Many colleges and universities are largely separated from community life outside of them. Students, isolated from what goes on off-campus, may spend all of their undergraduate years without venturing far beyond the college walls. Faculty, on the other hand, may commute from an entirely different part of town, seeing the local neighborhood only through a car window or over a lunch counter.

At Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, there is no such clear distinction between the university and the surrounding neighborhood. Metro State was founded and designed to be a college without walls, an institution so integrated into the local community of Dayton s Bluff that their resources were indistinguishable. Students regularly went into the community to get needed services, like food and books. As a result, they were familiar with the surrounding neighborhood.

This is an example of shared space: places in the community where individuals from on and off campus interact. Shared space, however, can be brought to a level beyond this. People not only need places where they can interact, but also where they feel a sense of belonging. It is rare for community residents to feel that there are any places on a college campus where they are particularly welcome, just as it is rare for college students to feel that they belong in most of the off-campus community. When a college or university breaks this barrier, they have created shared space at a higher level.

Four years ago, Metro State began an effort to bring shared space in Dayton s Bluff to this higher level. Responding to demands by both students and Dayton s Bluff residents for a new library, Metro State President Susan Cole suggested that a shared facility could be created. She entered discussions with members of the community, and plans for the Community Library and Information Access Center were born.

As its name suggests, the center will be the joint possession of the St. Paul Public Library and Metro State University. The library will include two major components a family center that specializes in children s literature and includes a teen study area, and a 20,000 volume collection of frequently-used academic texts and reference books. A computer system will provide access to the St. Paul Public Library, as well as to Metro State.

As such, the library truly is shared space: a place that students on campus and families in the community can both call their own. By sharing responsibility for the design, construction, and eventual use of the library, planners from Metro State and Dayton s Bluff are creating a place where campus and community combine. Though not yet completed, years of planning and design around the new library have already recast Metro State University not as a college without walls, but as a college that has worked with the community to build the walls that bring them together.

From

Service Matters 1998: Engaging Higher Education In the Renewal of America s Communities and American Democracy

Website: Library plans are online at http://www.metrostate.edu/library/libimgs.htm