Aggie Square has the potential to substantially expand what we mean by “health” research at UC Davis. An excellent example of how it will do that is the health system’s Digital CoLab, which is looking to carve out a place for itself on an upper floor of Aggie Square’s Lifelong Learning building.
Looking around the U.S. for examples of innovation campuses to learn from, The Aggie Square team has returned again and again to Philadelphia. There, two research universities — Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania — have joined the venerable, research-focused, nonprofit University City Science Center. Not only that, the partnership extends to a canny business district — University City District — providing us both a model and a warning.
The whole idea of an innovation campus — devoted to catalyzing research that links UC Davis faculty with industry and community partners — depends on space that is better-designed for collaboration than what we have now.
Quarter at Aggie Square is one year old. It is going to grow up fast in the next year, since this fall will be the first opportunity students and faculty have to work together in person on the university’s Sacramento campus.
After a year of remote instruction on the one hand and global tumult on the other, students and faculty alike are primed to collaborate on new kinds of learning that can help improve the world.
Faculty have a lot of questions about how Aggie Square is evolving. The most challenging ones come from faculty who are curious but may not see how exactly they fit into a new campus with the emerging themes of translational research, experiential learning and community engagement.
The opportunity to work differently in some key area — whether research or teaching or service — is clearly a motivating factor for curious faculty who take me up on the invitation to explain where we are in the project’s evolution.
I watched the Community Forum and subsequent press conference on the Aggie Square Community Benefits Partnership Agreement hoping that my faculty and staff colleagues were as excited about this announcement as I am. Then I went on a hike with one of those colleagues and we talked about why this might not have gotten the attention I’d hoped for.
