Thanks to generous alumni donations throughout the year and during reunion week, Dartmouth will be moving up Main Street sooner than anticipated. At Convocation yesterday, College President James Wright announced the College was moving forward on several large campus expansions which would hopefully be completed within the next four years.
Though still shy of their ultimate150 million dollar fundraising goal, the College has secured more than 90 million dollars in donations for the expansion of the College physical plant and will shortly begin construction on several new facilities including a 300 bed dorm complex, a 600 seat dining facility and the long-awaited Kemeny math complex.
"We are prepared to move ahead on some facilities on a fairly rapid basis," said College Vice President of Public Affairs Bill Walker. Wright told students that he was hopeful the bulk of the construction projects would be completed before the Class of 2007 graduates.
While College Provost Barry Scherr emphasized that the completion by the spring of 2007 was still just a hope at the moment, he said that the College was very excited and planned to move forward aggressively during the next few years on construction projects.
According to Scherr, some of the architectural plans have been amended to "keep in touch" with the rest of campus. The new dormitory complex in what is currently the Medical School parking lot, will consist of two buildings, one with 139 beds and one with 169 beds as opposed to the 500 bed complex originally planned. The housing will be designed mostly for first and second year students and will consist of some suites, but mostly two room doubles with lots of open social spaces similar to the East Wheelock housing complex.
According to Scherr, this would make each of the new buildings roughly similar in size to the Ripley, Woodward and Smith dorm complex. Assuming there are no further delays, the College plans to break ground on the new dorms late summer or early fall 2004.
Where the other approximately 200 beds will be is yet to be determined. Thus, any plans to demolish either the River cluster of the Choates cluster will be pushed indefinitely into the future.
The new dining facility near the new dorms will hold about 600 seats, making it the largest dining facility on campus. The College is still in the planning phase as to the future of Thayer. Scherr said he believed that the building would not be demolished, and would be at least partly converted into social, "student-controlled" space.
The new dining hall will also contain social space designated for graduate students studying at the College of Arts and Sciences.
Despite the inevitable shift of student traffic up Main Street after the new dorms and dining facilities are complete, Scherr said he believed that the "focus of social activity will still be around Collis" due to the Green and all of the social spaces and currently in Thayer Dining Hall and Collis Center.
A couple of relatively smaller projects will begin almost immediately, including a renovation of Sudikoff computer sciences complex and Engineering Sciences Center at the Thayer School of Engineering.
While he could provide no specific timeframe, College Provost Barry Scherr told The Dartmouth that the first of the large construction projects, Kemeny Hall, will begin construction shortly. Scherr said that plans and fundraising were in their final stages, and that construction for the buildings would begin soon.
According to Scherr, the new Kemeny center will also host the College's several academic centers. The Leslie Center for the Humanities, the Ethics Institute, and the Dickey Center for International Understanding.
Also in more distant plans are the new life sciences complex, to be built near the medical school and a new arts complex to be built on Lebanon Street, which will someday house the studio art and film and television departments. In the future, the Tuck School of Business will also receive a new dorm complex for first year business school students.
