At the annual conference for the Society for College and University Planning two weeks ago, I ran into Michael Haggans, a man who is wading into a contentious topic in higher education’s digital age: What is the value of a physical campus? Do we still need it?
Mr. Haggans, an architect who is now a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, is no sentimentalist. He acknowledges that online tools may supplant some of the things that people at colleges now do face-to-face.
But his research started out by analyzing our most sentimental impulses about campuses. He asks his students and colleagues to write 250-word essays describing their favorite place on a college campus. And he has found some commonalities in those descriptions: places that have earned names, like Northrop Mall at the University of Minnesota or Dunn’s Woods at Indiana University. People often describe the sounds they hear in those places. And people have affinities for places that have tables, where they can share work or a meal.
The question Mr. Haggans is pondering now, which he describes in the podcast on this page: Are these places worth keeping?
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His answer is that physical campuses will remain important to key aspects of higher education"not because they are the least expensive way of doing anything, but because they are the best way of doing it. That value lies in people’s being able to communicate one-to-one, and something very important: the ability for people to share time at the same time and at the same place.” Some studies, he adds, indicate that face-to-face education has better outcomes.
That’s not to say that every part of the campus experience will survive in the digital age. “Certainly the 500-person class—that wonderful class that you loved to go to at 8:30 in the morning to share with 500 other lost souls as someone drones on at the front of the stage—that’s gone,” he says. With online technologies, “there are much better options available.”
That may open space for other, better ways for delivering education and services on campus in a face-to-face way. “I prefer to think of it as expanding the capacity of those institutions,” he says.
Mr. Haggans invites readers to send him their 250-word essays about their favorite place on campus. Why do you value this place? Why is it place worth remembering? You can reach him at mhaggans@umn.edu.
