There’s a saying in Zen practice: In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind, there are few.
I bring 55 years of combined hands-on operations and strategic planning experience to this work, all of it lived inside of fine dining kitchens, back of house and front of house operations, beginning in 1971 at the iconic Pillar House in Newton, Massachusetts, in the late 1980s at Harvard University, and since 1990, student unions, dining halls, and the campus-wide next generation residential and retail strategic plans we have pioneered by crafting them through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking. That experience is invaluable. It is the pattern library I draw on every time we take on a new campus, and there is no substitute for it.
But I have also been gifted with something experience can’t teach: the beginner’s mind gene. It’s second nature that when embarking on a new strategic planning exercise, my “tea cup” is empty and open to being filled with new opportunities and out-of-the-box thinking that often wait to be discovered and hide in plain sight. Many of our clients have commented that “David sees patterns and opportunities that in hindsight make perfect sense, yet they were not obvious to any of us.” No assumptions. No, “this is how it’s always been done.” Just one question: if I were an 18-year-old arriving here for the first time, would this campus, this student union, this dining commons, this food hall, pull me in, time after time, day after day, seven days each week, or insidiously encourage me to venture off campus to get my social connection, sense of belonging, and food and nutritional needs met?
That question is the whole method. Most student unions struggle not from a lack of expertise but from expertise that was never paired with fresh eyes, a beginner’s mind, the students’ lived experience, and meeting the students where they are. They are built by committees faithfully reproducing the unions of their own college years, designed for students, and an archetype that no longer exists. The beginner’s mind asks the obvious questions the expert stopped asking decades ago. Here’s what happens when you let it.
Question #1: Who is actually paying for this building?
The expert answers reflexively: the institution. We follow the money and find something remarkable. On many campuses, students fund the capital-intensive student union projects through their fees. The students are the investors. It is rare anywhere in business to have your investors and your customers be one and the same, and it changes everything: when you put students first, you put your investors first.
Seen fresh, the programming question becomes simple. What combination of services and amenities serves all of the students attending your institution? Not just commuters (non-residents), not just residents, not just the involved few, but everyone. If a student fee is funding the new student union, then the program should attract and support all who are funding the project. Administrators know that good things happen when students have more opportunities to engage socially: to make friends, problem-solve, collaborate, and innovate. The results show up as higher GPAs, longer stays, and a greater likelihood of graduating equipped for professional success. In a survey of college freshmen, more than 80 percent said the number one reason they’re going to college is to be well off financially. If the union is the center of campus life, it should deliver that return for every student investor, from every background, for life.
Question #2: When do students actually live?
The expert builds to the archetype. We observe actual students and see that one set of investors, commuters, has very different daily patterns than the other set of investors, resident students, and stay open to understanding how the realities of their daily patterns should influence the programming of the new building. The beginner also notices something else: a typical day for a resident student has little or no correlation with the typical day of the committee of career professionals responsible for programming the new center.
Not long ago, the “student clock” didn’t start ticking until Juniors arrived on campus and mom and dad drove off into the sunset. Those days are gone. Thanks to smartphones and social media, incoming freshmen arrive with a 24/7 history of social interaction with at least 500 of their closest friends. The irony is rich: Steve Jobs designed Apple’s headquarters to engineer face-to-face collisions between people, and Apple’s most famous product helped build a generation that struggles with exactly that. The replacement of face-to-face time with screen time has cost students many of the social skills they need in the professional world: civility, dignity, and the simple art of conversation. The union and the food hall is where they can be rebuilt.
But only if it’s open. The student center has the potential to be the accidental (intentional) collisions crossroads of your campus: the most socially rich nexus of students from all demographic groups, from morning to late night, seven days a week. We have cracked that code. The student center is the living room of the campus. I don’t know about your kids, but mine hung out in the living room after school, well into the night, and all weekend. A living room without a kitchen that’s open all the time is like a house with nobody home. If students can’t find safe, compelling on-campus venues to meet their social needs, they will go off campus to find them.
Question #3: Could I actually get there?
The expert sites the building where land is available. We walk the campus like a freshman and ask where life already flows. The union belongs in the academic core, where students travel through all day long on their way to and from class.
We ask a question experts find unglamorous: where do students park? Generous parking matters for two reasons. First, a catering and conference business can’t grow if guests struggle to park. Second, a union must offer real value to commuter students. It should pull them back to campus in the evening, and that requires generous free parking during those hours, so off-campus students can return easily and share a socially rich, on-campus college experience with hundreds of their contemporaries.
Question #4: Why is there still a bookstore?
Here, the beginner’s mind earns its keep because the expert is still defending a model designed for 1996. The textbook two-step is over. Inclusive Access moved course materials online, and with them went the seasonal foot traffic that legacy stores were built around. Students compare every campus transaction to one-tap Amazon convenience, so the store can no longer compete on price or assortment. It has to compete on convenience, belonging, and experience.
Look at the union with fresh eyes, and the answer is conflation. Students live integrated lives, moving fluidly between dining, studying, socializing, and shopping, yet we run each as a separate silo. Put the new campus store inside the union or directly connected to its retail dining operations, and the math transforms. Out-of-the-box beverage programs are a margin engine: a semester refill pass with a branded reusable tumbler converts occasional buyers into daily visitors at near-pure margin. And apparel is where identity lives, earning two to three times the gross margin of course materials, because students buy identity, not products. The store becomes a town square: part retail, part commons, part institutional showcase.
The Expert Builds the Past with a Lot of “Harvested Natural Light.” The Beginner’s Mind Disrupts by Programming and Building What’s Next.
In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman notes that academic I.Q. accounts for only about 20 percent of a person’s professional success. The next generation student union is a classroom outside the classroom, teaching the social I.Q. responsible for much of the other 80 percent. But you can’t build it from the expert’s mind, because the expert’s mind builds the union that worked in 1996.
Walk your campus as if you’ve never seen it. Ask who my customers are and what their lived experience is. Ask who pays, when students live, where life flows, and why each legacy space still exists. The beginner’s mind sees many possibilities. Your students are waiting inside one of them. There are few better gifts you can give them, and for student investors, it’s an exceptional return on investment that can positively influence the arc of their lives.
