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Few people have looked inside as many campus buildings as Lisa Keith. As a Principal at Stantec, she has studied space at more than 500 institutions, from community colleges to R1 research universities. Her view of space management starts with a simple shift in vocabulary: departments don't own their rooms, they occupy them on behalf of the institution. From there she walks through what a sound space planning program measures, how research space should be shared and reassigned, and why classroom planning is often about bigger rooms rather than more of them.
→ Shrinking capital budgets have pushed space management to the front of campus planning, and gaps in it are now easier to see. Responsibility-centered budgeting, where each college pays for its own space, helps but doesn't solve it on its own.
→ An out-of-date space inventory is the first warning sign. If it hasn't been refreshed in several years, the institution isn't really managing its space.
→ New construction is a small share of what a building costs. Operations, deferred maintenance, disaster recovery, and a capital renewal plan make up the rest, and faculty and colleges should hear that full number.
→ Shared core labs, run by a few specialists and charged back to research programs, cut duplicate equipment and staff across a research enterprise.
→ Research productivity looks different by discipline. Dollars matter, but so do publications, undergraduates trained in the lab, and the space each field actually needs, from a humanities office to a high-bay lab.
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Aaron Benz: Welcome to another Bow Tie Tuesday. It is my pleasure to welcome Lisa Keith, who has been a campus planner for over 37 years. In that time, she has served over 550 campuses. What she brings today is a wide range of breadth and knowledge of how campus planning and best practices have changed over the years. I don't know anybody who has seen more campuses and been more involved in policy, governance, and campus planning than you, Lisa. Welcome to Bow Tie Tuesday.
Lisa Keith: Thanks for having me.
Aaron Benz: I'd love to start with a question that might be simple, or might be complex. What's the biggest difference you see in space management and campus planning policy, say, 10 years ago versus today? If somebody woke up still planning the way we did 10 years ago, what would they need to know about how things are changing?
Lisa Keith: First of all, capital resources have dried up and budgets have shrunk. That's where space management has really come into play, or the lack of space management is really starting to show at institutions. One of the ways institutions deal with that is through an RCM budget model, where basically every college pays for its own space. But that is not always as effective as we'd like to think it is. Space management is coming more and more to the forefront of how we deal with space.
And because you said the last 10 years, this really encompasses the COVID era. Post-COVID, we see a lot of changes on our campuses, especially with remote and hybrid working. Online education has definitely changed. Ten years ago, online learning was called distance education. Now it's just part of our everyday learning environments.
Aaron Benz: Those are big changes. I know a lot of universities are refiguring their work-from-home policies, and there may be gaps in how that's being done. If somebody asked, "How do I know I have a good space management program? Am I doing it correctly, or do I still have work to do?", what questions would you ask them?
Lisa Keith: The fundamental question I would ask first is: when was the last time you updated your space inventory? If that hasn't been updated in several years, then how are you managing your space? Another question I would ask, to see the longevity of what they're implementing, is how are you communicating the true cost of space to your faculty and to your colleges? That's becoming more and more important.
Aaron Benz: The true cost of space. How should we think about that?
Lisa Keith: People think about the true cost of space as what we spend when we first build it, so new construction. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Below the iceberg, you have massive amounts of dollars. You've got your operations costs. You have deferred maintenance costs. God forbid you have a disaster on your campus. So how are we maintaining our spaces, and how are we creating a capital renewal plan that keeps them current? And do our spaces reflect the kind of quality we want to show the people who use them? Not just students, but employees, visitors, alumni, and parents who come onto campus.
Aaron Benz: Is there a different way we should frame the space conversation? I often think of endowments. Endowments get lots of attention, with reports and expected returns. Then you have your physical assets, which for most universities are worth some multiple of the endowment in replacement value, and we only talk about the cost of space. Is there a way to frame the opportunity of space, how it adds to the experience, or the opportunity to redo, replace, or upgrade spaces? Does changing that attitude require a different way of thinking about the space we have?
Lisa Keith: I think it does. That's part of why we should be communicating the true cost of space to our faculty, our colleges, and our employees.
Aaron Benz: Is that partly because it's easy to feel like space is free, or a given?
Lisa Keith: It is. If we don't have strong space management policy, we perpetuate the idea that a college or a department owns its space. Very rarely will you hear me say, "Who owns the space?" I always ask, "Who occupies this space?" Because the real owner is the institution. And if you're part of a public institution, the state actually owns your space. You don't own any of it. You just get to use it, and hopefully be a good steward of it.
This is where the concept of ownership versus stewardship really needs to come into play. Say a building is 75% vacant because we're trying to get it razed, but we're still squatting in it. What is that costing us in utilities, especially since that building probably isn't energy efficient? And if we've got people shoved into a building we intend to get rid of or completely renovate someday, how are they working with colleagues in other spaces? How are we keeping those synergies alive and keeping our spaces vibrant with activity?
Aaron Benz: I'm really interested in the ownership of space. There's always this feeling that space is super personal, even emotional. People spend so much time there. And to your point, they don't literally own it; the institution or even the state does. I think of it as a paradigm shift: they might know it's not their space, but they feel it is, and that drives choices. What have you seen work to change that paradigm, so people see themselves as stewards rather than owners? One of my favorite lines is that people fight over budget, but they'll go to war over space. So how would you help a university change its culture around space?
Lisa Keith: Part of it is changing who manages the space. Some institutions let the colleges manage their own space. But I also think there is a higher reckoning of how space is used, by the space management director or facilities management, so that it takes it a little bit out of the hands of the colleges. If this department is growing and that department is shrinking, space can change hands between those two departments. There will always be respect for the colleges to be good stewards of research space, laboratory space, and things like that. But we can try to find spaces we can share and compromise on.
We can have great spaces that very rarely impinge on how we deliver our programs and instruction if we think more globally about space. Yes, we need some specialized spaces, but getting more flexibility out of our spaces is a shift I'm seeing. Every institution struggles with this. I don't think a single institution would say, "We've arrived. We've got this all handled," because there's always something driving some other decision.
Aaron Benz: Let's talk about a specific space type that, as far as I'm concerned, is under the most pressure: research space. People use different metrics to understand whether they're using it well. What are we getting right in managing research space, especially now that it's under extreme pressure, and what would you change?
Lisa Keith: It depends on the type of institution. Some institutions aren't R1s but do have research. Research is part of achieving tenure, so we know we need some level of research space. When I'm working with R1 institutions, I look at how many core labs they have, so that a principal investigator doesn't need their own equipment. We might have a mass spectrometry lab that everybody taps into. That's what I mean by a core lab. They charge back to the research programs for the use of the facilities, equipment, and personnel. That's where you start to see real operational savings, because we don't need that piece of equipment in 10 labs. We can have it in one space with a handful of people running it, instead of a specialist in every lab. That's when we see a level of efficiency in our research labs.
The other thing I see is that when we talk about measuring efficiency, we often look to R&D expenditures or awards to see how productive a lab is. I would dare say that only holds up in some disciplines. A college of education might bring in lots of R&D dollars and just need 500 square feet to store materials. The sciences may bring in far less and need 12,000, 15,000, or 20,000 square feet to do their research. So dollars are one way, but not the only way. We need to look at the publications we're producing, how many undergraduates we bring through our research labs, and the scholarly activity happening in them. And from a productivity standpoint, are we siloed? Do we have modern research labs that can be expanded or contracted? And save the instructions, because quite often they bought equipment that lets a lab expand and contract, and no one can find the instructions.
Respect the disciplines, too. The humanities may not need a lot of space, maybe just room to collaborate with graduate or doctoral students, but their main research space is their office. Giving them a really small office may do them a disservice, because they can't do their research there.
And finally, space management policies. How long are you going to give a PI to replace a grant that just ran out? Two years? Three years? If in three years they haven't replaced it, you should be able to reassign that space to someone else. Those policies are really important for research.
I love it when an institution builds a new research building intended for convergence, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary work, whatever term you attach to it, and researchers have to apply to be housed in that building. The VP or vice chancellor for research then controls who's in that space and is on the hook for how productive it becomes. That takes control of the space out of the colleges and puts it with the entire institution, and gives us a way to make that space more effective.
Aaron Benz: At the end of the day, it's kind of what's old is new. How do we have good policy, execute well on it, and change it when research changes and different departments gain momentum? How do we build in flexibility so we're not bogging down progress?
Lisa Keith: Exactly. And we have to acknowledge that some research activities require space beyond the norm. I think of a soil conservation lab in Colorado, which I'll keep private, in something like a 30,000-square-foot high-bay space where they're actually replicating soil erosion. That's space above and beyond what any of us can imagine.
Aaron Benz: Let me ask you this, Lisa. I started by asking what's changed over the previous 10 years. Looking five to 10 years ahead, what are you most excited about, or hoping to see change, in campus planning, space management, and space planning?
Lisa Keith: What excites me is the potential for colleges to tear down the silos between them and work together around space, creating wonderful learning environments that everybody can tap into, and maximizing their budgets in the process. Instead of me taking my own budget to invest in the technology in one room, maybe the institution holds back some of that money and together we create a really dynamic space. The other thing that excites me is seeing more collaborative spaces in our research and academic buildings, where people can come together and talk about the problems they're trying to solve.
Aaron Benz: I'm going to say what you said in different words, and hopefully I'm on target, but it makes me think: how is less more? How do we have less overall square footage, instead of assuming we should all have individual spaces, and create shared collaboration spaces where things happen that otherwise wouldn't because more people are working closer together?
Lisa Keith: Right. Less is more. I like that terminology. One thing people get confused by is classrooms. An institution may have more classrooms than it really needs. But the reality is that each of those classrooms is way undersized for today's pedagogy and for flexible, active learning. So we might show them their classroom space need, and they don't need more rooms. They need more space behind each door. Less is more is great, but we need to be on our toes for the areas where the space we need per student has actually increased.
Aaron Benz: That's interesting. At the end of the day, it's about being more thoughtful in creating dynamic environments: not only how we use our square footage, but how we bring people together to do more. Lisa, it’s been fantastic having you on Bow Tie Tuesday. So pleased you could join me, and it’s great talking to you.
Lisa Keith: Great. Thanks so much.