What is the world coming to?! I spent four of the most utopian summers of my life teaching at Arkansas Governor's School on the Hendrix campus in Conway, Arkansas. This photo below is the track right next to the faculty dorm. I suppose the focus on school is just too intense for hyperstimulated kids these days, but for me, the beautiful campus was heaven on earth, even with the intense summer heat in central Arkansas (hey, that's what the air conditioned faculty lounge was for!)
What will they do next? Will Massachusetts institutions Amherst College and Williams College start putting up bland cement high-rises? Hendrix College was just such a perfect place...
In the world of the mega-church, with fast food joints replacing church basement coffee and the out-of-tune piano, turning campus villages into generica malls can only be next, right about the time the rest of the world is abandoning malls for being so bland and look-alike.
I should talk. I taught at Clemson, SC, a "town" far smaller than the university that dominates it, and the "Death Valley" football stadium that triples the population of the university on game day. The "town" consists entirely of one of those fake "main streets" that is really just a college strip.
Link: Rural Colleges Seek New Edge and Urbanize - New York Times.
Rural Colleges Seek New Edge and Urbanize
Stephen B. Thornton for The New York TimesAt Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., ball fields and woods that the college owns near the main campus will be replaced by an urban-style village.
By ALAN FINDER
CONWAY, Ark. — Across from the red-brick Collegiate Gothic campus of Hendrix College in central Arkansas lie a few beat-up ball fields, tennis courts and an expanse of woods. Downtown Conway is only a half-dozen blocks away, but it is “not overflowing with amenities,” as Frank H. Cox, a member of the Hendrix board of trustees, diplomatically put it.
For decades, colleges like Hendrix in rural areas of the country embraced a pastoral ideal, presenting themselves as oases of scholarship surrounded by nothing more distracting than lush farmland and rolling hills. But many officials at such institutions have decided that students today want something completely different: urban buzz. “You can’t market yourself as bucolic,” J. Timothy Cloyd, the Hendrix president, said.
At the same time, officials have realized that a more urbanized version of the ideal campus could attract a population well past its college years — working people and retiring baby boomers — if there is housing to suit them. And so a new concept of the college campus is taking root: a small city in the country that is not reserved for only the young.
At Hendrix, construction will begin this year on a large urban-style village on the 130 acres of ball fields and woods that the college owns across the street from the main campus, with stores, restaurants and offices. Soon, officials hope, will come nearly 200 single-family houses, many with rental apartments above the garage; 400 town houses, apartments and loft-style condominiums; and a charter school with the college as a participant.
On the corner of the property, a large student fitness center is already being built, which will be available to the owners of houses and condominiums and to the apartment dwellers, probably for a fee, as will many of the college’s other cultural and educational facilities.
Similar projects are under way at about a dozen other institutions nationwide, including the University of Connecticut in Storrs; the University of Notre Dame; Furman University in Greenville, S.C., where a retirement community on campus is being planned; and Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where construction will begin soon on 120 condominium apartments on campus for working people and retirees.
“It’s part of a pattern of colleges and universities realizing that they have elements that are appealing to a population far broader than 18- to 25-year-olds,” said Ralph J. Hexter, president of Hampshire College. “It’s often said of a college education, ‘It’s a shame it’s wasted on the young.’ ”The distinctive marks of many of these campuses are shops, restaurants, offices and housing that, together, create a destination. The idea is to produce street life and to promote social interaction.
Nearly all of these developments are being built by institutions with vast tracts of unused land; officials hope to take advantage of that asset to help build endowments. Generally, these are also institutions that are not looking to expand significantly the size of their student bodies.
Students graduating from high school these days seem particularly attracted to urban settings, said Dr. Cloyd, the Hendrix president. Many come from the suburbs, he said.
“I think students crave the kind of vitality you have in an urban space,” Dr. Cloyd said. “The images that reveal an active social life are urban-based.”
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