Campus-based university
Another day, another discussion about how DCU will develop physically in the future.
DCU has the smallest campus of any Irish university. The main campus has about 60 acres, and much of that space has been built upon. Most people working here will not be able to recall any time when the university did not have builders on site. But that is about to come to an end, as every available space has now more or less been used. I can add in passing that the space has been used very well, and I believe that in terms of the planning and design of our estates we have an attractive and efficient campus, with some stunningly good buildings.
We also have two other sites nearby, but one contains our sports fields (which are very important to us), and the other consists of 10 acres off a nearby road, and is too far away from the main campus to use for normal expansion purposes. It is therefore increasingly inevitable that, very soon, we shall have to plan for DCU facilities that will be established in other locations. It does not seem likely to me that these other locations will be used for undergraduate teaching purposes, but there will be a time when, perhaps, some DCU staff will be based away from the current campus, either in self-contained DCU-owned sites, or more likely, in sites shared with other organisations.
DCU, like all universities in the Republic of Ireland, is designed around the idea of a campus that contains all of the key facilities and houses the entire university community. The ‘campus experience’ is part of what we are providing for staff and students alike. Of course, such an experience makes certain assumptions about the make-up of the student body, and indeed about how faculty and staff work. As more students will in future inevitably be part-time, and as staff will find it easier to do some of their work remotely, these assumptions may become more questionable.
Higher education has changed dramatically in recent years, for demographic, cultural and technological reasons. We may need to consider again whether the traditional university campus is still necessarily the only (or even the best) way of containing and facilitating the new higher education and its partners and stakeholders. We may in that process need to look at how this has been done in some other countries where the idea of the ‘campus’ has never been part of the tradition. But we also need to ensure that the concept of the university ‘community’ is not lost in this process.
Tags: DCU, university campus
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