Campus master plan, vision for 'greatest decade,' inspires praise and protest

The 2020s, years known as “the greatest decade in the history of the University of Tennessee” by UT System President Randy Boyd, have come into fuller view.

Every 10 years, university leaders partner with architectural and consulting firms to embark on the months-long process of creating a massive document: the campus master plan. The newest plan, which began development in 2021 to replace its 2011 predecessor, includes near-term and long-term construction and renovation projects and is the result of nearly 18 months of public forums, survey responses, campus tours and meetings. 

By projecting the next 10 years of growth, the plan contains the hopes and frustrations of faculty, staff and students over the university’s use of its increasingly limited space. 

The plan also reflects a broader change for the UT System as it receives unprecedented funding from the state in its mission to provide educational access to the most Tennesseans possible. At a Board of Trustees executive committee meeting on Jan. 20, President Boyd reported that the university had secured 100% of its legislative agenda in 2022, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding. 

These funds, part of a push by Boyd and Chancellor Donde Plowman to engage the legislature in planning the university’s expansive future, have helped fuel transformational building projects in nearly every corner of campus. 

There is now over $1 billion in construction and design currently underway on Rocky Top. UT has entered what Moira Bindner, communications and customer service manager at Parking and Transit Services, describes as “Extreme Campus Makeover.”

On Wednesday, Chancellor Plowman was joined by representatives from Ayers Saint Gross, a Baltimore-based architectural firm specializing in higher education, as well as several local firms, including McCarty Holspace McCarty (MHM) and CDM Smith, in a town hall meeting in the Student Union in order to present the newest campus master plan and field questions from the campus community. 

The town hall comes after a fall semester in which students and faculty took issue with the university’s insufficient residential space, limited parking availability and plans to relocate several academic departments in order to make space for a new Haslam College of Business building. 

As features of the plan have become public over the last two years, including plans to replace the current Melrose Hall with a new student success building and to build two new residence halls, they have been met with both excitement and criticism.

Jessica Leonard, a principal architect with Ayers Saint Gross, presented the plans for construction and renovation, focusing on physical needs, like gateways and pedestrian access, along with space needs, like housing and research space. These needs drove the group’s decisions surrounding 38 near-term projects to be completed in the next five years, 27 mid-term projects and 24 long-term projects, expected to take 10 or more years to complete.

Among the near-term projects are a new chemistry facility at the site of the current Panhellenic Building on Cumberland Avenue and several renovations and new constructions in the pressing area of student housing. 

Further out in the future lie projects such as replacements of McClung Tower and the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) building, as well as renovations of facilities which may soon be in poor condition, like Andy Holt Tower and Hess Hall. These projects are not only more distant but are more uncertain, since the long process of securing state and donor funds for them has in most cases not yet begun. 

The long-term future also contains development of the South Waterfront, given the potential construction of a pedestrian-bicycle bridge across the river in collaboration with the city and county. 

The master plan’s 10-year goals include one million square feet of additional housing space and 3.3 million square feet of non-residential space to support research and student experience. 

The timeline of the plan depends largely on the firms’ assessment of which facilities are in good, average or poor condition. According to the plan, 25% of spaces on campus, or roughly 4.2 million square feet, are in poor condition. Leonard said this figure is typical for old campuses with sprawling layouts. She also mentioned the progress of UT’s infrastructure since the last master plan was created. 

“Your campus had not the best reputation for its physical campus and, in the last decade, has really transformed itself,” Leonard said. “I think that that commitment to quality and consistency and really the exterior environment will ultimately help with a lot of your goals.”

Leonard and Plowman emphasized UT’s need for physical growth to accommodate the growing population on campus. The master plan projects a total population of 46,133 students by 2030, a 36% increase over the next 8 years. The total student population in fall 2022 was 33,805 students, which included a record freshman class of 6,846 first-year students.

Plowman, speaking on the first master plan of her tenure, said the population growth would continue as part UT’s strategic vision. The year-old strategic vision involves cultivating a volunteer experience, conducting research, emphasizing the “VOL is a verb” sentiment, being nimble and adaptable and embodying the R1, land-grant university.

According to Plowman, the university will have a “drastically” lower acceptance rate for the more than 48,000 students who have applied for entrance into the class of 2027, especially as UT plans to end a 10-year trend by admitting a smaller freshman class this fall than in fall 2022. 

This decision was driven by data in the master plan which suggested the university was outgrowing its support space and residential capacity for first-year students. Plowman said growth is still very much a part of UT’s future, however.

“We can grow, we are growing, as opposed to most of the other public schools in the state. And that means a greater opportunity for more students to get a college degree. And that is a philosophical position of the board, the president and chancellor,” Plowman said. “But we wanna do that in a way where we can maintain the quality … of the student experience in every aspect.”

In her presentation, Leonard said the plan would not only make campus itself more connected, but would also connect it to other parts of the city, like nearby downtown Knoxville. The firm realized how difficult the current landscape makes it to get from one place to another. 

“It’s kind of taking your life in your own hands walking down those hills, that topography,” Leonard said, getting a laugh from the full audience. “We spent a lot of time walking around your campus.”

The presentation, available for download online, painted a picture of a campus that will be 5,000 beds and hundreds of thousands of square feet behind its projected population growth without intervention. 

A few of the previewed plans to make roads more pedestrian friendly and strengthen connections include replacing a portion of E.J. Chapman Drive to make a path for pedestrians and bikes, adding wider sidewalks and a bike lane to Joe Johnson Drive and restructuring Caledonia Avenue to include sidewalks and green space.  

The development of the campus master involved a process of cross-disciplinary design sessions, listening sessions, open forums and surveys. Nevertheless, attendees had questions and concerns about the new plans. 

Many questions that were critical of certain aspects of the plan came from staff and faculty within the College of Arts and Sciences who spent 2022 speaking out against the university’s restructuring proposals for the college and the physical future of several departments following board approval of a plan to build a $227 million Haslam College of Business building in place of Dunford, Henson and Greve halls.

Many graduate students, staff and non-tenure track faculty in the college occupy shared office space in old buildings slated for destruction, which will be replaced with state-of-the-art facilities to support growing STEM research and the expansion of the college of business. In the meantime, the university is planning to relocate employees to temporary office spaces across campus.

“As someone who’s coming from a department that’s being divided and displaced to make room for the new Haslam College of Business building, I want to know what priority, if any, is being given to something that’s more important than temporary, which is stability – providing departments and units with permanent academic homes,” said Roraig Finney, a PhD student in history, at the town hall. 

The campus master plan accounts for the relocation of employees for one or more years during a construction project, and Leonard said the architects’ goal is to only move workers once. 

Finney, along with other members of the UTK Space Coalition, plan to hold a rally on Thursday, Feb. 2 at 12:15 p.m. at the foot of McClung Tower to protest what they deem the “space crisis” at the university. 

Though the master plan includes near-term construction of an interdisciplinary humanities building on Volunteer Boulevard, Katie Hodges-Kluck, communications and marketing coordinator for the Humanities Center, said she and her colleagues heard similar plans during the rollout of the last master plan over a decade ago. 

“We were told a humanities building was right on the horizon, and we’ve been told that over and over and over and everyone’s started wondering, and I know it was on the plan, but how do we know that’s actually happening and not bumped again and bumped again?” Hodges-Kluck said.

In response, Plowman said the university did not previously have a systemized process of selecting projects to present to legislators for funding. She clarified that chemistry and arts and humanities projects are next in line to begin the lengthy process of receiving approval from the Tennessee Higher Education Committee and moving forward to legislative presentation. 

Mia Romano, senior lecturer of Spanish Studies and vice president of the UT chapter of United Campus Workers, noted a figure that was absent in the presentation of the plan. 

While the slideshow included percentages of student population growth, square footage of campus’ expanding footprint and even a map of a widened campus boundary, it did not include the rate of faculty hiring necessary to keep up with the growth. It also did not address any increases in salary for lecturers, non-tenure-track faculty who have spoken out for years against what they believe is underpayment.

In 2021, UT raised its minimum wage to $15 and its minimum salary for full-time, non-tenure-track faculty to $40,000 for those without terminal degrees and $45,000 for those with terminal degrees. At the town hall on Wednesday, the chancellor said more of these raises are on the horizon as UT seeks to rise to the compensation levels of its aspirational peers. 

“It’s largely a problem in one college, but that’s a college that uses a lot of lecturers,” Plowman said, referring to the College of Arts and Sciences. “We need to keep raising the minimum wage.”

Not all the feedback from staff and faculty was critical of the plan. Like many of the plan’s supporters, Amy King, an educational specialist in the College Access and Persistence Services (CAPS) Outreach Center, expressed appreciation for the comprehensive and ambitious nature of the master plan.

“This is great because it’s like a 30,000 foot view, and it’s a plan and we know what it is. I just want to say thank you,” King said, addressing the chancellor. “This is great. Thanks for having the foresight to do it and the wherewithal to make it happen.”

There were moments of laughter at the town hall, as architects from Maryland delivered light-hearted deprecations about UT’s infrastructure and as figures from across campus put forth their characteristic prods at the plan.

Plowman, for her part, said she had spent more time thinking about zoning and sidewalks than ever before, and once the spirited round of questioning was through, she enjoyed her own moment of optimism for the future.

“I’ve learned that when you design a building, you’re really redesigning what happens in a building and who we are and that’s what I love about this,” Plowman said. “I’m just so impatient, I want to do it tomorrow. I want it to look like this tomorrow."