Campus Universities
‘Campus’ is one of those bits of jargon everyone assumes you know because it’s so straightforward, but that’s no help till you know it.
Even schools have a ‘campus’ — it’s simply the site or precinct on which it’s based. In the case of schools, that’s usually not much more than teaching and common rooms, offices, a cafeteria, a hall and perhaps a gym, maybe a few playing fields.
In the case of a campus university, there’s likely to be all that — multiplied in size — as well as probably most of the following: student accommodation, bars, cafés, restaurants, mini-supermarkets, libraries, computer centres, launderettes, travel agents, night clubs, bookshops, banks, a post office, a sports hall and playing fields, a newspaper and radio station, concert venues, a theatre, a swimming pool and so on.
Not every campus has all of the above — far from it. If something’s particularly important to you, well that’s part of the decision-making process. Check what the campus has to offer before you end up living there.
At most campus universities, most of the buildings were thrown up all at once. and have been added to ever since. Most (but not all) were started in the 1960s when they were opening universities like crisp packets. As a result, they often rely heavily on the sixties’ optimistic enthusiasm for concrete with landscaped greenery — even a lake, if you’re lucky.
Sometimes, it works: a harmony of Bauhausian simplicity of form coupled with… whatever.
But sometimes, it don’t work.
Campuses have the advantages of being convenient with everything within easy reach — friends and facilities, work, rest and play. They often have a stronger community atmosphere than non-campus universities and can feel like a heady little world of their own — less dusty than more traditional universities, but just as separate from the daily realities of most people’s working lives.
Campus universities have even been the inspiration for a whole genre of novel-writing (called, unsurprisingly, ‘The Campus Novel’ — check out the works of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge if fiction’s your thing).
But the closed world of the campus can also be a disadvantage because, to some people, it can feel like sharing the Big Brother house with 10,000 housemates, everyone living on top of each other with nowhere else to go.
Of course, there always is somewhere else to go… off campus. If it’s in or near a town, that’s no problem and, indeed, most students at some point live ‘out’ (ie. live in housing not owned by the university, and maybe some distance from the campus). But, of course, living out may mean the benefits of having everything within easy reach become less important.
Campuses often have accommodation for thousands of students, but often there are relatively few places. When picking a campus university, you should not only check what’s on campus, but what’s not — and whether you’re likely to be on the list.
A few examples: Birmingham, East Anglia, Nottingham and Sussex.
Last updated on: 21 May 2008