photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

The Jayhawk Welcome Center, located on the north end of Jayhawk Boulevard, is pictured on Feb. 15, 2023.

From big buildings to smaller restrooms, leaders at the University of Kansas want to hear from the public about how the Lawrence campus should look during the next decade or more.

Various members of KU’s operations team will be hosting an open house from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursday at the Jayhawk Welcome Center, 1266 Oread Avenue, to get feedback about KU’s new master plan for the Lawrence campus.

As the Journal-World reported in September, the master plan dives into a bunch of big-picture issues, including a finding that the Lawrence campus may be able to get rid of 20% of all building space in the next 10 years.

But the plan also hones in on smaller spaces — and restrooms might be one that is on the mind of the campus community after dozens of students protested last week a decision that eliminated gender-neutral restrooms at a KU scholarship hall for the upcoming school year.

The master plan actually talks about the future of restrooms at KU, although it doesn’t get into the specific issue that arose at Grace Pearson Scholarship Hall, where transgender students use a community-style bathroom with multiple toilets and a single shower stall.

In the section titled “Inclusive and Welcoming Campus,” one of the recommendations says KU can “advance inclusivity” by converting many of its restrooms on campus to “single-use” facilities, meaning they would be designed to serve one person at a time, and would not necessarily be labeled as a men’s or women’s restroom.

The master plan says every building at KU should have single-use restrooms over the next 10 years, and it says when new buildings are constructed on campus, every floor of every building should include single-use restrooms.

Last month’s controversy involving Grace Pearson Scholarship Hall centered on a restroom issue. The university’s student housing department notified residents that “gender inclusive” housing assignments would not be allowed at Grace Pearson during the next school year. The voluntary program allowed roommate assignments to be made without regard to a student’s sex, meaning transgender students could room together, even if their biological sex did not match.

But university leaders said they were ending the program because they were no longer comfortable with the bathroom situation that comes with those living units. The multiple toilet stalls for a bathroom that wasn’t designated male or female created building code issues, KU told students in a February letter.

Discussion about KU’s new plans for single-use restrooms to be constructed in all campus buildings, however, received little to no discussion with Grace Pearson residents. When the Journal-World asked a university spokeswoman how, if at all, the master plan could play into the issue, she referenced plans for the March 6 open house.

“Leaders will be looking for feedback in preparation to prioritize pieces of the plan,” spokeswoman Erinn Barcomb-Peterson told the Journal-World.

The master plan — titled “A Resilient Campus” — will give community members many other topics to discuss as well. A big message of the plan is that KU needs to right-size its campus. Among the findings presented to the Kansas Board of Regents in September are:

• Classroom space could be reduced by 132,000 square feet, if the university is successful in creating a centralized scheduling system.

• Research space could be reduced by 166,000 square feet, as the master plan found that there was significant duplication of support facilities in KU’s research enterprises. “More shared facilities could both reduce excess square footage and enhance interdepartmental collaboration.”

• Office space could be reduced by 370,000 square feet based off of KU’s current workplace environments. However, the plan found that approximately 600,000 square feet — half of all office space on the Lawrence campus — could be reduced if KU adopts more hybrid and remote work styles for office employees. Authors of the plan said they did find some office spaces on campus that “had visibly not been used in years.”

The end result could be that many departments and offices could be moved in the coming years, and consolidated into existing buildings on campus. That would create opportunities for KU to demolish existing buildings that are in need of major repairs. Such efforts to reduce “deferred maintenance” issues at universities have been a major focus of the Kansas Board of Regents. The master plan, however, does not provide a specific list of buildings that are candidates for demolition.

Moving departments around also may create a need for a few new buildings on campus to efficiently house or combine users. However, the master plan lists only two new buildings for the Lawrence campus over the next 10 years.

Plans call for a new student wellness center to be built near the Ambler Student Recreation Center to replace the aged Watkins Memorial Health Center, with an estimated cost of $42 million. The master plan also calls for a new Interdisciplinary Science Building that would add more than 200,000 square feet of laboratory and classroom space on a site just west of the Burge Union. That’s estimated as a $250 million project.

People can learn more about the master plan ahead of Thursday’s event at KU’s Facilities Planning website, fpd.ku.edu/2024-master-plan.