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Academic Commons Vision

Imagine ... a premier scholastic environment that makes visible Oxy's commitments as a 21st century liberal arts and sciences college. The Academic Commons at Occidental College is becoming that space.

We are creating a supportive environment designed to strengthen student and faculty scholarship, to encourage public and participatory digital scholarship, and to cultivate collaborative, integrated engagements with a world of ideas and action. Building on the library tradition as a place where knowledge is created and explored, the Academic Commons will additionally work to foster pedagogical experimentation, scholarly reflection, and animated discourse.

The creation of the Academic Commons requires efforts in three areas:

1) increasing the capacity to support faculty and student scholarship
2) improving access to and delivery of resources and academic support, and
3) renovating physical space in Clapp Library.

The Academic Commons will develop over time and some of it is already underway. In 2010, scholarship-technology staff and postdoctoral fellows began work under a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to increase capacity among faculty for curriculum-based digital scholarship. In the 2010-2011 academic year, the College retained the renowned architectural firm of Shepley Bulfinch to evaluate the Clapp Library building and advise on reprogramming the spaces as well as produce preliminary design sketches.

That same year, the College also produced a plan to reallocate staff resources in keeping with the goals of the Academic Commons, and a taskforce of faculty, staff, and students created and discussed in open meetings with the campus a report on the commons' role in intellectual life and its constitutive elements.