Temple may sell or repurpose its Ambler campus

Temple University is contemplating the future of its decades-old Ambler campus, and selling it is one of the options on the table.

The school last month announced it had hired two firms to think through real estate and best-use options for the 187-acre campus in Montgomery County. Temple also launched a survey to gather ideas from the campus community.

“Your feedback in helping to inform this process is critical,” Temple president John Fry said in an email to the campus community Wednesday, noting the survey would be open through Friday.

» READ MORE: From ‘Truffula trees’ to carbon storage, Temple’s Ambler campus offers new discoveries one year after Ida

The move comes as enrollment on the campus has fallen. In the early 1990s the Ambler campus had about 5,000 students. In fall 2024, just 647 students took a course there, with only about a third of those students taking the bulk of their courses there, the university said.

“Temple Ambler is a tremendous asset, but it remains a significantly underutilized asset,” Fry said in a statement last month. “We intend to change that.”

The process, he said, will take about six months.

In addition to a potential sale, options being considered are converting the campus into an “experiential learning” facility combined with commercial purposes or developing it as part of a private-public partnership.

Temple Ambler is one of several Temple campuses. In addition to the university’s main campus and health sciences campus in North Philadelphia, the school has a Center City site and international campuses in Rome and Japan. It also has a site in Harrisburg and a podiatric medicine facility in Philadelphia.

Founded in 1911 as the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, the Ambler site was one of the first of its kind in the United States, teaching women to garden and farm. Temple acquired the property in 1958 and it was designated an arboretum in 2000.

For decades, the campus has doubled as an outdoor learning laboratory for students, those enrolled in horticulture, landscape architecture, and engineering classes. In September 2021, a tornado wreaked devastation on the campus, knocking down hundreds of trees and light poles, ripping roofs off buildings, and leaving more than $10 million in damage.

» READ MORE: A tornado caused millions of dollars in damage to Temple’s Ambler campus. Recovery could take decades.

Two residence halls on the campus were heavily damaged and later taken down. They have not been replaced.

But the campus rebuilt in other ways and had planted 150 trees a year later, with students using lumber from felled trees to build animal habitats. And educators and students used the weather disaster as a learning opportunity, charting its impact on the campus. That study is still underway, with the campus dubbed a “disturbance ecology laboratory,” the school said.

About 10 acres of the campus serve as a Smithsonian Institution Forest Global Earth Observatory site, and the campus also is home to the Temple University Municipal Police Academy, an officer training school.

Temple has hired consulting firm U3 Advisors to help the school develop a plan for the campus and real estate advisory firm Newmark to seek proposals for the school to consider once the plan is developed.

The school also has been meeting with the Upper Dublin Township supervisors to discuss the process and potential plans for the campus.

The survey seeks input on gaps in campus services, facilities, and spaces that are most important and ideas for how Temple Ambler could be “re-imagined.”

“Is it academic? Is it residential? Is it recreational? Is it commercial? We’re very open-minded about what the possibilities are,” Fry said in an Inquirer interview in January. “We don’t have a sort of blueprint for Ambler. What we want is this process to produce a blueprint for Ambler.”