Driving a large wedge between the two academic campuses is the physical distance separating them. A 10-minute bus ride awaits any student departing from the C.C. Little bus stop. To make the journey more convenient, the University operates a fleet of busses that run every 10 minutes during the week. This arrangement does well to make the journey north less of a hassle, but the weekend bus schedule is not nearly as successful.
On Saturdays and Sundays, the buses run only on half-hour intervals, an inconvenience that strands a many students for two days during the week. The lack of readily available transportation discourages students living on North Campus from visiting Central Campus and the downtown Ann Arbor area. Weekends give students the opportunity to relax and explore all of Ann Arbor. Students on the respective campuses often remain there for the duration of the weekend - missing out on the resources available on both campuses.
To remedy this problem, the University simply needs to run a few more busses on the weekend. Granted, the number of students using the weekend busses drops, but these students deserve to have a convenient way of getting around to both campuses. The University could add more buses during the weekend to reduce the time interval between pick ups to a more reasonable 15 minutes. This interval should be short enough to make the trip between campuses more feasible, and long enough to gather a number of students that justify running the bus.
Another major problem facing North Campus is its lack of development. Nearly every building on the campus is a University-owned property dedicated to housing classes or students. Only in Pierpont Commons is there a food court, and it is drastically short of restaurants and services. People do not go up to North Campus because there is little to do there. The University would likely have little trouble locating potential suitors to develop the North Campus image. Many businesses would jump at the chance to market themselves to a large number of college students. Such expansion would also help build the North Campus sense of community.
A third problem for the University is that the split between campuses damages the potential for interdisciplinary work. North Campus takes the engineering, music and art professors and breaks them away from the University. Different departments working together can lead to interesting new research and better classes for students to take. The University needs to publicize North Campus more so that more faculty and students consider looking to the different parts of campus for their next endeavor.
As the University develops North Campus into a more accessible and diverse environment, it will start to earn a place in the collective mind of the University. Eventually, the campus may be seen as one developed unit. A unified campus will greatly benefit students in both an academic sense and a recreational sense.