Campus

For other uses, see Campus (disambiguation).
Joseph Jacques Ramée's original plan for Union College in Schenectady, New York, the first comprehensively planned campus in the United States[1]

A campus is traditionally the land on which a college or university and related institutional buildings are situated. A modern campus is a collection of buildings that belong to a given institution, either academic or non-academic. Usually a campus includes libraries, lecture halls, residence halls, student centers or dining halls, and park-like settings.

Etymology

The word derives from a Latin word for "field" and was first used to describe the grounds of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) during the 18th century.[2] Some other American colleges later adopted the word to describe individual fields at their own institutions, but "campus" did not yet describe the whole university property. A school might have one space called a campus, one called a field, and another called a yard.

History

The tradition of a campus did not start in America, but with the medieval European universities where the students and teachers lived and worked together in a cloistered environment.[3] It was the notion of the importance of the setting to academic life that migrated to America, and early colonial educational institutions were based on the Scottish and English collegiate system.[3]

Uses

The meaning expanded to include the whole institutional property during the 20th century, with the old meaning persisting into the 1950s in some places.

Office buildings

Sometimes the lands on which company office buildings sit, along with the buildings, are called campuses. The Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington is a good example. Hospitals, and even airports sometimes use the term to describe the territory of their facilities.

Universities

The word "campus" has also been applied to European universities, although most such institutions are characterized by ownership of individual buildings in urban settings rather than park-like lawns in which buildings are placed.

References

  1. ↑ Turner, Paul V. (1996). Joseph Ramée: International Architect of the Revolutionary Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 190.
  2. ↑ Harper, Douglas. "Campus (n.)". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chapman, M. Perry (2006). American Places: In Search of the Twenty-first Century Campus. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 7.

See also

Look up campus in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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