Planners Debate Location of New University Campuses : Education: Administrators face the difficult choice of whether to build in cities or rural areas--or in between.

Although it is strapped for money now, American higher education abounds with plans for growth to accommodate the children of baby boomers. For example, University of California officials are expected to debate Thursday whether to build a 10th campus in the San Joaquin Valley, a decision that will hinge largely on UC’s ability to pay for such expansion.

But aside from finances, U.S. colleges and universities that want to build campuses face another crucial issue: location. Should it be rural, suburban or urban?

The choice is not an easy one, influenced as it is by factors as varied as freeway access and ensuring an ethnically diverse student body.

“It’s a key issue,� Bruce Hamlett, associate director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission, said of the question of campus locations. “It’s one of the more fundamental policy issues that the state has to come to grips with.�

Some planners follow the beloved model of the university as a city unto itself, spread over enormous rural tracts, such as the UC campus at Santa Cruz, built in 1965 on 2,000 acres of stunning pastures and woodlands, or the campus UC may one day build in the San Joaquin Valley. Other campus architects are pursuing sites for commuter schools in burgeoning suburbs and exurbs, such as the new Cal State campus in San Marcos and another one planned in Ventura County.

The least conventional approach, being adopted in places as different as Tacoma, Wash., and Brooklyn, N.Y., looks to build campuses in underused inner cities, which have large pools of office workers and minorities whose college enrollment is low.

Choosing locations for new colleges involves more than deciding what lands are available and how many students might need dormitories. Higher education institutions are seen as powerful engines of economic development, as evidenced by San Joaquin Valley communities’ intense lobbying for a UC campus. But new schools can produce traffic and environmental problems, leading to tension with neighboring communities.

The strongest trend is to build campuses at the suburban edges, according to Edward L. Delaney, president of the Assn. for Institutional Research, a higher education planning group. “That is where your professional work force is tending to locate, to live and to work,� he said. Delaney is an assistant vice president for planning and research at George Mason University, a state school in Fairfax, Va., that is opening suburban satellite branches.

Likewise, George Washington University, with its main campus near the White House, has opened a satellite in suburban Virginia, and Arizona State University recently opened a suburban campus outside Phoenix and is thinking of another.

Many of the nation’s state universities were established as part of the 19th-Century land-grant movement, linked to agricultural studies and located in rural places. But schools in such areas can face problems in recruiting urban students, Delaney said.

Similar concerns have been quietly raised about the three rural sites outside Fresno and Merced earmarked for a possible UC campus. The Cal State system faces skepticism about developing a third possible campus at Ft. Ord, the military base near Monterey being closed in a few years. Some critics fear that the fort is too isolated, unlike the future Cal States in San Marcos in San Diego County and in the Ventura area.

David Leveille, the Cal State system’s director of institutional relations, concedes that Ft. Ord probably would not be considered if the federal government were not offering the incentive of 2,000 acres of the fort’s 28,000 acres as a possible gift. But he stressed that Ft. Ord, with its many existing residence halls, might be suitable for a different kind of Cal State campus, one serving students from around the state instead of commuters.

Some educators and urban planners contend that such gifts of land unduly influence decisions on campus locations.

“It is convenient for land acquisition and college administration. It makes great sense except that (such sites are) distant from where people work and live,� said Robert Harris, the former dean of the USC architecture school who has been active in downtown Los Angeles planning.

Harris believes new campuses should be developed in traditional downtowns, where mass transit provides easy access and where available office and loft space can be turned into classrooms and even dormitories.

Such development is exactly what the University of Washington has undertaken in Tacoma, where it eventually hopes to serve 6,000 commuter students in rehabilitated warehouses and industrial structures. Concerns about crime in the decayed neighborhood will be met with added policing, improved lighting and the general security that revived street life brings, said William Richardson, an official for the new Tacoma campus, which is expected to open by 1995.

Some Tacoma residents believe the University of Washington’s main campus in Seattle, although less than an hour away, is inaccessible. “We are opening here to be accessible to those who hadn’t been able to get degrees before,� Richardson said. At the same time, the University of Washington is planning a third campus in a rural area northeast of Seattle that is expected to boom with suburban development.

Even supporters concede that shoehorning a campus into a downtown can be difficult and probably would work better with community colleges than with full-service research institutions. In addition, the ideal of a campus as a leafy, utopian retreat from the city--dating back to Thomas Jefferson’s designs for the University of Virginia--still has a powerful hold on the American imagination.

But all that did not deter the University of Illinois from building a 100-acre, 19,000-student campus in central Chicago in the mid-1960s. Showing political power that is rare in these days of environmental impact statements, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley overrode protests from residents who were displaced by the school.

The original campus at rural Champaign-Urbana maintains a fine international reputation for research. But the Chicago campus has more interaction with businesses and culture, supporters say.

“A large number of our students work part time and it’s easier for them to get jobs because they are right here in the city,� said John Camper, associate chancellor for public affairs. The urban location also helps recruit faculty members whose spouses need the types of jobs that are more readily available in the city, he said.

In California, some Fresno boosters suggested that UC should build its campus in the heart of downtown or in a nearby park. Both sites were too small and unsuitable, said Mark Aydelotte, a UC representative in Fresno, who said remodeling buildings for university use is more expensive than constructing classrooms and labs.

“Locating a new campus in a downtown environment presents its own set of unique problems--in safety requirements, adequacy of parking, impact on the business community. It would be difficult to do,� Aydelotte said. Instead, the region’s three final possibilities are more rural, have no buildings and are expected to be donated to UC.

The San Joaquin Valley area, although far from being a population center like Southern California, is underserved by higher education and needs a UC campus, some officials say. Besides, they add, the new campus would attract students from around the nation because UC students, unlike Cal State’s, generally like to live away from home.

“People will come to a UC no matter where it is,� said William Storey, chief policy analyst for the Postsecondary Education Commission.

But whether a UC campus or many other schools are ever built depends on the uncertain future of funding, a matter that may cause the UC Board of Regents next week to delay or abandon crucial environmental impact studies. A start-up campus of 3,200 students is expected to cost at least $300 million. Some officials insist that such money would be better spent on increasing state financial aid at private colleges, which have room for more students on existing campuses.

Other experts contend that funds would be better spent on new video- and computer-assisted learning technologies that could be used in rented office space, at work sites or in existing classrooms. Presumably by making every home and office a potential mini-campus, those technologies might ease enrollment crunches and end the tug among cities, suburbs and countryside.

But other designers and educators insist that campus location and architecture will always be very important, especially to encourage the informal learning and socializing that are so much a part of college life.