More about Nugent Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specifically designed for the accommodation of students with very difficult disabilities.

Each of the rooms on the first floor, which houses 17 disabled students and three personal assistants, has adjustable hospital beds and high-tech accessibility features. The rooms have a motorized ceiling-lift system, which some of the students use to move from their beds to their bathrooms. Students slide or are helped into a sling suspended from the ceiling; then, with a remote-control device, they or their assistants activate the lift, which runs along tracks built into the ceiling.

The building is designed to integrate students with and without disabilities. The top three floors include disabled students who are able to live more independently, as well as students without disabilities, and both groups share the dining hall. A cardio room includes exercise machines that a student can use from a wheelchair. Buses stop at the dorm every half-hour during class times to take students anywhere on the campus.

Here is more from the university website. 

This blog post by Steven Litt of The Plain Dealer, notes that Case Western has narrowed the design field for its new landmark facility to four firms. Litt shares his provides insights into the challenges and issues of this new urban building and its placement among landmarks:

The site presents enormous physical and conceptual difficulties. It's irregular in shape. It includes a large underground parking garage, which serves Severance Hall and the Kelvin Smith Library. And it's surrounded by buildings in a variety of clashing styles, with oddly shaped outdoor spaces around them.

"We recognize that the building has to hold its own against some very prominent neighbors," Campbell said. "It's a tough problem to solve."

Severance Hall and the Cleveland Museum of Art are neoclassical, and date from the early 20th century, although the museum's expansion, designed by Raphael Vinoly, takes inspiration from the Brutalist architecture of Marcel Breuer, who designed a prior museum expansion in 1971.

The Kelvin Smith Library, designed by the Washington D.C. firm of Hartman Cox in the early 1990s, is a bland, post-modern neoclassical building. Nearby on Bellflower Road, there's Frank Gehry's explosively sculptural Peter B. Lewis Building, clad in shiny stainless steel.

The schizophrenic environment in part symbolizes CWRU's uneven and uncertain approach to architecture and campus planning in recent decades. The University Center represents an opportunity to pull everything together -- but it won't be an easy task.

Larry Goodwin, president of The College of St. Scholastica writes, in Solving the "It's My Data' Mess, about the trials and tribulations of implementing a business intelligence platform for a small, private institution. The article is from University Business magazine. If it is reflective of the essays in the book linked-to below, then both are well worth a read for their perspective on the processes involved.

[P]utting the BI system into operation was not easy. The difficulty was not technological or quantitative; it was political: Who controls the fundamental data definitions? In the meetings of a large committee established to implement BI, it became obvious that people whose primary interests were tactical and departmental couldn’t agree on common definitions. Senior administration had to take hands-on control—our second lesson learned. ...

A BI system can be costly ($250,000 for us up front) and require significant staff training (intensive for key users for three to eight weeks; ongoing, more moderate, for a year). But the payback is generous and quick. Data reporting has increased ten-fold. Time spent retrieving information has been reduced 50 to 75 percent. Collections work that took a monthly half day now takes less than a minute. The controller saves over eight hours each semester on reconciling numbers. And so forth. Best of all, data is reliable and consistent, allowing for accurate and integrated planning, budgeting, and assessment.

It is excerpted from President to President: Views on Technology in Higher Education Volume II, published by Sungard Higher Ed and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC). That entire publication can be downloaded as a PDF at no cost here.

Scott Jaschik once again covers an important topic in a useful way. His story of the institutional direction planning for Augustana College (IL) touches all the bases. It's a story that has its parallels in the major challenges faced by small private institutions which did not, pre-recession, have large, highly noticed brands:

Now, in the face of the economic downturn, the college is making some adjustments -- which Steven C. Bahls, its president, calls the "post-recession strategic plan" for a liberal arts college. That means several new majors focused on pre-professional interests. With new majors, Bahls says the college may need, over time, to move away from a tradition (rare among American colleges) of paying faculty members equivalent salaries across disciplines; the plan also means symbolic and real steps to be sure that the college can attract diverse students, beyond its historic (and shrinking) base of Swedish Lutheran families.

No one will mistake Augustana for a vocational institute. Even with the changes, this is a college that offers numerous modern foreign languages as well as the classics, a college that, true to its immigrant roots, has a Scandinavian major and instruction in Swedish, a college with majors in philosophy and art history and theater at a time when such programs are being threatened at much larger and wealthier institutions. But the changes are nonetheless significant and, to some, jarring.

Kenneth W. Dobbins is president of Southeast Missouri State University focuses on strategic analysis of academic programs in this brief set of suggestions:

Most of us are faced with, or will be facing, the daunting task of balancing our budgets with less funding from state government. There are several ways to increase revenue and reduce costs, which seem to be easier than reducing or eliminating academic programs.

Examples of these “easier” approaches include: increasing capacity with larger classes; eliminating low enrollment classes; increasing teaching loads; redesigning courses; and adding more temporary or adjunct faculty instead of tenure track. However, the advice in the old saying, “do more or the same with less,” cannot be followed anymore.

With the easier approaches already taken, many of us must critically examine academic programs and ask what are we doing, how are we doing it, and should we be doing it at all. How you do this magic act depends on your campus culture and shared governance expectations, but below are several ideas for your consideration.

This link may require a Chronicle log-in after a few days.

A nice piece from Lawrence Biemiller at The Chronicle. He points out that all the campus damage donw by Katrina added up to just over $1B, but the damage to the University of Iowa from flooding was estimated at $734M - but we don't hear nearly as much about U Iowa. He finds that the disaster has given the university an opportunity to rethink its overall campus plan:

There's a silver lining, though: The flood has given the university the chance to rethink some poor decisions made decades ago. The School of Music, which was relocated from the riverbank to temporary quarters in a down-on-its-luck downtown mall, liked the location so much that it will move to a new facility bridging a major downtown street. City and university officials hope that will make the downtown livelier and attract new audiences for music-school performances. Part of the School of Art will move into a new building designed to encourage collaboration among artists in different media, who say that sharing temporary digs in a former big-box store has been unexpectedly energizing. As it has in New Orleans, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will eventually pick up much of the tab for repairs here, covering 90 percent of costs that are judged as eligible for reimbursement. Related Content Slide Show: U. of Iowa Buildings Affected by the 2008 Flood Enlarge ImageLiz Martin for The ChronicleTwo years after floods destroyed arts and music buildings at the U. of Iowa, a university band rehearses in an Iowa City church hall. Enlarge ImageLiz Martin for The ChroniclePresident Sally K. Mason walks near the U. of Iowa's 2006 Art Building West, which FEMA designated as architecturally significant, allowing money for its restoration. Enlarge ImageLiz Martin for The ChronicleCharles Swanson is executive director of Hancher Auditorium, a performing-arts center that was ruined by the floods. The replacement building will seek platinum-level LEED certification.

"There are great opportunities that have come from the disaster," President Mason says. "You grow from these things." She was told when she was hired, she says, not to expect to do a lot of building. Instead, she'll oversee high-profile construction projects—a music school, an arts building, a major auditorium, and possibly a museum—with architects who have international reputations.

This link will take you to a portion of a great Chicago-based photography website, this portion of which specializes in images from the campus of the University of Chicago. One of the current themes there is how many photos they can find of the University of Chicago that look like they could be from Hogwarts, in the "Harry Potter" world.

Photo by Justin Kern

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to Signs That Work: Hospital Wayfinding.

Hospitals are complex spaces. An innovative student project at the University of Cincinnati's School of Design has been working on a set of symbols that it is hoped will be adopted universally, to help patients and others more effectively find their way. The symbol at right indicates mental health services. Student teams on this project are also working on the campuses of California Polythechnic State University, Iowa State University, and Kent State University. This story reveals some of the pedagogical benefits of a project intended to improve the effectiveness of facilities planning, specifically wayfinding. The symbols will also be useful in virtual spaces.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link on How is the University of Southern Indiana's Master Plan Shaping Up 4 Years Later? 

 Does it always come down to parking? The quote below is from a student news article. As well, here is a link where you can download the actual master plan (PDF).

A master plan is an instrument comprised of principles, objectives, developmental plans and several maps used for “shaping the physical character of a university campus” as the 2006 Master Plan defines. Proposed developments in the 2006 Master Plan included the roundabout, entry treatments and road improvements, all of which have been completed. The uncompleted projects include a visitor drop off, a perimeter loop road, surface drainage, an elevated walkway, and an improved loop road . . . Eventually, the plan is to have the main road loop around the perimeter of the university rather than run through the middle. If this plan eventually goes into effect, University Boulevard will only stretch from the entrance of campus at the roundabout to the Orr Center, where the visitor drop off will be located. This will also eliminate the majority of crosswalks that cause congestion and potential accidents. When it comes parking, Kalvelage believes that problem does not lie with lack of parking spaces.

Plesae scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.