APPA in Conversation at the 2024 Higher Ed Facilities Forum

How ASU, Vanderbilt, and UW-Madison Are Rethinking Campus Infrastructure, Sustainability, and Space

Aging infrastructure, shrinking budgets, workforce competition, and aggressive sustainability goals—none of these are new challenges. But what’s changing is how institutions are choosing to respond.

At the 2024 Higher Ed Facilities Forum in Tempe, Arizona, APPA President & CEO Lalit Agarwal joined senior facilities leaders from Arizona State University, Vanderbilt University, and UW–Madison for a candid discussion on what’s working, what’s not, and where we go from here.

The panel brought together real examples from the field—strategies that aren’t hypothetical but already in motion: apprenticeship programs aimed at growing in-house talent, employee scholarship benefits designed to compete with private-sector wages, underground utility mapping to avoid future disruption, and smarter approaches to space management that ask not just how much space a campus has but how often it’s actually used.

Lalit underscored a key point that often gets buried in the data: it’s not just about backlog totals or infrastructure reports—it’s about institutional priorities.

“Deferred maintenance isn’t just a facilities issue—it’s a leadership issue,” he said. “We need to shift the conversation beyond the number and talk about what’s urgent, what’s actionable, and how it affects the student and research experience right now.”

He also emphasized that facilities professionals are no longer on the sidelines of strategy—they’re shaping it. And that work doesn’t happen in isolation.

“If we could do all of this alone on our campuses, we wouldn’t be here. But clearly, we cannot,” he added. “My motto is collective success. We will be successful together—and if we work only by ourselves, we won’t get there.”

The APPA community knows that the future of campus operations will be built on collaboration, creativity, and a willingness to rethink long-held assumptions—from recruiting and retaining staff to defining value in our physical spaces.

Read the full article from Higher Ed Facilities Forum: How ASU, Vanderbilt, and UW-Madison Are Rethinking Campus Infrastructure, Sustainability, and Space, and watch the full panel discussion.