Students running late for class in the David M. Dennison building might no longer have to worry about sprinting up six flights of stairs.
With planned renovations in the next few years, Dennison’s classrooms will be transformed into academic centers and University institute offices. The renovations, which were originally supposed to start this year, are part of the University’s plan to use its academic spaces more efficiently.
University officials have discussed renovating the Dennison building since 2009, when plans to renovate the fourth floor of the building were announced by former University Provost Teresa Sullivan. The project was delayed and never implemented.
Last fall, University Provost Philip Hanlon spoke of plans to renovate the sixth floor of the building and to move the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute and the Barger Leadership Institute into the space. In an interview on Friday, Hanlon said the original plan was delayed because University officials want to remodel Dennison to a larger degree.
“We’re now looking at a grander substantiation of that idea,” he said.
Currently, the renovation of Dennison is still in the early stages of planning, according to Hanlon. The space in Dennison primarily used for undergraduate classrooms would be better suited to function as facilities for academic departments, he said.
“To get to where we want to be, one of the things we need to do is take some of our lower quality classrooms offline, convert them to more important uses and then share our higher quality classrooms more effectively,” Hanlon said.
The proposed renovation has not yet been presented to the University’s Board of Regents and does not have a complete funding plan. The project would allow various centers and institutes to share resources — a coordination Hanlon said has been difficult to maintain in the past because the institutes are dispersed throughout campus.
“(The plan is to) take essentially most or all of the classrooms in Dennison and convert the building into a place where we put together a lot of small centers and the small centers will — by being co-located — be able to share staff very effectively, be able to share common space, drop-in faculty offices and so on,” he explained.
The Dennison renovation will be part of a larger Space Utilization Initiative aimed at evaluating and maximizing current uses of space to decrease growth of academic offices on campus. The annual growth in square footage of the University’s academic spaces has dropped from 1.86 percent to less than 0.5 percent since the initiative started in 2007, according to Hanlon. He added that the initiative is important not only for environmental sustainability but also to aid the University’s budget amid reductions in state funding.
“We need to be good stewards of our resources …” Hanlon said. “It keeps our costs down and therefore helps minimize tuition increases even in the face of state cuts. Slowing down the growth of our academic space slows down the growth of our environmental footprint as well.”
Hanlon, who is teaching Calculus I in Dennison this semester, said the classrooms are satisfactory, but aren’t as advanced as other academic spaces at the University.
“They’re just rectangular. They don’t have technology built into them for the most part,” Hanlon said. “When you leave a classroom in Dennison, you just enter a hall where lots of other students are entering at the same time. So at the end of class, it’s really hard to find a place to land and talk and continue conversations.”
LSA junior Jen Bizzotto, who is taking two classes located in Dennison this semester, described the building as “cramped,” “dingy” and often overlooked.
“I think Dennison is just one of those things that gets forgotten,” she said.
Bizzotto said she is looking forward to seeing the future renovated building.
“It’s awesome that they’re doing this sort of thing,” Bizzotto said. “It’s nice to know that our tuition dollars are going towards things that we’ll actually see.”