Academic Facilities

As we transform our academic program to infuse it with new perspectives, and our campus community to infuse it with new life, we will also transform the physical configuration of our campus to bring together the elements of campus life and concentrate the energy of the people who live, learn, and work here.

The Athenaeum will be the most prominent and important manifestation of this ideal. Even before we began developing our strategic plan, Goucher had planned a substantial renovation and expansion of some of its buildings, first and foremost the Julia Rogers Library. As you have seen in the preceding pages of this document, the college has also become well-known for the impressive variety of performances, lectures, panel discussions, and other events it hosts. In the Athenaeum, we envision a space that merges the power of a state-of-the-art college library with the energy that arises when the kind of world-class visitors we invite to our campus come together with the members of this extraordinary community-and then amplifies that energy and broadcasts it to the world.

As the library moves to become the anchor of this new facility, we will be able to renovate the existing Julia Rogers building to provide more and better space for our growing academic departments-for improved faculty offices and innovative classroom spaces that also bear the imprint of our new educational vision, both in their design and in their implementation of the full range of current instructional technology. We will also renovate and expand student housing to meet the needs of our growing student body.

In all of our facilities, we will envision and create whole new kinds of spaces that encourage through their very design the kind of interaction and collaboration we hope to foster among the members of our community. We will hold foremost in our minds that we are working to realize a vision whose paramount values are innovation in thinking and action in the world, and we will ensure that this vision is reflected throughout the college-not just in our curriculum, events, and programs, but also in the very face of the campus.

We have already begun taking steps toward this goal, and we will continue working at these initiatives over the coming years. We will:

1. Build the Athenaeum-and renovate the Julia Rogers building to provide new classrooms and offices for our academic departments.

The economic turbulence that everyone has experienced in recent years has made it necessary for us to proceed slightly more deliberately with the construction of the Athenaeum than we had initially planned, but we will realize our original vision for the building in increments.

The first step in the process will be to reroute the Loop Road and underlying utilities to reflect the perimeter of the campus, which we will complete over the summer of 2004. This move reflects the vision of the original architects of Goucher’s Towson campus, and in addition to providing the space we will need to build the Athenaeum, it will return acres of meadow to the heart of the campus.

Next, we will build a superior new library facility that will also feature a café, a commuter lounge, seminar rooms, and information technology resources that far surpass those we currently offer. At the heart of the Athenaeum complex will be an open-air plaza where musicians will play, writers will read, all manner of people will speak, and visitors can come to express themselves, check out what is happening at Goucher, and dive into what we hope will be a continual, free-flowing exchange of ideas. The new library will serve as the crossroads of our campus and the core of the Athenaeum. Its construction will also enable us to vacate and renovate the Julia Rogers building to provide additional-and much-needed-classroom and office space for our academic departments. A recent survey revealed that the building is large enough to accommodate most of the space now required for additional faculty offices, classrooms, and labs.

Finally, we will expand the new library to reflect the whole of our vision for the Athenaeum, adding a 500-seat auditorium and other areas where the members of our community can gather for events, academic programs, and informal and formal discussions.

We have received a $3 million capital grant from the state of Maryland to support the construction of our new library, and we are currently meeting with architects to finalize its design.

2. Build a new residence hall and explore new living configurations that encourage increased interaction and collaboration among our students.

Our growing undergraduate population-and our decision to expand it further-has created an immediate need for new housing. In the fall of 2003, we began offering new student residential choices, including halls centered on the themes of community service and creative writing, in the Dulaney Valley Apartments across the street from the campus. We have experimented with theme-based housing on campus over the past several years, including language floors in some houses and the health-and-wellness-dedicated New House, and we are considering additional possibilities for bringing students with similar interests together. The Dulaney Valley Apartments are intended only as a temporary solution, however. We will build an entirely new residence hall adjacent to the Athenaeum by 2005, and we are upgrading the facilities in Stimson Hall, with improvements to Froelicher Hall down the road. The new spaces we are building encourage interaction through their very architecture, which brings students together in suites with common living areas where they can more easily share their experiences here at Goucher. The new residence hall will also hold apartments for visiting scholars.

3. Expand Goucher College’s presence in Baltimore.

Part of our strategic vision calls for Goucher to offer our students more opportunities to engage the city of Baltimore, particularly though intercultural experiences. One of the possibilities we discussed as we developed the plan was to develop a facility in the historic Goucher neighborhood in midtown Baltimore. The space would serve as a center for arts, education, and service programs and a laboratory for historic preservation. Goucher students would use it as a headquarters for student-teaching at city schools, and it would house after-school and weekend tutoring and mentoring programs and youth theater and reading groups. The building would also serve as a home base for service-learning programs, including community development and immigrant assistance projects and partnerships with community organizations in the city of Baltimore.

As an arts center, the downtown facility would host community-based arts programs, but it would also serve as a rich resource for our traditional art program because of its central location among Baltimore’s art museums, theatre district, and fine arts institutions. Goucher’s historic neighborhood is also a natural location for a historic preservation laboratory because of its proximity to the abundant preservation research opportunities in the city of Baltimore.

Finally, moving back into the old neighborhood has the potential to result in a rather rapid expansion of Goucher’s institutional involvement in the Baltimore community because of the long-term partnerships to which its location would seem to lend itself. We already have many strong partnerships in place; among the organizations with whom we could explore further relationships are local elementary schools such as Margaret Brent, Dallas Nicholas, and Bernard Harris; local non-profit and community organizations, including WYPR radio, Catholic Charities, the Center for Poverty Solutions, and the Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper, all of which maintain offices in the area; the Maryland Geological Survey, which is housed in an adjacent building; and the national office of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Next: Realizing the Vision