Local colleges examine their role in South Loop

By Michael Comstock

Representatives from Columbia College, DePaul University, and Roosevelt University spoke on local plans and national trends in higher education at a recent Near South Planning Board luncheon at the University Center, 525 S. State St. John McCarron, contributing columnist at the Chicago Tribune and adjunct professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, moderated the panel.

Columbia College vice president of campus environment Alicia Berg spoke first and shared Columbia’s long term goal to become a “coherent student-centered campus from a mostly commuter campus. We used to be known as a commuter school, but now we are known as a greater school nationally. We have students coming from all over the place.”

Two years ago Columbia had nearly 500 students living on campus, but that number has soared to about 2,000, thanks in part to the University Center, a dormitory collaboration among Columbia, DePaul, and Roosevelt.

“Our long-term goal is to make Wabash our own,” Berg said. “But if you look at it now, most of the [student] traffic is going around Harrison Street.” Columbia plans to connect the northern and southern parts of its campus over the next ten years by adding 400,000 square feet of space and making better use of its facilities.

Columbia has about 100 square feet of academic and student affairs space per student, versus 300 square feet at competing urban arts institutions.

“The statistician we used for this planning effort compared us to a community college in terms of space,” said Berg. “We want to turn from being like a community college to a place where we can have the space that we need to have a collaborative, artistic work space for students. We don’t have a student center. There are a lot of things missing from Columbia’s campus.”

Consolidating boundaries
Columbia also wants to consolidate its academic boundaries from north on Congress Parkway to south on Roosevelt Road and from east on Michigan Avenue to west at the State Street/Wabash Avenue corridor.

“We will allow for remote facilities where appropriate,” Berg said, although Columbia expects to sell its properties south of Roosevelt Road and expand over time within coherent boundaries.

Other plans include using iconic architecture, beautifying Wabash Avenue and the Harrison Red Line station, creating a campus center on the northwest corner of 8th Street and Wabash Avenue (where Buddy Guy’s currently is located), and building a performing arts center and off-campus media center.

Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, DePaul University’s president, spoke next. With about 23,000 students (12,000 at the Loop campus), DePaul is not only the biggest Catholic university in the United States but the country’s eighth largest private university.

“Several weeks ago DePaul announced its strategic plan for the next six years,” said Fr. Holtschneider. “You may know we had a strategic plan that went six years. It was all about market position; it was about growth and size and strength of the institution. It brought depth to our many programs.

“We went from 15,000 students to over 20,000 students over five years. To do that you have to build new classrooms, new offices, and new parking. DePaul has had a very aggressive building program for the past five to six years.

“The new strategic plan is not so much about growth anymore. We’ll be doing some internal shifting of graduates and undergraduates, re-balancing the organization a little bit. We’re not looking for aggressive growth. Instead we’re going to aggressively reposition ourselves academically,” he continued.

DePaul among the top
In many programs DePaul ranks among the top. Its music program is in the top three along with Indiana University and Julliard, and its computer science school was one of three U.S. computer science schools to make the top 30 of the computer science world championships this year along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University.

“We are going to aggressively build [our programs] now and aggressively build ourselves as an academic institution,” Fr. Holtschneider said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to change the type of students we have at our institution. We happen to be very, very proud that DePaul is deeply a Chicago institution and a Midwestern institution.

“We’re not looking to become a national institution, as far as where we draw our students from.

Other schools can brag that they have students from all 50 states; we’re not sure what that would bring us. We’re going to continue to recruit from the Midwest and bring the very best out of the students we already have,” Fr. Holtschnieder continued.

DePaul may not have national aspirations, but it does have global ones. Fr. Holtschneider said, “You can literally get a DePaul degree in Bangkok; the whole degree program is available there.”

DePaul degrees can be obtained in cities throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa; a satellite location opened recently in Jordan, and others will launch soon in Kenya and Mexico.

“We have an aggressive international strategy,” Fr. Holtschneider said. “And one of the reasons for that is the same reason the Mayor [Richard M. Daley] talks about all the time in Chicago. The Mayor has stopped thinking of Chicago as just one of the cities in the United States. Strategically, he thinks of Chicago as one of the great cities in the world, and how do you position Chicago to literally compete with the great cities of the world, because that is where the competition is.

“We have to think that way at the university. So how do we prepare our students to compete with programs across the world? We now have partnerships with 36 other nations. We send our students to just about every developed nation and some developing nations as well.

“These next six years are going to be less about putting new buildings into the Loop. We are very aggressively positioning academically and internationally the institution,” Fr. Holtschneider concluded.

Vitality, street life
The luncheon’s final speaker was Charles Middleton, PhD, president of Roosevelt University.

“One of the reasons the Loop works so well is because of those 23 or 24 institutions of higher education that are down here,”

Middleton said. “Down here with 50,000 students going to school, it brings vitality and street life and all the things that go with students of traditional undergraduate age all the way up to graduate students
coming in to take the occasional course.

“The success of the economic endeavor in this part of the city that we are located in, this great part, is because of the growing presence of institutions of higher education. One of the things that holds the three institutions [Columbia, DePaul, and Roosevelt] together is the commitment to the City of Chicago and the general Chicagoland area to keep intellectual capital in the city so the city can become an even
more significant presence than it already is,” Middleton said.

The outlook for higher education nationally, however, is not as good as locally. “Since about 1980 we in higher education have sold this country on a great ideal: go to college, get ahead…you make more money,” Middleton continued. “We’ve sold ourselves as an economic good for our students.”

That strategy has caused a backlash, Middleton, said, because many think if higher education is only a private good, then public funding and financial aid should be made less available at both public and private institutions. As a result, students are in more debt than ever.

“Higher education is a public good,” said Middleton. “The United States cannot be competitive without more college graduates and without more of those graduates going on to advanced work in masters programs and doctorates.”

With competition from India and China, the U.S. is no longer on top in higher education, he asserted.

“We have to re-balance the equation,” he said. “We have to remind Americans that whether or not you personally participate in higher education, it is in everybody’s best interests to have a better education to compete in this world.”

Audience members posed questions at the end about how expansion affects the tax base (they were told economic activity in the area puts more money into the tax base) and future collaborations among the institutions (none is planned). Others raised concerns over whether the South Loop would be “institutionalized” by school expansion, eliminating the “funkiness” of the area enjoyed by students and locals alike.