Comprehensive Standard 3.11.3 Physical Facilities
The institution operates and maintains physical facilities, both on and off campus, that appropriately
serve the needs of the institution’s educational programs, support services, and other mission-related
activities.
Compliance Judgment: In compliance
Narrative
East Carolina University (hereafter, ECU or the university or institution), located in Greenville, NC, (Pitt
County), consists of approximately 1390 acres; approximately 535 acres are located on the Main
Campus, 206 acres are located on the Health Sciences Campus and 649 acres are located on the West
Research Campus. The university utilizes 206 facilities comprised of over 6,606,987 million gross square
feet (gsf) in support of daily operations.
Campus Buildings
171 State-owned buildings
35 leased facilities
99 residence halls
62 Support/administration/auxiliary facilities
9 athletics facilities
conversion ready or leased facilities
Gross Square Feet (gsf)
6,174,455
432,532
1,227,561
846,112
335,681
383,410
An interactive map provides a comprehensive overview of ECU’s facilities.
Space Policies
In 2011, the ECU Space Policy was approved. The intent and language of this policy shifted the longstanding practice and perceived ownership of space by departments to a centralized management
process. In 2012, the ECU Research Space Policy was drafted and approved to allow for a more efficient
management of research space. In Spring 2012, ECU invested significant resources in the purchase of
Assetworks, a space management software planning solution that not only tracks space size, ownership,
and usage, but allows for planners to analyze space with respect to future space planning needs.
Facilities Inventory and Utilization
Facilities Services is responsible for the construction, operation, and maintenance/repair of campus
buildings and for the provision of facilities services to the entire campus community. As one of 17
constituent institutions that comprise the University of North Carolina (hereafter, UNC), ECU’s Office of
Space Planning located in the Office of Institutional Planning, Assessment and Research (IPAR) is
required to report space utilization data annually. Table 1 of the Facilities Inventory and Utilization
Study 2010 (the most recent publication) shows the capacity/enrollment ratio, often referred to as the
C/E ratio (the amount of instructional and library space scheduled on campus divided by the total fall
term student clock hours). In Fall 2010 ECU had 1,001,174 assignable square feet and 262,537.5 total
student clock hours based upon on-campus courses. This physical capacity/enrollment ratio was above
average as compared to other constituent institutions that comprise the University of North Carolina.
ECU’s Office of Space Planning works with ECU’s Space Allocation Committee and the Brody School of
Medicine’s Space Allocation and Reallocation Committee (SPARC) to consider space requests that are
made via the online space request portal. Representatives from both of these committees serve on the
University Space Planning Committee. The committee, reporting to the chancellor, is responsible for
determining space policies and space allocation in accordance with relevant policies.
Master Plan
In February 2012, the ECU Board of Trustees approved the comprehensive ECU Master Plan that, first
and foremost, reflects the Strategic Action Plan, Values, and Mission of the university. The two-year
master planning process considered all aspects of ECU. Detailed studies were conducted on space
utilization, space needs, building condition and deferred maintenance, campus safety and security,
utilities and infrastructure, traffic, transit, parking, academics, research, clinics, athletics, housing,
dining, and recreation facilities. The master planning process was inclusive, transparent, and iterative
and required ongoing commitments and inputs from ECU leadership along with the full participation of
students, faculty, staff, alumni and the community of Greenville.
The ECU Master Plan presents a roadmap for how ECU will address future growth and expansion and
plan addresses a five-year initial planning horizon, a fifteen-year timeline, and also a longer vision for
land use. This flexible plan is intended to be a “living document” to accommodate unanticipated future
institutional needs and changes.
Educational Programs
As with other institutions of higher education, enrollment levels in academic programs drive ECU’s need
for instructional space. Academic discipline and degree program requirements, aligned by pedagogical
methods to deliver instruction, trigger the demand for different types of teaching and learning spaces
(e.g., teaching labs, auditoria for lectures, and classrooms with flexible furniture and small group study
spaces for problem-based learning). In 2008, ECU established the Classroom Space Scheduling Policy
that grants room allocation preference based on the degree to which utilization is maximized in
accordance with the policy and then on specific needs such as proximity and access to necessary
technology and equipment. This process is managed via the ECU Banner Student Information System.
Support Programs and Services
ECU operates and maintains physical facilities (residence halls, recreational and wellness facilities, and
dining facilities), both on and off campus, to serve the needs of the institution’s student support
services. Examples of investments that the institution has made over the past few years are outlined
below.
Residence Halls
ECU’s residence halls are located on ECU’s Main Campus. In Fall 2011, 92.7% of available residence beds
were occupied. Recent projects and improvements to residence halls include:
 In 2010, a renovation and addition of 55,520 gsf. was made to Scott Residence Hall at a total
construction cost of $28.5 million.
 In 2006, College Hill Suites, a new residence hall, was completed. This facility offers suite-style
accommodations and shared spaces designed to foster the learning environment.
Recreation and Wellness
The Student Recreation Center, located on Main Campus is the winner of the 1997 prestigious "Facility
of Merit Award” from Athletic Business Magazine. This 150,277 sq.ft. facility is the primary hub for
recreational experiences at ECU. In addition, the Blount Sports Complex offers students 18 acres of
developed property to be used for a variety of sports activities. The North Recreational
Complex includes eight multipurpose activity fields and six acres of water for fishing and boating
activities. Significant examples of recent improvements to ECU’s recreational and wellness facilities
include the 2011 state-of-the art Odyssey High Challenge wall and a 3,124 sq ft boat house added to the
North Recreational Complex.
Student Union
The Mendenhall Student Center provides access to banking services, copy services, mail services, a
computer lab, food services, and lounge/meeting areas, ECU’s Central Ticket Office, and Students
Affairs’ offices. Future plans include a new student center and supporting transit hub to be built on
ECU’s East Campus during Phase 1 of the Master Plan as well as a complementary student center to be
built on the Health Sciences Campus.
Campus Dining
Fourteen Campus Dining facilities are located on ECU’s Main and Health Sciences Campuses. Examples
of recent capital and renovation projects include:
 In 2010, a new 18,659 gsf. $8.2 million Croatan Dining Facility in the heart of Main Campus. The
project architect has submitted an application for LEED certification at the Silver Level.
Highlights of the project include special lighting, water cisterns in the courtyard, ecologically
friendly landscaping, and the use of products produced within a 500 mile radius of Greenville,
NC.
 The summer 2010 $1.9 million renovation of Wright Place, fast food and gathering center in
Main Campus.
Plans and Funding
The UNC requires that each of the 17 constituent institutions submit Six-year Appropriated Capital
Improvements Projects Plans, 2011-12 through 2016-17, Six-Year Repair and Renovations Appropriated
Funding Plans, and Six Year Non-Appropriated Capital Improvement Plans. The Six-year Capital
Improvements Plans list and describe all potential projects. Campus administrators, the ECU Board of
Trustees and the UNC Board of Governors review the six-year plans to ensure that plans comply with the
ECU Master Plan, and ECU Strategic Action Plan. Funding requests must comply with the University of
North Carolina Guidelines and Policies as outlined in the 2011-12 Budget Memorandum – Number 2 and
the North Carolina General Statutes G.S 143C-4-3(b). ECU adheres to these regulations in the
development of all of its facilities planning efforts.
Maintenance of Facilities
The Facilities Services’ Mission is to maintain an aesthetically pleasing campus environment that is
conducive to teaching, learning, and research. Facilities services personnel are responsible for all real
property including repair, planning, minor renovation and construction, utilities, maintenance, grounds,
and housekeeping. The ECU Facilities Services Standard Practice Manual outlines operating procedures
to be followed. Services are managed via a computerized maintenance management system to ensure
timely, efficient, and effective delivery of services. Routine work orders are received from campus
departments via a call center and/or the web-based system request. Over the past four fiscal years, the
percentage of asset preventive work orders to routine work order has steadily increased, demonstrating
that the preventive maintenance system is both cost-effective and improving the quality of the system
components.
Deferred maintenance needs are also identified through the state’s Facility Condition Assessment
Program (FCAP) which is updated every three to five years. ECU’s 2007 Facilities Condition Assessment
Program Report outlines the highest priority needs that are then addressed through the biennium
budget request and the six-year deferred maintenance plan discussed under Plans and Funding.
Technology Infrastructure to Support Distance Education
Appropriate equipment is also provided by the institution to support distance education. The
University’s primary distance education offering is delivered through the BlackBoard applications. ECU
has a total of four physical application servers (Sun Sparc Enterprise T5240), each having two processors
(8 Core Ultra Sparc T2+) running at 1.2 Ghz and capable of 128 simultaneous processing threads and 128
GB of RAM. Each of these application servers is divided into 3 logical domains each (separating
production, development/pilot, and restore environments). Course content is stored on ECU’s NAS
device, and we are currently using 1.5TB of the allocated 2.0TB. The database servers consist of two Sun
Sparc Enterprise M5000 servers. Each server has eight processors (4 Core Sparc64 VII) running at 2.4
Ghz and capable of 64 simultaneous processing threads and 128 GB of RAM. Each M5000 is partitioned
into two domains (one for production use and one for development/pilot use). The databases are
configured using Solaris Clustering to provide failover capability.
In March 2010, Blackboard Consulting Services performed a Performance Audit and Tuning Engagement
on our Production (Blackboard 8) and Development/Pilot (Blackboard 9) environments. The outcome of
the engagement indicated that ECU’s production system was well tuned, designed, and capable of
supporting our students.
Because of the importance of this environment to the University, ITCS has taken a High Availability first,
disaster recovery last approach. Each server is built with component redundancy for processors,
memory, power supplies, network cards, fiber cards, etc. Multiple fully redundant systems power the
database and applications tiers. The redundant servers are split between ECU’s primary (Cotanche) and
secondary (GE99) data centers and are connected via multi-pathed replicated storage also split between
both data centers. Sun Clustering is used to provide automatic failover for the database tier, while load
balancing provides seamless redundancy for the applications tier. The design ensures that ECU can
maintain BlackBoard services in the event of an entire data center failure. In addition, full system
nightly backups are maintained offsite, and recovery procedures are routinely tested.
Another primary tool to support the distance education experience is Centra, a hosted solution used for
web conferencing. This hosted web conferencing program provides a virtual classroom, enabling a
group of people to interact with each other in a virtual online meeting environment. Centra can be
accessed "live" anytime from anywhere that attendees have access to a computer and an internet
connection. All meetings using Centra are automatically recorded, so those unable to participate in the
live meeting are able to play back the meeting at a later time. The platform is hosted by Saba, which
provides the capability to hold an unlimited number of meetings 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Centra’s server currently stores recordings for over 7,000 meeting events and accommodates over 8,000
active users. Saba provides toll free end user technical support for faculty, staff, and students Monday
through Friday, 7:00 AM to 12:00 AM and Saturday & Sunday, 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM.
Through ECU’s nearly petabyte of storage, adequate storage and backup is available for student work,
academic websites, and student and faculty blogs. There are also several resources available for the
sharing of video. The primary resource for sharing student work is iTunes and a winmedia streaming
server. Both of these resources currently enable students and faculty to upload unlimited amounts of
video for use in courses.
The primary video infrastructure used to record lectures is through Media Site. ECU’s Mediasite 5.5
setup is based on a high-availability load balancing infrastructure. ECU currently runs two application
servers and one video content server that facilitate all of the capture from 35+ recorders to 13
departmental sites for both on demand and live- streaming presentations. All sites require Active
Directory authentication or local user authentication to view information and sensitive material.
Classroom Technology configures the management portal access, we restrict access for departmental
administrators to parts of the server that impact actual connection settings and server configurations.
The video server contains all of the storage for the department’s site presentations. ECU currently has
6TBs of storage that all thirteen sites share. The video server is running Windows Media Server that has
connections to each sites content folders and will stream the presentation as it is requested.
Presentations can be viewed in two ways, either live or archived. This service will take the schedules and
push it down daily or as changes are made to the schedule settings. This allows a redundancy for
presentation recording even in the event that the server is unavailable due to a network connection
issue.
The main internet connection for the University is provided by the North Carolina Research and
Educational Network (NCREN). The connection to NCREN is a 1 gigabit per second connection to the
NRCEN Remote Point of Presence (RPOP) which is connected to the NCREN backbone by two 1-gigabit
per second connections taking diverse paths back into the NCREN network.
ECU’s Information Technology & Computing Services (ITCS) is a centralized technology organization led
by a Chief Information Officer, reporting to the Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance. There are
193 positions including professional staff in the fields of networking, security, systems, operations,
instructional technology, programming, desktop support, communications, training, and administration.
Academic Computing, a division of ITCS, emphasizes support of faculty, staff, and students using online
learning platforms, the development of online course material, multimedia tools, distance education
tools, Web conferencing, the IT help desk, and web applications. ITCS works collaboratively with
departmental instructional technologists to provide support of institutional online applications and
infrastructure. Through national and regional searches to hire the most qualified personnel and
following North Carolina Office of State Personnel guidelines, ITCS provides qualified staff to support
technological infrastructure. ITCS staff have a myriad of nationally recognized advanced degrees and
certifications in a variety of areas, such as ISCA security and governance, Cisco Networking, A+
hardware, Microsoft Products, and Red Hat. Ongoing training is provided to staff through online training
tools, workshops, and conferences.
In summary, East Carolina University operates, maintains, and supports physical and electronic facilities,
both on and off campus, that appropriately serve the needs of the institution’s educational programs,
support services, and other mission-related activities.
Documentation
Reference Title
2007 Facilities Condition Assessment
Program Report (FCAP)
2011-12 Budget Memorandum – Number 2
Blount Sports Complex
Campus Dining
Classroom Space Scheduling Policy
Croatan Dining Facility
ECU Master Plan
ECU Research Space Policy
ECU’s Residence Halls
ECU Space Policy
ECU’s Residence Halls
Facilities Inventory and Utilization Study
2010
Facilities Services
Facilities Services Mission
Facilities Services Standard Practice Manual
Interactive Map
Information Technology and Computing
Location
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/2007%20FCAP%20All%20Deficiencies
%20By%20Building.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/Budget%20Memo%20%20UNC%20Guidelines%20and%20Policies.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/BLOUNT%20SPORTS%20COMPLEX.pd
f
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/CAMPUS%20DINING.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/ECU%20Classroom%20Scheduling%2
0Policy.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/Croatan%20Dining%20Facility.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/Master%20Plan.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/2.11.2/ResearchSpacePolicy040212.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/RESIDENCE%20HALLS.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/SpacePolicy.jpg
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/RESIDENCE%20HALLS.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/2.11.2/FacilitiesInventoryandUtilizationStud
y2010.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/FACILITIES%20SERVICES.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/FacMission.jpg
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/Facilities%20Services%20Standard%2
0Practice%20Manual.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/Interactive%20Map.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
Services Organizational Chart
Mendenhall Student Center
Mission
North Carolina General Statutes G.S. 143C4-3(b)
North Recreation Complex
Office of Space Planning
Office of Institutional Planning,
Assessment, and Research
Repair and Renovations Appropriated
Funding Plans
Six-year Appropriated Capital
Improvements Projects Plans, 2011-12
through 2016-17
Six-year Non-Appropriated Capital
Improvements Plan
Six-year Repair and Renovation
Appropriated Plan
Space Allocation Committee
Space Allocation/Reallocation Committee
(SPARC)
Strategic Action Plan
Student Recreation Center
Table 1
University of North Carolina
uments/3.11.3/ITCS%20Org%20Chart.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/MENDENHALL%20STUDENT%20CENT
ER.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/ECU%20Mission%20Statement.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/143C-4-3-b.jpg
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/NORTH%20RECREATIONAL%20COMP
LEX.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/SPACE%20PLANNING.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/IPAR.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/20102017_RRListToGA%20_ECU_Submission.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/2011-17%20ECU%20SixYear%20Appropriated%20Capital%20Improvements
%20Project%20Plan.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/20011-17%20NonAppropriated%20CI%20Template%20(2).pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/20102017_RRListToGA%20_ECU_Submission.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/Space%20Allocation%20Committee.p
df
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/SPARC.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/2010_ECU_Strategic_Action_Plan2.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/STUDENT%20RECREATION%20CENTE
R.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/2.11.2/Table1.jpg
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/University%20of%20North%20Caroli
University Space Planning Committee
na.pdf
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/University%20Space%20Planning%20
Committee.pdf
Values
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/Values.pdf
Wright Place
https://collab.ecu.edu/cmte/sacs/CorrespondingDoc
uments/3.11.3/WRIGHT%20PLACE.pdf