The explosion of online universities makes the contemplation of the future American college campus an interesting and fruitful proposition.

The variety of online institutions is impressive. One the one hand, there is the vast and partly-physical University of Phoenix, whose Peter Eisenman/Populous University of Phoenix Stadium was not actually made for intercollegiate athletics. On the other hand, there is the little “Yorktown University,” which runs courses for high-school students and grants credits for “life experiences” from a rented office above a Denver tanning salon. (The founder’s “Today in History” calendar doesn’t suggest that an intellectual environment prevails even there, since it credits Joseph Conrad with the authorship of The Red Badge of Courage — by Stephen Crane.) The costs saved by avoiding a physical campus would seem to allow these virtual schools to take considerable business away from traditional colleges.

It is also popular to say that the traditional college will not vanish entirely. Some students who value the old-fashioned ways will always exist, and “there will always be a Harvard.” I would go one step further: in line with the rule, attributed to Ferry Porsche, that the last car ever built will be a sports car, one could predict that the last university to survive will be a “real” one, not an online institution.

Real-world schools are developing their grounds more intensely and planning them more thoughtfully than they have in decades. Along with the maturation of the “virtual” university, any school that has a spatial presence and a sense of place seems to be making its physical campus even more of a selling point. The standards for campus design continue to rise, and university planners these days are expressly incorporating the neo-traditional principles of the New Urbanism (see also the Congress for the New Urbanism; some argue that it was only university planners that kept these principles alive for the city during the Dark Ages of Modernist planning).

Fascinating plans, for example, continue to come out of the office Michael Dennis & Associates, famous for its Classical and traditionalist Carnegie Mellon plan, a plan that is just as notable for the fact that much of it actually got built. The firm’s 2004 master plan for Texas A&M (under Projects, also depicted at the school’s master planning site) is worth viewing and comparing to what exists today. No one knows how much pressure A&M is feeling from online competitors, but it is clear that its campaign to reclaim vast expanses of empty space is much more than simply “beautification.”

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[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to accreditation loss notice replaced.]
[Update 05.03.2013: Yorktown University (a.k.a. “DontQuitU,” which is not a smoking-cessation product) lost its accreditation during 2012 and now seems to be running a Sports Management degree program out of Florida under the names “Yorktown University of the Americas” and “EDUCourses.” The institution gets to keep its .edu domain name even if it no longer meets the requirements established by Educause.]
[Update 11.17.2012: Broken links caused by curly quotes fixed; broken link to calendar at “yorktowncollege.com” removed; broken links to Porsche quote and CMU replaced; broken links to TAMU depiction and illustrations fixed; broken link to existing map replaced.]