John Marx Blog

John Marx Blog

In December of 2019, UC Davis Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph Hexter announced that John Marx, professor and chair of the department of English and 2018-2019 ACE Fellow, will serve as Faculty Adviser to the Provost — Academic Planning, Aggie Square. Marx's academic work focuses on the role that universities play as institutional anchors for their neighborhoods. In this blog, he will share more about the collaborative efforts involved in launching new research and teaching programs at Aggie Square. 

 

From Clay to Campus

For 145 years, H.C. Muddox has been making clay products in Sacramento. Today, their bricks compose the University’s signature on the side of the Life-long Learning building, at the east entrance to Aggie Square.  

Aggie Square Team: Here’s What We Look Forward To

Now that we’ve broken ground, the Aggie Square project has turned a page. 

What comes next? Building the buildings. That’s underway and, honestly, totally thrilling. Fences are up and in the coming months the first two structures in the project will begin to take shape. Planning continues too: the Aggie Square team is meeting with future tenants to assess equipment needs and fine-tune the interior design to ensure the project’s labs, classrooms, and community engagement spaces all deliver on their promise. 

The Groundbreaking: So Many People to Thank

How did we get here? What did it take for the Aggie Square team to reach the crucial threshold of breaking ground on the new UC Davis innovation campus in Sacramento? 

There’s a one word answer: teamwork. 

Philly Shows Us The Way to Succeed

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.

Aggie Square and the ‘Death of the Ivory Tower’

How are innovation districts like Aggie Square responding to our turbulent present moment and what are they contributing to the future of the cities where they are built? Those questions drove discussion at this October’s Association of University Research Parks (AURP) conference, which I attended in Salt Lake City. 

Setting the Stage for Collaboration With the Community

Picture this: You enter Aggie Square’s Community Engagement Hub on the first floor of the tallest building of the project, the front door opening onto a gallery with a long table and walls filled with art from a Quarter at Aggie Square experience. Or maybe the gallery is showing off a citizen science experiment run with a local school; or images taken by a neighborhood photographer who worked with a university collaborator; or possibly paintings by a local artist who is working with a member of our faculty. 

What's It Like Teaching a Quarter at Aggie Square?

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.