Wayne State’s Campus Plan Shifts Focus from Continuous Growth to Improved Agility

When Wayne State University in Detroit released its campus plan—the Wayne Framework—in 2018, no one could have guessed how prophetic the school’s new approach would turn out to be. Rather than creating a campus plan that sets a specific schedule of chronological tasks and building projects, the Wayne Framework instead focuses on how the school should evaluate priorities on an ongoing basis, allowing the facilities department to remain flexible enough to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Within a few years of launching the Framework, those circumstances would include a global pandemic, catastrophic flooding, and numerous university leadership changes. The plan’s name reflects the idea that it is intended to provide a solid framework for facility decisions that are guided by current data and resource availability, rather than mandating a prescriptive timetable for upcoming projects. 

“Higher education is used to leadership changes, but just like everyone else, we were not prepared for COVID in 2020, nor did we expect to be hit by a 500-year storm in 2021,” says Ashley Flintoff, Wayne State’s former space manager and director of planning, who led the team that developed the Wayne Framework. (She has since left that position and now serves as executive director for the Detroit-based non-profit, Friends of the Rouge.) “Everything else came to a halt for approximately six to eight months while we immediately addressed the flooding damage, which included water intrusion or water damage in 68 of the school’s 124 buildings, with 11 of those categorized by our insurance as catastrophic,” says Flintoff.

Despite these challenges the principles outlined in the Framework helped the facilities department stay on track following the pandemic and better react to continuous change within the university and the surrounding community. The approach also led Wayne State to shift from focusing on constant growth to selecting projects and priorities based on findings from current data. Primary components of the Framework include: 

• Data Collection and Governance – When developing the Framework, Wayne State surveyed students, faculty, staff, and community members—approximately 900 individuals in over 200 interactions—in settings such as forums, town halls, one-on-one meetings, and department meetings. Ongoing data collection within the facilities department includes studies on facility circulation and utilization and use of interactive web-based mapping tools to review data sets, aid in visualization, and analyze traffic and pedestrian patterns within campus and surrounding streets. All of this data is used to continually evaluate which facility projects will take priority. 
   
• Community Engagement – Wayne State is in the heart of Detroit, near the city’s Cultural Center, which includes well-known sites such as the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright African American History Museum. The Framework aims to strengthen the university’s connection with the Detroit community by fostering a more centralized and inviting main campus. According to Flintoff, the hope is to better connect Wayne State’s 13 schools and colleges with the city of Detroit to promote continued engagement. 

Wayne State identified a section of its core campus, located adjacent to the Cultural Center, where it hopes to reduce traffic lanes and add more green space collaboration areas and pedestrian paths, making the area more welcoming and accessible to students and the surrounding community. Wayne State calls this area “the H,” because two of its key streets run parallel through the campus with an intersecting road in the middle of campus that provides a connection to the Cultural Center. 

“Among the lessons COVID taught facility planners is the importance of outdoor space,” says Flintoff. “This time in history really illustrated the need to provide outdoor spaces that support students’ mental health and enhance a connection to nature, especially in urban settings.”

Aligning Goals with Resource Availability 

At the beginning of the campus plan process, the team identified approximately $700 million in deferred maintenance throughout Wayne State’s aging infrastructure. “We knew that the only way to tackle such a staggering number was to start strategically reducing square footage, either by eliminating or combining existing classroom and lab spaces, and consolidating office space,” says Flintoff. She points to two large-scale, adaptive re-use projects as examples of this strategy.

STEM Innovation Learning Center (SILC), originally built in 1970 to serve as a science and engineering library, was completely gutted and renovated into a state-of-the-art classroom and academic laboratory space. The SILC, which opened in October 2020, is Wayne State’s first building to include a dedicated maker space, and an area (called the “STEM Commons”) which offers peer mentorship and student assistance in STEM-related studies. The STEM Commons is overseen by faculty but run by students, and offers dedicated group study rooms and areas for one-on-one mentoring. The idea has been so successful that Wayne State recently created a similar “Humanities Commons” in one of the school’s libraries.

“Since Wayne State is primarily a commuter campus, we wanted this renovation to include a lot of spaces that engage students even when they are not in the classroom, and give them reasons to stay and learn in this building,” says Flintoff. “We want our commuter students to stay on campus to study and collaborate, not just go from their car to their classroom and right back to their car.” She adds that the furniture in the SILC labs can be easily reconfigured based on class size or project scope, and that there are numerous collaboration spaces throughout the building, where students can interact with other students and faculty outside of class. 

M. Roy Wilson State Hall Building, originally built in 1947, is one of Wayne State’s largest academic classroom facilities, but it had not been updated, other than finishes, since a wing was added in 1955. Prior to the recent $80 million renovation, which concluded in 2023, State Hall was still set up like a 1950s classroom building, with lockers lining the halls and old uncomfortable furniture, says Flintoff. She added that the classrooms were not sized correctly for the way Wayne State professors now teach, so faculty were either cramming big classes into small rooms or wasting space with small classes taking place in rooms that were too large. 

“Since we couldn’t optimize our scheduling, the building was not being properly utilized,” says Flintoff. “We worked very closely with our registrar and our faculty to understand what size spaces we needed to include to optimize the use of the new building. 

“Similar to the new STEM facility, we added numerous student collaboration spaces throughout State Hall, because this is what students told us they wanted,” says Flintoff. “It seems to be working, because both of these new facilities are fully in use every single day of the week when students are on campus.”

Flintoff says that the Wayne Framework makes sense, since change really is the only constant in higher education. “Rather than fight change, think about how you can use it to your advantage. Look at alternative strategies to create more immediate impact that will eventually lead to your larger goals,” says Flintoff. “Even if you don’t have the current resources to implement your grand, big ideas, think about what smaller steps will lead you in the direction of those long-term goals.”

By Amy Cammell