Planning for the first phase of the new Central Campus has officially begun. After months of refining and publicizing their overarching vision for the new “village,” administrators, faculty and student representatives have begun researching what exactly should fill the 278-acre campus once its current buildings are razed.
At a kick-off meeting last week, the Central Campus Planning Committee tackled the first stage of Central’s overhaul, which includes building new residential accommodations and eateries as well as venues for classes and other activities. Three subcommittees were created to address specific areas of life on the revitalized campus: Housing and Dining, Academic Programs and Spaces and Extra-, Co-curricular and Recreational Activities, Services and Spaces. Executive Vice President Tallman Trask said a separate group was formed to handle communication with the greater Durham area to make sure that “people understand what we’re doing here and what we’re not doing, because there is a lot of community mistrust.”
Provost Peter Lange said the committees were “sent on their way” after the meeting to probe their particular areas and told to report back with “their broad conceptual thinking.”
“We’re going to take all that stuff and the Central Campus Planning Committee and senior leadership will look and say, ‘Here are all the ideas, how do we mix them into a more coherent model?’” Lange said. “Then we’re going to project them back out to those committees and say, ‘Now here’s what you need to plan in more detail.’”
The subcommittees’ initial reports are due in four to five weeks, and the sum of their findings and recommendations will be presented to the Board of Trustees for approval in May.
Senior Anthony Vitarelli, Campus Council president and a member of the Housing and Dining subcommittee, said generating a report for review in the next month is “ambitious, but doable.”
“The committees are populated with very serious people who approach this with a creative and innovative perspective,” Vitarelli said. “The folks on these committees will do what research is necessary to come up with a truly unique Central Campus.”
Several core principles will guide each of the subcommittees’ work, Lange explained, including how best to create a residential experience conducive to seniors and graduate students who “want a different residential experience than they did when they were freshmen.” Lange noted that figuring out how to incorporate the area and its activities with the rest of the University is also key in the planning process.
“Central is not to be a suburb, it is to be an urb,” he said. “It is not to be a place where people get up in the morning, throw on their backpack and leave and don’t come back until later at night.... We’re trying to make sure that it is an integrated part of the whole Duke campus experience.”
Judith Ruderman, vice provost for academic and administrative services and a member of the Academic Program and Spaces subcommittee, said the new committees were told to “think broadly and imaginatively” and “take a very broad blue-sky sweep” in their research. She noted, however, that President Richard Brodhead and other top administrators at the meeting emphasized the need to keep goals in check.
“We don’t want to build a campus that will be so far superlative that everybody will say, ‘If I can’t live on Central, I don’t want to live anywhere else,’” Ruderman said.
Trask said he expects the first phase of Central’s reconstruction to cost “north of $200 million.” The University has not decided how to fully fund the project, but Trask emphasized the need to lay out specific plans and priorities before delving into finances.
“We need to figure out what we’re going to do before we worry about money,” he said.
There will be follow-up discussions about funding after the subcommittees meet independently in the coming weeks, Trask added.
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