[2006alum]

It would appear to me that lots of the building occurs because many successful people want to donate money to Stanford, and they want their name on it. An endowed chair doesn't have the same flash as a building, and nobody wants to turn down money.  So we get another building. It is not really a planned event, it is a target of opportunity. Some of the building was undoubtedly necessary to replace and augment older structures. However, what we have now is all out proportion to what Stanford can use effectively, IMHO.

+1. One of the things I've noticed about Stanford these days, even compared to a decade ago, is that there are a lot of buildings that aren't very well utilized and that, for lack of a better word, feel vacant. The new Old Union rarely ever feels crowded. Lots of empty seats and conference rooms all over the place. The grad student barpub, Ray's, behind Mirrielees, is almost never even close to full, unless it's for a specific event. The new GSB complex feels a bit more like a Dubai real estate boondoggle than an efficient use of space. The ground floor of the Alumni center is basically just a ton of open hallway space and comfy couches scattered about. Almost every common area in the new law school building is largely just open atriums without any highly functional use beyond sitting between classes. Etc. etc.

Other than just making things fancy and big, none of these spaces seem very well utilized. Meanwhile, my memory as a student is of very crowded seminar rooms, extremely old classroom space in Main Quad and Encina, and a tiny, cramped one-room double in Stern. It seems like some really odd choices of real estate to me, because none of the new space seems dedicated to classrooms or teaching, at least for the Arts & Sciences.

My largest beef with university expansion is that I think it's led to the rise of a brobdingnagian bureaucratic administrative staff that tends towards mission creep away from the core mission of research and teaching. I'm presenting at a university where it feels like there are more administrators than faculty, and one wonders what % of student tuition actually goes toward someone teaching them something rather than filling out the staff of the office of [services/feelings/needs/inclusion/accommodations/paper-pushing].

This insatiable appetite for physical expansion makes me wonder how land-challenged universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, U Chicago etc. manage to keep up without tripling their size every couple of decades. 

I'm an alum of two of those five, including one of the British Unis. In terms of core colleges, Oxbridge basically doesn't expand much in terms of the colleges themselves; they've worked that way for 1,000 years and they're still top of the league tables, so why change things? They add new colleges from time to time, but after a big expansion after the war, there have been few new colleges in the last several decades. Where there has been more change, much like at Stanford, it's been in the academic departments and graduate divisions, where they are adding fancy MBA buildings, research labs, etc. It's just demolishing old things and building new ones, or expanding on a smaller footprint.

I know Harvard and Yale much better than U Chicago - for those two, again, the expansion has been in research and grad programs (where there's even more money to be made). Yale has a brand new School of Management building that stands out like a fancy glass sore thumb compared to the neogothic old campus. They've also added two new residential colleges, a new dorm building for the law school, and a new medical campus in West Haven a few miles west of downtown New Haven, so they're expanding similarly to how Stanford has, just in a more geographically scattered fashion. But land is relatively cheap in New Haven, and Yale owns a ton of it, so expansion is actually probably easier there than in Palo Alto, where nearly everyone is rich and entitled and will show up to a city hall meeting to dish their two cents.

Harvard essentially bought a brobdingnagian chunk of the relatively poor Allston neighborhood across the Charles with RMBS-boosted pre-housing crisis bloated endowment funds, and the project has remained half-built after stalling out post-financial crisis when the endowment collapsed and funding dried up for nearly a decade. They're finally getting around to completing it, and it's largely medical and STEM research and lab buildings. They also recently completed some new law school buildings, though basically on the same footprint as the existing campus.

In short, the universities I'm familiar with are also expanding, just on smaller footprints and in less geographically dramatic fashion. Unlike Stanford, all four are embedded within civic urban spaces, so they can't always clear whole blocks the same way Stanford can, and when they do, it's often on land where there was already an extant structure. 

[quote author=Redrum link=topic=17921.msg210997#msg210997 date=1510005640]My entire walk to the Oregon game was a continuous "What the hell is THAT building..."

If makes you feel any better, that happens to me too and I'm not even to my 10th reunion. The new art built next to Cantor looks nice, though!
[/quote]

+1000. I had my ten-year last fall and between the roundabouts, the bike lanes across White Plaza, the Meyer pit, and the new law school and law school dorms, 80% of my daily undergrad commute across campus is nearly unrecognizable from a mere decade ago.

[2006alum]

It would appear to me that lots of the building occurs because many successful people want to donate money to Stanford, and they want their name on it. An endowed chair doesn't have the same flash as a building, and nobody wants to turn down money.  So we get another building. It is not really a planned event, it is a target of opportunity. Some of the building was undoubtedly necessary to replace and augment older structures. However, what we have now is all out proportion to what Stanford can use effectively, IMHO.

+1. One of the things I've noticed about Stanford these days, even compared to a decade ago, is that there are a lot of buildings that aren't very well utilized and that, for lack of a better word, feel vacant. The new Old Union rarely ever feels crowded. Lots of empty seats and conference rooms all over the place. The grad student barpub, Ray's, behind Mirrielees, is almost never even close to full, unless it's for a specific event. The new GSB complex feels a bit more like a Dubai real estate boondoggle than an efficient use of space. The ground floor of the Alumni center is basically just a ton of open hallway space and comfy couches scattered about. Almost every common area in the new law school building is largely just open atriums without any highly functional use beyond sitting between classes. Etc. etc.

Other than just making things fancy and big, none of these spaces seem very well utilized. Meanwhile, my memory as a student is of very crowded seminar rooms, extremely old classroom space in Main Quad and Encina, and a tiny, cramped one-room double in Stern. It seems like some really odd choices of real estate to me, because none of the new space seems dedicated to classrooms or teaching, at least for the Arts & Sciences.

My largest beef with university expansion is that I think it's led to the rise of a brobdingnagian bureaucratic administrative staff that tends towards mission creep away from the core mission of research and teaching. I'm presenting at a university where it feels like there are more administrators than faculty, and one wonders what % of student tuition actually goes toward someone teaching them something rather than filling out the staff of the office of [services/feelings/needs/inclusion/accommodations/paper-pushing].

This insatiable appetite for physical expansion makes me wonder how land-challenged universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, U Chicago etc. manage to keep up without tripling their size every couple of decades. 

I'm an alum of two of those five, including one of the British Unis. In terms of core colleges, Oxbridge basically doesn't expand much in terms of the colleges themselves; they've worked that way for 1,000 years and they're still top of the league tables, so why change things? They add new colleges from time to time, but after a big expansion after the war, there have been few new colleges in the last several decades. Where there has been more change, much like at Stanford, it's been in the academic departments and graduate divisions, where they are adding fancy MBA buildings, research labs, etc. It's just demolishing old things and building new ones, or expanding on a smaller footprint.

I know Harvard and Yale much better than U Chicago - for those two, again, the expansion has been in research and grad programs (where there's even more money to be made). Yale has a brand new School of Management building that stands out like a fancy glass sore thumb compared to the neogothic old campus. They've also added two new residential colleges, a new dorm building for the law school, and a new medical campus in West Haven a few miles west of downtown New Haven, so they're expanding similarly to how Stanford has, just in a more geographically scattered fashion. But land is relatively cheap in New Haven, and Yale owns a ton of it, so expansion is actually probably easier there than in Palo Alto, where nearly everyone is rich and entitled and will show up to a city hall meeting to dish their two cents.

Harvard essentially bought a brobdingnagian chunk of the relatively poor Allston neighborhood across the Charles with RMBS-boosted pre-housing crisis bloated endowment funds, and the project has remained half-built after stalling out post-financial crisis when the endowment collapsed and funding dried up for nearly a decade. They're finally getting around to completing it, and it's largely medical and STEM research and lab buildings. They also recently completed some new law school buildings, though basically on the same footprint as the existing campus.

In short, the universities I'm familiar with are also expanding, just on smaller footprints and in less geographically dramatic fashion. Unlike Stanford, all four are embedded within civic urban spaces, so they can't always clear whole blocks the same way Stanford can, and when they do, it's often on land where there was already an extant structure. 

[quote author=Redrum link=topic=17921.msg210997#msg210997 date=1510005640]My entire walk to the Oregon game was a continuous "What the hell is THAT building..."

If makes you feel any better, that happens to me too and I'm not even to my 10th reunion. The new art built next to Cantor looks nice, though!
[/quote]

+1000. I had my ten-year last fall and between the roundabouts, the bike lanes across White Plaza, the Meyer pit, and the new law school and law school dorms, 80% of my daily undergrad commute across campus is nearly unrecognizable from a mere decade ago.