Campus Construction for Academic Survival: The Importance of the Curriculum in the College Building Program
IN I985, an educational historian studying the annals of small independent colleges will be likely to note a relationship between the pattern of campus construction and academic survival. Never in the development of American higher education has there been such a wave of building on our college campuses as is taking place in the I960's. Never before was the planning of construction so vital to survival for small independent colleges with modest resources. It is all too easy for them to be trapped into extinction by the wrong pattern of construction. It is essential that building programs undertaken by such colleges, which must carefully husband their resources, be planned around the curriculum: not the curriculum of the past or of today, but rather the curriculum of the I970's. Today will be two or three years in the past by the time a building now in the planning stage is opened for classes. Colleges must not be caught in a I950-I960 pattern of curriculum, teaching methods, or teaching tools in the I970's. There are several hundred small colleges in the United States which lack the resources to carry on a continuing program of research and experimentation in the development of programed learning, electronic teaching aids, and other methods of instruction. In most cases these colleges have been operating successfully for over fifty years. Thus their plants are in need of replacement, are being replaced, or have been replaced in the last decade. A small independent college, with limited endowment, which has decided to construct a new library, dormitory, or classroom building may have been eyeing enviously those recently built on the campuses of its neighbors. There is always the temptation to put up a building like the neighbor's, but "just a little newer and better." Some of our leading institutions, however, with sufficient resources to have conducted several years of research and experimentation, are already beginning to build entirely new types of structure.