Warwick in 2085: What does the future hold?

To predict the future is hard: none of us would claim to be Nostradamus. Most Warwick students, in fact, tend to live in a sort of temporal haze, the notion of what lies after university existing only as an abstract concept paid lip-service to by the occasional internship rejection. 

Asking Warwick students to imagine what the University might look like another sixty years from now would be hopeless; imagine asking a fish to visualise running a half-marathon. Yet, having approached some two dozen faculty members, all of whom had worked at the University for over 30 years, it is apparent that this scenario stumps them too, having apparently been institutionalised by decades of life in academic limbo. The onus thus falls, as always, on The Boar to speculate what Warwick will look like for the class of 2085. 

What buildings will our students be studying in? One would hope, certainly, that these haven’t yet been constructed. The University does have much-vaunted plans for an ambitious new Science and Engineering Precinct to be completed by 2033, to replace the current Science blocks which were built all the way back in 1965. The fact that these 60-year-old facilities are still very much in use today does imply we won’t have seen the backs of the FAB, only opened in 2022, nor the Oculus, completed in 2016, by the 2080s. 

In the case of both the FAB and the Science Precinct, space was made for these expansions by axing old car parks, so any new facilities will probably wind up being built on the sites of the current multi-storeys opposite Junction or Claycroft. It also remains to be seen what Warwick does with the site of the Humanities Building once longstanding plans to put the RAAC-riddled prison block out of its misery are finally executed in the indeterminate future. 

If predicting the future 60 years from now is entirely guesswork, the one thing that can be said with total conviction is that students will always find a reason to have a moan.

What will Warwick stand for? Strategy 2030, unveiled last year, gives a suggestion – although it isn’t particularly surprising. Innovation, inclusivity, and global influence: as it was, so shall it be. Like all British universities of late, Warwick has been battling increasingly severe financial headwinds as student enrolment numbers fall and inflationary costs remain high. The response by higher education has been to invest heavily in the lucrative business of attracting international students, who come bearing far higher tuition fees than their UK counterparts. Any universities which do manage to survive until 2085 will likely be international in nature. Global institutions, rather than just ‘British’. 

But will that really affect the future Warwick’s students? Having reported student concerns for over fifty years now, The Boar knows better than anyone that it is the same issues over and over again that drive conversation on campus: complaints about accommodation fees, complaints over the prices of SU outlets, complaints with public transport. If predicting the future 60 years from now is entirely guesswork, the one thing that can be said with total conviction is that students will always find a reason to have a moan. The accommodations may look different (Rootes, no doubt, will remain completely unchanged), the SU might be completely vegan, and the buses might even fly – but no doubt, all three will remain as derided as ever.