A great building shell game moves one step closer to reality this week as the Board of Regents takes up at its Aberdeen meeting today the plan to buy the old Madison hospital for $1.6 million. According to Agenda Item 6-F, the Board will consider authorizing its exec to sign the purchase agreement that will allow the state to acquire the hospital, which sits at the northeast edge of the main campus.
The Madison Community Hospital is moving operations to the south side of town to a new 110,000-square-foot, $36.8-million facility. The Regents will spend $7.5 million renovating the hospital into student housing and a “Learning Engagement Center.” (Funny: when I’m on campus, I feel engaged in learning all over the place, but I guess we need a center for that engagement now.) According to DSU’s 2020 strategic plan, “Learning Engagement Center” means a central location for academic advising and tutoring.
The Regents are acquiring the building for free: the purchase price is covered by a grant from the Great Plains Education Foundation (ah, old student loan interest at work!). The renovation dollars will come from bonds.
Remember, this is the second time DSU has twinned its expansion with the Madison hospital. The Regents did the same thing in the 1960s, when the Madison hospital built the facility the Regents are now buying and moved out of what the Regents then purchased and turned into Heston Hall, which is now the DSU administrative building. Heston Hall and the new DSU housing/tutoring center sit kitty-wampus from each other at Washington Avenue and 8th Street.
GO DSU
If you have not been on campus in the past 10 years or so, the beautification that Pres Knowlton undertook is great, so I invite you to campus. I will give you a tour, just email me. Then, I want you to set you email reminder for May of 2018 because, We have emerged from the post-Borofsky purge, we are slowly healing, our residence halls are full, and I believe we will be hiring some great new administrators to serve with President Griffiths. The new/old hospital will be transformed, the Beacom Institute of Technology will be built, and an amazing transformation of the Trojan Center will be done. This is not you grand parents General Beadle any longer. Our security programs grew almost 20% this year. We have a mission and we are fulfilling it. As Porter said, Go DSU, and we are. And yes Corey we do want to have alcohol :-)
Good to hear that optimism, Wayne! Now tell me how selling alcohol advances the Regental mission at DSU.
When I came to DSU in 1998 the state support for higher education sat at about 70% of the system budget, so the student cost was affordable, and the demand for scholarships was not nearly what it is today. Speaking of today, the state support has eroded below 40%…actually closing in on 30%, so the student must come up with a much larger share as the public contribution has evaporated. The demand for scholarships from alumni, the community, and our businesses and industries are at all time highs. Alcohol helps us raise money at basketball games, football games, and galas. We are not going into a daily business centered on alcohol. just using it as a tool to help at social events. Think of it as WD 40 for your wallet. ;-). Focused on the donors, not on the students, staff, or faculty.