Guest Post | From Campus to Commons, Part 2

A closing campus may not mark the end of higher education, it may signal the beginning of a new kind of commons.

After a college closes, people often ask: What will happen to the buildings? But increasingly, I think that is the wrong question. The deeper question is:

What forms of human life do we still know how to build together?

Across the country, campuses are closing at an accelerating rate. Much of the conversation focuses on economics, demographics, and institutional sustainability. Those realities are real. But beneath them, I believe something larger is being revealed. Many people are hungry for forms of life that feel more connected, participatory, intergenerational, and rooted in place.

We are living at a time of extraordinary technological advancement, yet many people feel profoundly alone. We have unprecedented access to information, yet many struggle to find meaning. We are more digitally connected than ever, yet many of the physical spaces that once fostered sustained human relationships are disappearing. And perhaps most significantly, we have increasingly organized society around consumption rather than participation.

We consume content.
Consume experiences.
Consume education.
Consume community.

But belonging cannot be consumed. Belonging is practiced. It is created slowly through participation, mutual responsibility, shared rituals, collective care, and sustained presence over time.

This is part of what has drawn me so deeply into the work of reimagining the former Goddard College campus in Vermont through The Creative Campus at Goddard. What began initially as a question of campus preservation gradually evolved into something much larger:

Could campuses become places where fragmented dimensions of life are woven back together?

Not simply educational institutions.
Not lifestyle enclaves.
Not retirement villages.
Not coworking hubs.

But living ecosystems where learning, housing, creativity, civic participation, ecological stewardship, culture, and intergenerational life intersect.

Places where elders are not isolated from younger generations.
Where artists and educators live alongside families and social entrepreneurs.
Where housing is designed not only for affordability, but for relationship and mutual support.
Where learning continues across the lifespan.
Where people participate in shaping the culture and life of the place itself.

In many ways, I have come to believe that campuses may represent one of the last large-scale physical infrastructures already designed for collective human life.

Dining halls.
Libraries.
Gathering spaces.
Theaters.
Housing.
Gardens.
Paths designed for encounter.
Places where private life and public life meet.

For decades, many campuses functioned as temporary waystations people passed through on the way to somewhere else. But perhaps the future calls for something different. Perhaps these places can evolve from institutions into commons. From enrollment-driven systems into participation-driven communities. From isolated campuses into living civic ecosystems embedded within the life of surrounding towns and regions.

This shift is not only practical. It is cultural. Because underneath the housing crisis, the loneliness epidemic, civic fragmentation, and growing polarization lies another question we rarely ask directly:

Where do people actually learn how to live together?

Not online.
Not through branding.
Not through algorithms.

But through the slow, imperfect, deeply human practice of shared life. I do not believe we are meant to live entirely fragmented lives — separated by age, profession, ideology, and economic class, interacting primarily through transactional systems.

Human beings evolved in relationship.

And increasingly, many people are longing for structures that allow relationship, contribution, creativity, and belonging to become part of everyday life again.

Perhaps this is why the idea of the commons is re-emerging in so many forms. Not as nostalgia for the past. But as a response to the conditions of the present.

The future may not belong to larger and more impersonal systems alone. It may also belong to smaller, place-rooted ecosystems where people once again participate in shaping shared culture and shared life.

Places where belonging is not consumed, but practiced.

Places where human beings are not merely tenants, customers, students, or users —but stewards of something larger than themselves.

And perhaps, in the process, we may rediscover not only how to inhabit campuses differently, but how to inhabit society differently as well.

Barbara Vacarr, PhD, is a psychologist, educator, interspiritual minister, and organizational consultant whose work explores human development, belonging, leadership, and the future of place-based community. A former president of both Goddard College and Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, she currently serves as Chair of the Board of The Creative Campus at Goddard, where she is helping activate new models for reimagining college campuses as community-centered commons integrating learning, creativity, intergenerational housing, and civic life. She and her husband of 47 years are the grateful grandparents of five.