Goodbye, Central Campus. Hello, West.
Starting in 2019, undergraduates may cease to call Central Campus home, said Larry Moneta, vice president of student affairs, at Wednesday's Duke Student Government meeting. As part of this plan, all first-year students will continue to live on East Campus, while other undergraduates will be distributed across some of the University's other locations.
“The game plan is to retire Central Campus by the summer of 2019 and relocate everyone who would be on Central to the Hollows and Swift complex,” Moneta said.
The exodus from Central coincides with the completion of various construction projects around campus that will open up enough beds to make-up for the loss of Central's apartment-style housing.
The Hollows, a residency hall currently under construction, will be situated between Keohane Quad and Edens Quad. This new dorm will be “unparalleled in terms of the undergraduate experience,” as It will have suite-style housing, Moneta noted.
Construction crews are expected to wrap up at The Hollows around fall 2019, the same time as renovations of Crowell and Craven dorms will have come to a close. An total of 500 beds will be needed in the long term to replace those held at Central Campus.
And what will become of the 57-acre property that makes up Central?
Moneta listed several options for the space's future—from office buildings, classrooms, retail space to graduate student housing.
The graduate student housing idea in particular was based on the lack of affordable housing in the Durham community, Moneta explained. He added that the new policy intends to enable students to escape the challenges of “the graduate market.”
Moneta noted that the housing graduate students will inhabit on Central may be quite different from the current housing there. The new buildings planned will be mid-size houses and five-to-six story buildings, “almost extending what you would see on 9th street," he said.
On East Campus, the "superdorm" Trinity House is still under construction, but is slated to open this January. With its upcoming completion, the dorm will house students returning from semesters abroad. The fate of a few of the oldest first-year housing options—Jarvis, East, and Epworth dorms—is still up in the air.
When asked if Student Affairs was basing its new housing model off of other universities, Moneta said that Duke distinguishes itself from its peer institutions.
“We'll let them look at us,” he said.
In other business:
Senior Michael Ivory, Jr., a representative from President Vincent Price’s Commission on Memory and History, explained that the committee “should have [set the] guidelines from President Price and have suggestions of who should replace Robert E. Lee” by Nov. 17. The commission is soliciting ideas from the Duke community for suggestions on the replacement.
Senate approved Student Organization Financing Committee's allocation of $1,691.14 to the women's a capella group Deja Blue. The group is planning to co-host a Breast Cancer Awareness Benefit Concert Oct. 13 with other groups outside of Duke.
Deja Blue has estimated the event will attract around 170 attendees, and the concert will be followed by a reception at which donations will be accepted for a local breast cancer charity.
Senate also chartered Duke Splash, a program through which Duke undergraduates teach middle and high schoolers from the Durham community, and Duke’s chapter of Phi Delta Epsilon, an organization for pre-med undergraduates to listen to speakers and attend informational sessions.
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Stefanie Pousoulides is The Chronicle's Investigations Editor. A senior from Akron, Ohio, Stefanie is double majoring in political science and international comparative studies and serves as a Senior Editor of The Muse Magazine, Duke's feminist magazine. She is also a former co-Editor-in-Chief of The Muse Magazine and a former reporting intern at PolitiFact in Washington, D.C.