Original Post featured in Huffington Post, UCF Forum, a weekly series of opinion columns presented by UCF News & Information.
What would it take to create a more learning-efficient campus? What elements must we have, what culture must we extend to promote a more responsive campus to bolster student success?The answer may be in the seemingly unrelated work of Australian architect and zoo director David Hancocks. In his 2002 book, A Different Nature, Hancocks explored the paradox of the modern zoo. We traditionally have taken animals that were meant to live and thrive in the wild and placed them on display at zoos for the purpose of study and our own entertainment. We take these animals that are meant to roam free in wide geographical expanses and house them in a controlled environment. Of course, this can go tragically wrong, as we were made aware in 2016 when a male gorilla was killed at a Cincinnati zoo to rescue a 3-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla’s enclosure.
While we all acknowledge that universities are not zoos, there is kind of a parallel. Universities are an ecosystem in which our students, faculty and staff must interact, and if we do not provide the right environment for learning then our students can suffer the consequences. Read the full article