Dean says the moving promise will be kept
After years of dashed hopes and false starts, the College of Mass Communication and Information Studies received final university approval to move from the Carolina Coliseum onto the Horseshoe during a Friday board of trustees meeting.
The $18 million project now faces several rounds of state approval, which should conclude by year’s end. Should no problems arise, the college will move into the former Arnold School of Public Health by the middle of 2014, said Dean Charles Bierbauer.
“We like the idea of being in the center of campus,” Bierbauer said. “Even though the campus is migrating in our direction here, as a communications entity, we would like to think of communications as a hub that fits better in the middle of campus. Maybe we’ve been on the periphery for too long.”
The School of Public Health will fully exit the building in the beginning of 2013, Bierbauer said. Then, construction and upgrades would begin on the more-than-50,000 square feet building.
Space occupied by the School of Journalism and Mass Communications inside The Carolina Coliseum is currently under 30,000 square feet.
The new facility would include a rooftop terrace, new furniture and upgraded technology appropriate for a modern journalism school, according to university plans.
But some in the school have remained skeptical as plans have been released — and with good reason. It’s not the first time such promises have been made. Previous plans to move into LeConte College in 2009 never happened.
“Since my time here, I’ve gone from revisiting dead-end projects and broken promises to focusing on moving this school forward,” Bierbauer said in 2009, according to the university’s website. “In the past, ‘the move’ has been a continued broken promise, and now the LeConte building is the future.”
Now, Bierbauer says the promise of moving will be kept.
“I’m not much interested in revisiting why the LeConte project did not succeed. Or any of its predecessors,” Bierbauer wrote in an email. “What’s important to our college is that there is a clear way forward that has met consistent approval, that promises a building that will facilitate and enhance what we are already teaching and that now has a distinct timetable for completion.”