Downtown Decay in the University Core: Cultural Landscape Impacts of Disinvestment in Public Higher Education

Keywords: Higher education; cultural landscape; historic preservation; disinvestment
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Many of the current challenges higher education in the U.S. face were already in place prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic; however, the impacts are being felt more acutely than previously. One such difficulty is a backlog of deferred maintenance on physical campuses; facilities consulting firm Gordian (2022) estimates the total cost to be over $110 billion. Moreover, as the cost of deferred maintenance on campuses across the country has grown in more recent decades, the spatial footprint of institutions has often grown. New campus buildings and physical expansion into surrounding neighborhoods and satellite spaces has often occurred at the expense of older central campus buildings. The result has been at times derelict core campus in which older facilities must be taken offline due to cost of rehabilitation or historic preservation. The impacts of such circumstances have been particularly acute for non-doctoral granting institutions for whom opportunities for new revenue streams are more limited.

Through a case study of a regional comprehensive university, this paper explores the impacts of deferred maintenance on the cultural landscape of the institution. I discuss the circumstance of the campus within the context of the historical development of the deferred maintenance backlog and the scope of larger enrollment trends and economic constraints faced by institutions of higher education in the U.S. today. The impacts of public disinvestment and amid geographic expansion on university campuses suggests parallels with the abandonment of traditional downtown areas and expansion of suburbs and edge cities.