determining in life but no one pays us the respect we deserve. In both the pastor case and the humanities case—I think the issue stems from the same basic error—an assumption of importance and centrality, or rather, a self assertion, without research basis, of importance and centrality. Everyone I know is bored to death with my repetitiousness on this point—but there are valid social science research methods that would easily PROVE the centrality and importance of the humanities in all sorts of later career outcomes BUT the darn (stronger word should be substituted here) humanities people are too lazy to use any method not hermaneutic/semiotic/idiotic/deXist, so they, lacking evidence of their centrality and importance, fall back on cowardly pitiful ineffective laments.

    Laments are not method, evidence, proof, research or honorable. They are just failure in a loud obnoxious form, worthy of another hundred years or two of being ignored by all the rest of us. People unwilling to operate in our current century should not be surprise to find their next facilities some backroom in a library even older than they are.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 14, 07:23 AM · #

  4. I am afraid that the boom in credit we have recently experienced will not only end with milliions of homeowners losing their homes, financial systems collapsing, overextension of federal bailouts and a national or perhaps international depression of some level but that it will directly hit colleges and universities. Free credit to students (and credit for building) has encouraged colleges to raise costs beyond the ability of most students to pay and now that credit too is going to retract dramatically. As a result there will be a shift in enrollment patterns and levels unlike any we have ever seen leaving colleges and universities struggling to pay for overdone recreational centers, residential villages and athleltic facilities among other debt sourced construction.
    Then we will discover than an increasing number of college degrees do not prepare graduates to do anything has a price too. Students get liberal arts and general study degrees by taking logic for math and history of science instead of science. This enormous issue will be as dramatic to the American economy, government and society as the coming collapse of the housing market.
    So football coaches may have to give back part of their bonuses as well as some presidents who have seen their compensation double and triple over the past five years.
    The global economy absent rational leadership in the White House and congress may deal the US and its institutions a powerful historical lesson.

    — james smith · Apr 14, 07:59 AM · #

  5. Yes, indeed. One need only look at the auction rate securities market to see how this is affecting the past/current building craze in higher education, as paying the piper will be costly indeed.

    Of course, to borrow a much-used phrase, all those chickens will also come home to roost for the interlocking directorates so accustomed to feeding at the trough of educational institutions. Small comfort, of course, given the incredibly high price to be paid by society (and the taxpayers) at large.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 14, 10:30 AM · #

  6. Ah, the buildings go up and the percentage of full-time tenure-track positions in the professoriate continues to decrease. What’s wrong with this picture?

    — George · Apr 14, 10:57 AM · #

  7. There’s a difference here between public and private institutions. At private institutions, there is a greater tradeoff between capital investment and operational expenses (i.e., paying for more full-time faculty). At public institutions, where the capital funds are often in a separate pot from operating expenses, the tradeoff is indirect, as in the operational/maintenance expenses after you put a building up. There, Katz is correct that the issue is who gets the new space.

    — Sherman Dorn · Apr 14, 11:46 AM · #

  8. In all cases, the laboratory spaces of scientific buildings require more operational/maintenance startup and ongoing investment than humanities buildings — which generally, only have computer labs but don’t otherwise require major budgets for the upkeep and upgrade of equipment that come anywhere near, say, a Van der Graaf accelerator.

    The science and technology building craze thus, also, entails corresponding major investment increases in long-term personnel funds — at both public and private institutions.

    If the public universities can leverage the funds for the extra ongoing science building maintenance, both in equipment and personnel, they could do it for the humanities as well.

    It’s all a matter of priorities — but again, there is more external building-and-equipment industry profit over the long term in the construction of a science/technology building than in a humanities building — whether in a private or a public institution.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 14, 12:12 PM · #

  9. I am afraid we may be facing a collapsing house of cards with all the money students have borrowed so colleges and universities could pay off bonds etc. Those student debts have been bundled and sold as securities on Wall Street and when someon pricks the dike then the house of cards will fall.

    Actually, most of the buiildings being built at colleges and universities have little to do with academics. Much is ramped up recreation facilities and fancy villages and research buildings where really there is little real research. Every po hick university wants to be a “research university.”

    — james smith · Apr 14, 03:09 PM · #

  10. Many of those “ramped up recreation facilities and fancy villages and research buildings where really there is little real research” are themselves financed through auction rate securities bonds.

    Ask the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, or the University of Rochester, or the City University of New York just what it cost when their auction rate securities bonds failed recently.

    Oh, this is one seamless web of a serious crisis — as comment 4 so clearly points out.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 14, 11:07 PM · #

  11. After reading all of the comments associated with this article, I can not but help, suggesting to the universities, a concept used at the manufacturing sector, called “flexible” manufacturing system (FMS) – a facility that workers can quickly modify to manufacture different products. I believe campuses can benefit by modifying and adopting this concept to meet their challenges. Does anyone agree?

    — Bala R Subramanian · Apr 17, 12:16 PM · #

  12. On comment 11:

    Universities already have this facility: it’s called a “smart” classroom — with or without technology.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 19, 03:42 PM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education | Contact us
User agreement | Privacy policy | About The Chronicle | Site map | Help
Subscribe | Advertise with us | Press inquiries | RSS | Today's most e-mailed
Home | Chronicle Careers | The Chronicle Review