from the president
Some friends of Emory would find it difficult to believe that, after completing more than a billion dollars' worth of construction and renovation in the past decade, we are not ready to put away the cranes and the orange fencing. As a result of the planning that has occupied much of our time and energy in the past eighteen months, the University now has some eighty building projects at various stages on the drawing board for the next decade. These range in scope from new facilities for each of our schools, to renovation of existing space on all of our campuses. Wags might suggest that Emory will be a lovely campus when it's finished. (Indeed, it already is lovely, and we intend to keep it so!) But all this activity is not about finishing the job Henry Hornbostel imagined when he laid out the campus ninety years ago.
The truth is that this campus plan is necessary to fulfill the substantive academic vision we have just laid out. All of the construction that we project will support the strategic plan approved by the Board of Trustees in November. That plan--"Where Courageous Inquiry Leads"--envisions a very wide array of investments in people and programs. Not all of those ways of investing are yet fully imagined. Our faculty will conceive many more.
Let me give just one example of how our campus plan will complement and undergird our strategic investments. In thinking about how to make this university the best Emory possible, we have determined collectively that we have unique strengths to help "confront the human condition and human experience." We will do this by focusing intently on three key initiatives: examining religions and the human spirit; looking at race and difference; and preparing pathways to global health. Emory is uniquely positioned to launch each of these initiatives.
In the last, for instance--global health--Emory can create a distinctive and leading paradigm for confronting and curing the world's endemic ills. Few major research universities have the resources and partnerships in this area that Emory does; fewer still have the faculty leadership in many departments and schools to make a difference. Our collaborations with our neighbor, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as partnerships through The Carter Center, CARE, the American Cancer Society, and institutions in other parts of the world make possible here a synergy impossible elsewhere. These linkages give Atlanta a strong claim for being, in the words of Dean James Curran, "the public health capital of the world." One of the ways we will seek to make this new synergy possible is through expanded facilities for the Rollins School of Public Health.
So, yes--we will continue to need our share of orange fencing. But the end result will have been to burnish the distinction of our faculty; to develop engaged scholars; to find new ways to create community; to help our society confront the human condition; and to explore new frontiers in science and technology. I invite you to help us make it happen.
—James W. Wagner
View the revised Campus Master Plan. View the Strategic Plan. |
