Move Drexel east, says new president Fry

Drexel University's pending "Campus Master Plan" is shifting the school's expansion focus away from West Philly and toward Center City. (See also my column and reader comments here.)

"North traditionally was where Drexel expanded, up to Powelton Ave.," through the neighborhood now crammed with student rentals, new President John Fry told me in his Chestnut St. office. Instead, "I'd like the campus core to be more developed," and grow "to the East of us," towards the Amtrak train yards and underused office buildings between Drexel and the Schuylkill: "If you could pick a better location that the neighborhood around 30th Street Station, I'd like to hear about it. A lot of very interesting properties are there."

Where will Drexel get the money? "You're going to see a lot of partnerships between ourselves and developers," to build student housing, labs and other projects, said Fry, a former president of Lancaster's Franklin and Marshall College who arranged private housing and retail deals in his previous career as a top Penn administrator. Already he says he's hearing from local and national developers hungry for work.

Do colleges really need more buildings, now that so many courses are delivered online? "Our online program, Drexel E-Learning, DEL, is growing very significantly. If things shift dramatically, we've built out. That, plus the co-op (Drexel's corporate work-study program) plus the fact we're reaching out internationally shows we're trying to hedge our bets. No one owns the future," he said. "What are the hot possibilities?"

Yet Fry doesn't think the four-year (or, for Drexel co-ops, five-year) college is going away. "Your'e always going to have those people who feel the experiential part of college, the maturation, establishing who they are, that's a really good thing there. Hopefully we can continue to make that successful. Of course I'm biased." 

Fry also promised to find ways to grow Drexel's modest humanities program. Engineering and professional schools will always have to support history and related fields, he said. (He said Securities and Exchange Commission top cop Mary Schapiro's graduation address made the same point when she urged students to remember the ethical principles taught at school and temple and to resist peer pressure to steal and lie.) "These disciplines need to be excellent. They're the people who ask the long-term questions dealing with historical perspective, policy, philosophy, the good of an institution. How do we wrap that together?"