Syracuse University is starting to move administrative units, including the division of marketing and communications, to off-campus sites to free up more space for academic programs on Main Campus.

About a year after its first meeting, the Campus Facilities Advisory Board has focused on making sure about thousands of square feet of the Women’s Building is available for schools and colleges to use as possible academic space, among other things, said Cathryn Newton, a member of the board.

The Campus Facilities Advisory Board is tasked with evaluating the Campus Framework, a major 20-year infrastructure plan that will fundamentally change the layout of some areas of SU.

“It’s up to colleges to identify the space in which they might be most interested in putting a proposal together,” said Newton, special adviser to Chancellor Kent Syverud and Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly on faculty engagement.

As part of the Campus Framework’s second draft, released in May 2017, the university aims to transition administrative and other service functions “that do not directly support students” to other areas of the university, “to make room for academic programs and units.”

Pete Sala, the university’s vice president and chief facilities officer, said SU is just starting to move the department of marketing and communications out of the Women’s Building to the second floor of the Warehouse, in downtown Syracuse.

SU’s Advancement and External Affairs is also in the process of being moved out of the Women’s Building to the Skytop Office Building, a section of South Campus, Sala said.

Moving forward, Sala said the advisory board will consider proposals from deans of schools and colleges for using the new space being opened up at the Women’s Building.

As of Monday, Sala said only one proposal has been received by the advisory board. That proposal was for the health and exercise science program, Sala said, which is housed in the School of Education.

The chief facilities officer added that, in the future, the advisory board will study individual Academic Strategic Plans from schools and colleges to determine what units need additional space on campus.

Those individual plans have all been drafted, Syverud said in his January speech to the campus community. As part of the chancellor’s broader Academic Strategic Plan — which outlines SU’s long-term academic goals — each school and college has to submit its own unique plan.

The College of Engineering and Computer Science, for example, has aligned its own master planning document with the Academic Strategic Plan. That plan aims to increase the college’s physical space by 40 percent to 230,000 square feet.

“By and large, the vast majority of the university will complete strategic planning this summer,” Syverud said at the time. “It is therefore time that we start moving faster from reaction and planning, to proactive implementation of our strategies.”

Newton added that she expects more officials to consider using the space that will be opened by the movement of administrative units.

“I think it’s fair to say that, in the months ahead, we’re likely to see more proposals,” Newton said of schools and colleges requesting to use new space opened up in the Women’s Building.

Published on February 20, 2018 at 10:14 pm

Contact Sam: sfogozal@syr.edu | @SamOgozalek