Deal of the Century
West Campus of Yale University
By Mark Alden Branch ’86, September/October 2010, Yale Alumni Magazine.
Mark Alden Branch ’86 is executive editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine.
When Yale got a chance at a billion dollars’ worth of land and scientific infrastructure for ten cents on the dollar, they bought first and asked questions later. Now, the West Campus is starting to take shape.
The first thing you notice when you visit Yale’s new West Campus—after you talk your way past a friendly but serious security checkpoint at the main entrance—is how big the place feels. It’s nearly a mile from one end of the property to the other, or about the distance from Phelps Gate to the Divinity School.
The second thing you notice is how quiet it is. Well, quiet isn’t exactly the right word; there is a steady stream of white noise from the adjacent Interstate 95. It’s more like emptiness. Even at their busiest, suburban corporate campuses are far less lively than urban college campuses, but here the vast parking lots are empty, the sidewalks are empty, the fully furnished office cubicles visible through the windows are empty, and the chairs and tables outside the cafeteria are empty. It’s as if a couple thousand people up and disappeared—which is pretty much what happened.
Just a few years ago, two thousand employees of Bayer Pharmaceutical were working on the 136-acre site in West Haven and Orange, manufacturing drugs and conducting research in a complex that had grown over several decades to include 20 buildings. When Bayer announced in 2006 that it would leave Connecticut and sell the campus, Yale stepped in and bought it at a bargain-basement price. (See "Yale Buys a Second Campus," July/August 2007.) The only question remaining was what to do with the new acquisition, which Yale dubbed the West Campus.
"The usual paradigm in academia is an abundance of creative ideas and little infrastructure to implement them," says Stephanie Spangler, a deputy provost who is also an associate vice president for West Campus planning. "In this case, we had the infrastructure and had the opportunity to generate the ideas.”
Three years after the purchase became final, plans for the West Campus have begun to take shape. The research labs—the main attractions of the property—are beginning to be used for a constellation of interdisciplinary science initiatives that are attracting new research faculty to Yale. The university’s museums and libraries are taking portions of the vast factory and warehouse spaces for conservation projects and enhanced, accessible storage for their collections. A conference center with a 250-seat auditorium is being well used by groups from the central campus for retreats and seminars.
About120 people are now working at the West Campus. Michael Donoghue, the Yale vice president overseeing development of the site, says that by 2020, there will be well over a thousand. The empty cubicles would be filled much faster if Yale had decided to use its new property to relieve crowding on the main campus. But from the beginning, the strategy has been to use the West Campus to expand Yale’s reach in the sciences and try out new initiatives in the arts. "The notion that it would just be overflow space was anathema," says Donoghue, a biology professor and former director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History."We want to have a transformative effect on the university.”
Yale Vice President Bruce Alexander ’65 says he and president Richard Levin’74 PhD were interested in the property from the time Bayer announced it was leaving, but they agreed it would be best for the region if another pharmaceutical company took over and preserved the site’s 2,000 jobs.Alexander kept a watchful eye on the place, however, and by the spring of 2007, "two things were clear: no pharmaceutical company was interested, and it was an amazing property for Yale.”
Alexander took Andrew Hamilton, who was then Yale’s provost (and now heads the University of Oxford), out to see the property. Hamilton is a chemist,and when they toured the high-tech labs, says Alexander, "Andy’s eyes grew wide.” Lab space can cost up to $800 per square foot to build, and some of Bayer’s labs were better equipped than even the newest at Yale.Moreover, because much of the salaries and expenses of research faculty in the sciences are covered by federal grants, by far the biggest barrier to Yale’s desire to expand in the sciences has been finding the land and money for new labs. If the university could get Bayer’s laboratories—some half a billion dollars’ worth—at a bargain price, it was an incredible opportunity.
Fortunately for Yale, none of the other bidders had any interest in the lab space. Most wanted to tear down some of the buildings and redevelop the property with big-box retail, so they bid as if the site were much less developed than it was. It was as if someone were selling a house with a fully equipped observatory on the roof, and Yale was the only other astronomy buff in town. Yale won the bid with an offer of $109 million, acquiring the land, the buildings, and the equipment, including a large assortment of extremely expensive scientific instruments.
"There’s at least a billion dollars in infrastructure out there," says Alexander, who retired from a career as a developer before coming to Yale. "I’ve been in real estate my whole life, and this was the best real estate deal I ever made.”
The eerie emptiness notwithstanding, there is plenty happening on the West Campus now, including a lot of unpacking. Four researchers have opened their laboratories there this year. Three of them are new recruits to Yale;the university has been using the site to lure researchers from around the world, promising not only modern labs but also a chance to get in on the start of a new interdisciplinary approach to science.
The word "interdisciplinary" is on the lips of academics everywhere these days, not least at Yale. University administrators are constantly talking about "breaking down departmental barriers " to allow" cross-pollination" among researchers in different disciplines. But long-established departments and their facilities aren’t easily reconfigured for cross-pollination. What the West Campus offers is a chance to start from scratch, with programs designed around new areas of inquiry rather than existing disciplines.
One major part of this strategy will be five new scientific "institutes,"each with nine or ten research labs working on related interdisciplinary problems: cancer biology, chemical biology,biodesign, systems biology, and microbial diversity. (To read about three scientists now working at the West Campus, see "The Pioneers.”) How interdisciplinary are these institutes? The advisory committee to the Microbial Diversity Institute has representatives from ten different departments on Science Hill and at the medical school, from geology and geophysics to public health. "It’s remarkable the fireworks that go on" at meetings of the advisory committees, says Donoghue, who attends them all. "This is the first time these people have sat down to have a substantive discussion with each other. Every one of those meetings comes out with something new.”
Another innovation enabled by the West Campus lab space is the science centers Yale calls "cores.” You could think of a core as an extremely high-tech Kinko’s: each performs an essential service for researchers all over Yale. Three are now open for business. The Center for Genome Analysis has a battery of state-of-the-art DNA sequencing machines—any one of them can analyze the entire human genome in a week—to provide genetic information for experiments in progress. The Center for High Throughput Cell Biology uses an automated process to disable single human genes in cells, so that researchers can try to deduce the gene’s function. And the Small Molecule Discovery Center helps scientists test the effects of small molecules on cell function.
The West Campus labs are filling more slowly than Yale originally projected, in part because of the economy’s effect on Yale’s endowment: overall, the university has cut budgets 10 percent since the 2008 economic collapse.But Donoghue says recruitment takes time anyway, especially when the post is one that Yale hopes to fill with a star academic. "The budget is not the rate-limiting step. It’s finding the right leadership," he says. "These searches can take years.”
As the first of those scientists get their labs up and running, another building is already well populated—with mounted animal heads, kayaks,skeletons, and nineteenth-century scientific instruments. Down the hall in the same building, a set of Roman mosaics is being painstakingly removed from its concrete backing. Across the hall from the mosaics,the parlor of an eighteenth-century Connecticut house has been rebuilt on an enormous warehouse floor. Yale’s museums have set up shop in Building A21 (Yale has, for now, retained Bayer’s unromantic nomenclature), where they have the kind of space they only dreamed about in New Haven.
The museums can put only small portions of their collections on display in central campus, so uncluttered, accessible storage space is a great boon to curators,faculty, students, and researchers who want to have a look at the collections. The Peabody, which has been the most pressed for quality storage, moved a large portion of its holdings out of its basements and into the West Campus in 2008. The Center for British Art and the University Art Gallery will be moving parts of their collections to A21as well. The art gallery is also using the building for conservation projects that, like the mosaics and the parlor, need a lot of room.
And soon, the museums and the Yale University Library will be collaborating on a permanent conservation laboratory, where they can share equipment and expertise in the care of their artifacts—an arrangement the university compares to the science cores. Yale has won a grant from the Mellon Foundation to hire a research scientist who will work full-time in the new lab. Another core will allow the museums and libraries to share equipment for making digital images of their holdings.
Those who have set up shop on the West Campus so far are generally happy about it. But they have reservations. "There are days when I say ’God,it’s lonely out here,’ and other days when I say ’Thank God nobody’s bothering me,’" says Howard Ochman, a researcher who came from Arizona with his wife, Nancy Moran (see "Redefining ‘Viable’"), to found the Microbial Diversity Institute. "But I’d like to be able to go to a café for a cup of coffee. And I’d like to go out and get that cup of coffee with another scientist and see what he’s doing. When there are 30 times the number of labs there are now, it’ll be a lot better.”
Ochman and others say the distance to the central campus—seven miles, a 15-minute drive, or 20-minute shuttle ride under optimum conditions on I-95—can be inconvenient. The faculty have to go to New Haven to teach and attend department meetings, and in some cases, storerooms and other necessary facilities are on central campus or at the medical school. Yale is improving the courier and shuttle services. But Donoghue acknowledges "a little bit of a glitchiness factor" in starting up a new and remote campus.
The few hardy souls who have gone West are adapting. They’ve started a"pioneer council," charged with inventing ways to build community. They hold brown-bag lunch discussions every Wednesday. They’ve arranged for weekly yoga classes. Yale is helping: starting this fall, the campus will have a fitness center and its first daily food service, a"grab-and-go" lunch spot. (Bayer left behind a full-service cafeteria,fully equipped down to the silverware, but it won’t be viable until the campus population reaches 500.)
The university will spend a decade just filling up the existing West Campus buildings.But Yale is rapidly sketching ideas for the future. In another 20 years, you might be able to take a commuter train to keep an appointment with your Yale doctor at a West Campus clinic. Afterward,you could visit the new arts buildings on the west side of the site.You might even stroll through an orchard in bloom. If you were interested, you could visit the new quad and surrounding lab buildings, many of them also new, on the east side—a huge science complex,harboring up to three times the current lab space.
Four years ago, such an enormous physical expansion was nowhere in Yale’s plans. But even the most cautious institution may rise to a target of opportunity. In a video on the West Campus website, President Levin compares the acquisition to another unanticipated westward expansion."In some ways, you could liken the West Campus opportunity to the decision that Thomas Jefferson faced when confronted with the opportunity to buy Louisiana," he says. "Think about what would have happened if Jefferson had failed to buy Louisiana.”
Posted 星期六, 09/11/2010 - 11:54 by Fishville at www.tongjiyiren.com.
