Dean: Problem reflected across all of campus
Needed renovations at the South Carolina College of Pharmacy are at least a year out as the school fleshes out its long-term plans, and USC searches for resources to fund them.
The key needs for the college’s Columbia campus are upgrading outdated classrooms and laboratories, said Joe DiPiro, the college’s executive dean.
Earlier this year, DiPiro told The Daily Gamecock its facilities left the college “10 steps behind” peer schools. They’re preventing the relatively young college from retaining and recruiting faculty and students by diverting attention away from research and instruction and keeping the school from its goal of cracking the top 10 pharmacy programs nationally, he said.
Some of that work — on a lab for an endowed chair on the seventh floor of the Coker Life Sciences Building — will happen this summer, starting as soon as a month from now. USC’s spending about $1.15 million to renovate labs on about half the floor, which DiPiro describes as “1970s vintage.”
But other needs are years from being remedied.
The College of Pharmacy has labs on the fifth and sixth floors of the building, and no plans to renovate them have been drawn up yet, DiPiro said, because there’s no money to do it.
“It’s not an easy thing, as tight as budgets are,” he said.
Those needs will be outlined in a master plan the college is currently writing and that, DiPiro hopes, will be done within the next six months.
In the shorter term, DiPiro and Provost Michael Amiridis will meet in about a week to discuss plans for the next year, including upgrades to one of two large classrooms.
Students in the College of Pharmacy are often taught remotely, because the school also has a campus at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and in Greenville.
One of the college’s two Columbia campus classrooms was renovated last year for $600,000.
DiPiro said he’s pushing to have work on the other done over the summer next year.
That project will be important, he said, as the college starts to move its tests online.
Starting next year, incoming classes will take exams electronically, so classrooms will need bigger surfaces than lecture hall–style pullout desks, outlets for their laptops and wired Internet connections.
“It absolutely requires a state-of-the-art classroom,” DiPiro said. “We think that most typical course testing will go electronic, and the classrooms just aren’t well set up to do that.”
And, DiPiro said, the college just needs more space. It’s a young school growing in its reputation — and student population — but it’s stuck in a space designed for the 1970s and a smaller student body.
Among USC’s programs, that predicament is hardly unique, he acknowledged.
The College of Pharmacy’s deferred needs underscore the tangle of competing demands USC faces and that it’ll have to answer with no new money in sight.
Answering questions by email, Amiridis said USC’s needs across campus include classroom and lab space, safety requirements and staffing troubles. The human resources and business offices are understaffed, fire alarm systems need to be replaced, the campus needs more police officers and there is inequity in faculty pay.
At the same time, USC has grown its tuition rates and student population to their limits, and the university isn’t expecting to get much more money from the state. The end result: Money, especially for growth and development, is tight.
“The needs are real and numerous, and the resources are limited,” Amiridis wrote.