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CPUC discusses future campus plans, sustainability

The Council of the Princeton University Community held a meeting Monday to discuss the future of campus planning and University sustainability efforts. The meeting highlighted the efforts of students involved in the Campus-As-Lab initiative, which seeks to explore how the University campus can be used as a laboratory for solving sustainability issues through bridging the gapbetween University academics and operations.

University Architect Ron McCoy GS ’80 described the goals of the 2026 Campus Plan.

“We use historical trends of understanding the growth of the University in order to plan for the future," McCoy said. "Understanding where we have been in terms of growth is extremely important in order to plan and anticipate the future growth of the campus.”

A crucial aspect of the plan, McCoy explained, lies in addressing parking and transportation for students, staff and faculty. He added that the University should continue to embrace biking culture as a more efficient and environmentally-friendly method of transport.

McCoy also noted that if the rate at which cars are currently being brought onto the campus community continues, the University will soon require six and a half more parking garages. McCoy said that the community should prevent this by using cars at such a rate that will necessitate adding only one additional parking garage. He recommended the University community reduce car usage habits by 35 percent over the next 30 years.

“That has huge implications into the amount of traffic we bring into the community, the amount of land we have to use for parking garages, the opportunity costs of that land… and the quality of the parking garages,” he said, referring to how a lack of need for additional parking garages would save the University time and resources.

Geocoding data reveals that most University staff live in the Trenton and Hamilton, N.J. areas, according to McCoy. This proximity, McCoy said, makes it easy to implement specific bus routes for staff members to get to and from campus in a more eco-friendly manner.

Another key element of the 2026 Campus Plan is the reuse of empty or underdeveloped space, McCoy explained, such as parking lots and buildings that are not being used to their full potentials.

“When we talk about redeveloping a site on campus, people tend to think about the gardens and landscapes, but I don’t think anybody would miss Dillon Court,” he said, noting that redevelopment opens the opportunity for more sustainability efforts that could create a more polycentric and multimodal campus.

Shana Weber, director of the Office of Sustainability, spoke to the multiple improvements that the University has made in terms of sustainability efforts since the office’s inception.

She explained that, looking forward, one of the things that the Office of Sustainability is focusing on is how to take everything that it has learned about sustainability and using this campus to serve as a demonstration of smart, sustainable approaches that can be repeated in the future.

“A lot of the toughest challenges we have in the sustainability field are all about our behavior, and that’s not a topic that people are entirely comfortable with sometimes,” she said.

Weber said that the Campus-As-Lab initiative intends to solve sustainability problems on campus in order to apply them to various contexts and scales. Students involved have been studying how the University uses its energy, she noted.

Weber then introduced the students involved with the initiative, Olivia Grah ’19, Hannah Kraus ’17, Deborah Sandoval ’16 and Eric Teitelbaum ’14 GS. The students’ work ranges from live-tracking how University buildings regulate airflow to making sense of big-data findings and effectively communicating them to further the message of effective sustainability.

During the meeting's Q&A session, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 answered a question about the recent University hacking incident by a white supremacist group. Eisgruber deferred comment to Vice President for Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun, who said that University administrators are thoughtfully and thoroughly discussing the proper course of action in order to respond. Executive Director of Public Safety Paul Ominsky confirmed that the University is using the Federal Bureau of Investigation to further examine the nature of the incident, and Steven Sather, associate CIO of the Office of Information Technology, added that over the weekend OIT took steps to prevent off-campus computers from having access to University printers.

“We’ve taken technical steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.

Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this article misstated the goal of the Campus-as-Lab initiative. The initiative seeks to solve sustainability problems on campus, not to change campus perceptions on sustainability.

The Daily Princetonian regrets this error.

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