Repository: UIHistories Project: UIS Long Range Plan - 1970 (Sangamon State Univ) [PAGE 16]

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PART II - A. Because Sangamon State University is established for the culminating years of undergraduate work and for the early years of graduate programs, its student body will have a level of experience that permits a more mature relationship with the faculty than usually is experienced in the preceding years of study. At this stage, casual, spontaneous contacts outside the classroom and conference room have particular value for the interchange of questions and ideas. This is consistent with the position that the arrangement of books, periodicals and other learning resources in the library, too, should be open to casual, spontaneous contacts in spacious, well-lighted quarters that encourage browsing and discovery. Also appropriate to the University's programs is a similar kind of interchange between the campus and the Illinois Capitol and Sangamon County Seat, only a few minutes away with its resources of government, politics, community affairs, landmark architecture, environmental problems and historical associationsThis calls for circulation of students into the city, and of Springfield area residents into the campus for mutually stimulating activities. All these features of the Academic Plan support its description of the Sangamon State University campus as an "educational city", with street circulation, architecture, landscaping and activities as much as possible like those of a well-conceived town. It moves positively away, in both program and physical plan, from the tradition of the academic realm cloistered from the outside world. This conception of a university campus plan addressed to the needs of good community life takes note of an obvious shortcoming of the conventional campus cluster of academic buildings, which relies on an unpredictable and too often an unstable combination of Providence and Private Enterprise to move into the fringe areas with coffee shops, eating places, recreati and convenience shopping appropriate to 'an environment of higher education. The plan takes exception to this haphazard condition, and also to the more recent attend to meet these needs within the campus by putting them