December 8, 1999
Enrollment growth pushes construction
___Recent enrollment growth and a commitment to providing the best facilities for our students, faculty and staff have resulted in the largest campus expansion program in Baylor University's 154-year history.
___Since August, the university has completed $60 million in construction projects, and another $60 million in facilities will be completed or under way by the end of this academic year. Baylor also has $120 million in projects that are in fund-raising and/or architectural planning.
Robert Sloan
President
___Projects completed this fall include expansion and renovation of School of Nursing facilities at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas; the 150,000-square-foot McLane Student Life Center; the 1,200-car Speight Avenue Parking Garage; new skyboxes and press box at Floyd Casey Stadium; and a utility infrastructure upgrade that expanded the heating and cooling plant and improved the energy efficiency of our campus.
___Construction will get under way in December on the $28.5 million Sheila and Walter Umphrey Law Center, which will be the new home for Baylor Law School in the fall of 2001. On Founders Day, Feb. 2, we will break ground on an $18 million campus for George W. Truett Seminary, which has been meeting at First Baptist Church in Waco. A focal point of the seminary campus will be the Paul W. Powell Chapel.
___Baylor's new baseball and softball stadiums, an $11.2 million project, will be completed by late February. On the drawing board are a new indoor/outdoor tennis complex and a golf academy for our nationally ranked men's and women's golf teams.
___Major academic facilities in the planning and fund-raising stages include the $15 million Harry and Anna Jeanes Discovery Center, which will house the department of museum studies, the Strecker Museum and the Ollie Mae Moen Discovery Place for Children; a $5 million addition to the Rogers Engineering and Computer Science Building; and construction of a science building and renovation of existing science facilities. The latter project will be the largest capital undertaking in Baylor's history, adding 200,000 square feet of science labs, classrooms and offices to our current science facilities. We anticipate this project will exceed $60 million.
___Certainly bricks and mortar do not represent the soul of an institution. People--students, faculty and staff--remain the focus of our mission; however, I believe there is no doubt that the kind of progress we are enjoying on our campus is a sign of Baylor's vitality.
___We are blessed to have the support of our alumni and friends--including Texas Baptists--who are making all of this possible for the benefit of future Baylor students. Our commitment is to be good stewards of these material gifts, just as we seek to be, through higher education, good stewards of the gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord.
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