FROM THE LEXICON - CUDC Quarterly 3:1 - Winter 2003

Campus

The first recorded use of the word "campus" (Latin for "field") in relation to the grounds of a college is from 1774. It comes from a letter relating how Princeton students burned tea to protest British taxes. The word is purely American in origin, as is the kind of place it describes. European universities were essentially urban in character and grew haphazardly, occupying available buildings in dense towns. If there was a collegiate open space, it was a cloister (as at Oxford and Cambridge).

From early on, American colleges departed from the European model, building in parklike precincts. After independence, new schools were often built away from  commercial centers, so that learning could take place in the virtuous countryside, not the squalid city. The campus was to be secluded and pastoral, and many American universities have sought to preserve that ideal, even as they have grown to the scale of small cities, with all the urban problems and impacts that tend to occur when tens of thousands of people live close together.

Campus planners have been coping with these issues of scale and complexity with mixed success ever since the post-war boom in higher education began 50 years ago. It’s become necessary to site larger and larger facilities, especially for the sciences, and to accomodate vast amounts of traffic and parking. In spite of this, the idyllic campus ideal has proved remarkably durable, and this probably hasn’t helped universities and colleges manage growth as well as they might.

This paradox is most apparent when it comes to urban universities. The term "urban campus" is practically an oxymoron, but our urban universities have been, for the most part, reluctant to go back to their European roots and integrate themselves into the cities they serve. For example, Cleveland State has an ad that says "The city is our campus," but the people who work and learn at CSU still want their own contained place that isn’t just part of the city. So the urban campus needs legible boundaries, but it also needs to reach into the city that American higher education has so long held at arm’s length.