Off the Quad: When Managing Space, Who Goes?

In this wide-ranging article for Inside Higher Ed, Elia Powers starts with the coming move of much of Stanford's business affairs division's planned move off-site, during the coming year, and engages a number of experts in discussion of the considerations to be made when making such decisions. Among those interviewed are SCUPers Ira Fink of Ira Fink & Associates, Dan Paulien of Paulien & Associates, Margaret Dyer-Chamberlain of Stanford, Connie Carlson of Wake Forest, and Rick Perales of the University of Dayton.

Some of the comments to this article are quite interesting:

"[M]any individuals who work for universities do so, often with less remuneration, because of the mission . . . [e]mployees who feel they’re being exiled to an office park will also ask why they’re working for a university when they might be able to work in another office park and get paid more."

"I don’t care what your duties entail — you have to be a part of a university to know how to serve your students and work in the best interest of that school."

"The physical environment of any college or university is intricately interwoven, and it sounds like campus planners have their work cut out for them in determining which offices are functionally viable when cut out, lifted, and pasted at a distance."

"[P]robably better off moving these people off campus rather than asking whether the university really needs them."

"Let’s just hope we don’t all end up in FEMA trailers."