UW Campus as a Destination

Educational Tourism and The Campus as an Underutilized tool for Outreach

Football Saturday. Close to 80,000 people, many from outside of Madison and Dane County, crowd into the confines of Camp Randall on a Fall Saturday to witness a Big Ten Football game.

Sports events are undoubtedly the most popular reasons for people who are not students or employees to visit the UW-Madison campus. But every weekend of the year, and many weekdays in Summer, hundreds if not thousands of people from around the state and world also set their sights on the UW-Madison as their destination. They come seeking a connection to a major research institution, a major educational institution, and one of the state's top centers of learning. They come to learn.

Yet the University currently does not do enough to encourage or facilitate these visits, or to enrich this learning.

The sprawling 2-mile long campus is maze of buildings, sidewalks and roadways. A few signs about notable research achievements have been erected in the last few years, but many buildings are marked only with obscure signs, often unrelated to what goes on inside. Most buildings are locked nights and weekends.

Yet visitors walk around the campus. They look at the outsides of the buildings. If one of them was once a student here, they know what goes on in some of the buildings. Yet much of the vibrant intellectual, research and academic activity that is the true substance of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is invisible to these interested, curious visitors.

What can be done about this? What can be done to greet, guide and inform campus visitors? Can people be encouraged to visit the campus, informed when they get here, and be pleased with their experience when they return home? Can the campus itself be a major tool for the University's outreach mission? Can visitors be encouraged to stay a while, linger in the area, sip from the heady brew of ideas and invention we've got bubbling away inside our campus?

One solution is the idea of the Learning Lobby. Publicly accessible building lobby displays could do a lot to make the facility itself a source of the wonder of learning. Better signing on the outside of buildings could help. An on-campus visitor center facility with plenty of parking is a long-wished-for dream.

What about a science museum? Most metropolitan areas the size of Madison have a public science museum, yet few have as much top-rated science. Could the UW-Madison, in cooperation with the city and surrounding communities, create a science museum for the public? A center for visitors to explore the wonders of the real-world science conducted in a top research university? A place for informal science learning, which could serve as a visitor magnet drawing in travelers from all over the state, region and world?

Science.Wisc.Edu Home | UW Home

File last updated: July 10, 2003

Feedback, questions or accessibility issues: kennethsmith@wisc.edu