You can look at The University of Adelaide as a good example of what happens when a unversity does run out of space on its major campus. It is slowly being atomised across the entire CBD of Adelaide and across its other campuses, resulting in a loss of efficiency and a loss of critical mass for campus services.

From a research point of view a large campus allows for a stock of old cheap buildings, such as sheds and demountables. These are vital if you want to construct some types of experiments. No one is going to allow you to alienate a floor of an modern building for a decade for a longitudinal agricultural experiment, nor are they going to allow you to hammer holes into the walls of a high rise to construct a physics experiment.

Finally, I’d be very cautious about drawing generalised conclusions from Cornell’s NY campus. Cornell are in upstate New York and need a New York City campus for their continued survival. Just like in Australia, US universities have more and more people wanting to study non-residentially and its upstate NY location means that Cornell could not attract those students.

As a result of this need to be in NYC, Cornell were willing to pay any amount of money, jump through any number of hoops, pass any number of beauty contests to gain the Roosevelt Is location for a new Cornell campus. No other university has that desperation for a new campus coupled with Cornell’s depth of finance. The Roosevelt Is campus should be seen as an exception, not the beginning of something new — the seizing of Cornell’s project by the UK education minister as heralding a new age of public-private partnership in tertiary education is deeply wrong.