Prof. Charles Dowding says there is something missing on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus.
You might notice it walking from your dorm on one end of campus to your class at the other. It might have stuck out at you when you visited NU for the first time.
Students need “some place to come together, some place to have shared experiences, some place to congregate,” said Dowding, a civil engineering professor who served as chairman of the Advisory Committee on University Space Planning .
NU’s lack of a discernable campus center is just one of many obstacles to the university’s efforts to build community — there are no main campus walkways, dormitories orbit on the fringes of campus and the university’s sports stadium is more than a mile from most locations.
But in recent years, NU has taken a closer look at how it can build community through geography. Dowding’s committee issued a set of guidelines last spring calling for more “interaction among students and faculty” in future buildings. The idea for a north-south pedestrian walkway that weaves through the center of campus remains in the back of administrators’ minds.
NU’s geography has loosely followed a campus “master plan” that dates back to the early 1990s, said Associate Vice President for Facilities Management Ron Nayler.
This decentralized plan for campus organization mirrors NU’s decentralized approach to building community. NU is not just a university — it is a collection of highly specialized programs, University President Henry Bienen said. It’s a fact that makes community building on the university level more difficult.
“Because you have six undergraduate schools, it breaks up a sense of identification I think on the campus as a whole,” Bienen told The Daily in October. “So you have a somewhat more chopped up university than, say, Dartmouth.”
The way to work around that fact is to build community on a more local level, Bienen and other administrators have said. Most of the recent construction at Northwestern — Slivka Hall, Kemper Hall, Crowe Hall, the Pancoe Life Sciences Pavilion — has included some kind of meeting place.
“I see (students) at Lisa’s Cafe, I see them at the new Crowe Hall facility,” Bienen said. “I was surprised that if I go to Pancoe ENH, where I thought mostly graduate students would go, where there’s an Einstein Bagels, a lot of people who live up on North Campus are there — undergraduates.”
The decentralized approach differs starkly from some of NU’s peer institutions.
At the University of Notre Dame — an institution with about as many undergraduates as NU — most students live and dine in one of the university’s two residence halls all four years, said Jim Lyphout, vice president for business operations at Notre Dame.
Lyphout, who also served as director of general services at NU from 1977 to 1984, said Notre Dame’s centralized approach to community building has garnered a following from other institutions over the years.
“That was my complaint when I was (at NU),” Lyphout said. “It seemed to me unplanned sprawl. There’s no pattern; there’s no logical association to the buildings.”
Meanwhile, Brown University is confronting the same geographical problems as NU, said Brown spokesman Mark Nickel. A faraway stadium and a lack of a campus center are just some of the school’s geographic ills.
But Brown is also looking at similar solutions, Nickel said. Building a campus center is one of the school’s priorities for the future, he said. About $20 million was recently donated to Brown in part to build a north-south pedestrian walkway.
His description of a Brown student’s walk to class is a familiar one.
“There will be a new system of walkways that will unite parts of campus,” Nickel said. “Right now … students do go past parking lots, past dumpsters and that sort of thing. And those things will be changed dramatically.”
Reach Dan Strumpf at [email protected].
