Strategic Leadership in Context 209
that are under the control of the designers and the design. They can be reduced
to precise drawings and blueprints, whatever the driving forces of the surrounding
world may be.
Strategic Space
Yet at the level of strategic reflection, it is clear that campus and building plans
are part of a system of beliefs and distinctive educational purposes. The plans of
today’s colleges and universities display a sharp consciousness of how the goals
of an engaged educational community should determine the places, shapes, and
forms where learning takes place. Campus spaces are configured to facilitate col-
laborative learning in small groups, to create places where people can interact, to
connect to technology, to allow for the placement of laboratories so that faculty
and students can do research together. Physical space increasingly has become
transparent to the educational goals that it serves.
A Sense of Place
Strategic plans and similar studies of campus life also reveal that the campus is
lived space, so it is often lodged in memory and in personal experience as a major
theme in the institution’s story. A sense of place is commonly a defining element
in the shared values of a community, and many students, staff, and graduates
develop intimate connections to the campus, its landmarks, and special natural
and architectural features. Places carry meanings that contribute to the larger
purposes of education.
Salem College and a Sense of Place
Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is located in the restored
Moravian village of Old Salem, whose roots reach back to the mid-1700s, when
German-speaking Moravian settlers arrived in Salem from Pennsylvania to create
an intentional community of faith and labor. The sense of historic identity of the
village is interwoven with the college and the neighboring academy, which grew
from a school for girls that the Moravians started before the American Revolu-
tion. College and village also share a common architectural signature defined by
simple geometric forms, pitched tile roofs, arched windows, brick structures in
Flemish bond, rhythmic green spaces, and pathways of worn brick. The campus
leads off the large village square into intimate quadrangles created by buildings
that largely conform to the style of the eighteenth-century town beyond. Historic
artifacts are everywhere, from antique furniture to embroidered samplers created
by young women over 150 years ago. A sense of intimacy and community, of
historic fabric and authenticity, defines the place. These very values shape the
human transactions and relationships of those who dwell there as students, deep-
ening bonds between them as responsible members of a historic community of
women, and marking their experience for life.