7.1: Central Campus
Redevelop Central Campus so that it is a vibrant intellectual and residential community Other Information:
The development of Central Campus as a coherent place connecting East and West offers a transformational opportunity in the
life of Duke University. The Central Campus Planning Committee overseeing this opportunity is pursuing a staged approach to
its development. While the full completion of Central will take decades, the first phase, targeted for completion in 2009
and including residential, academic space, and campus services space, will embody our commitments to interdisciplinarity,
internationalization, the arts, and the integration of learning and living. The educational model driving the conception of
Central is explicitly developmental, fostering students' intellectual and personal growth through academic, social, and residential
engagements. East provides the inward-looking gateway that welcomes first-year students into Duke's academic and social communities;
West provides more focused intellectual and social experiences as sophomores and juniors; and Central will offer upperclass
and graduate students the outward looking portal to the world beyond Duke. Thus, Central will provide both culminating and
transitional space - culminating in the sense of refining and consolidating intellectual and personal skills and the capacities
for autonomy and self-regulation and transitional in the sense of fostering engagement with the Durham community and the larger
world. This definition of Central as a vibrant place for discovery and learning suggests that it will be a natural home for
the arts and interdisciplinary research centers, bringing together faculty, students, and outside professionals. This intellectual
model has been guided by the concept of Central as an "academic village." As such, it will draw all members of the community
together - faculty, students of all levels and schools and staff - to interact and to engage and exchange with, and beyond,
the Durham community. Central's major program elements include student housing, dining, recreation and social spaces; an Alumni
and Career Development Center; and exhibition and performance space complementing a strong academic core. Current planning
involves the language, literature and culture departments; the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, the Center
for Documentary Studies, the Program in Film and Video, the Program in Dance, and the Department of Theater Studies; the Center
for International Studies and related area studies centers and support offices; and the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary
and International Studies. Central campus will feature shared facilities for digital media production, student performance
and exhibitions, and teaching and learning space designed primarily to meet the needs of the resident departments and programs.
Central will be supported by a library resource center focusing on visual studies but including access points to the full
range of library services and information resources. We are well aware that the development of Central campus must be consistent
with, and support, the ways in which the academic community will do its future research, teaching, and learning. The environment
needs to support processes of discovery, teaching, and learning that are increasingly based in the social context of interpersonal
and small group relationships and that build upon the model of the vertical integration of undergraduates, graduates, postdocs,
and faculty. This will require break out rooms, labs, and spaces that are amenable to the processing of information in multiple
formats, such as film/video, texts, and data sets - types of classrooms for which we have particular current need. In addition,
we anticipate the development of centralized facilities, such as a film/video/ digital production media lab, which will serve
students across the visual arts and documentary studies. To meet the needs of academic and extracurricular programs, a film
theater on Central is contemplated. Finally, Central must include study space and meeting space to facilitate social interaction
and access to information. While this space will not replicate libraries and facilities currently on East and West, it will
nonetheless be critical in supporting Duke's integrated intellectual and social experiences.
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