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OPINION UPDATE ON THE STRATEGIC PLAN
By DR. WILLIAM THIERFELDER
As you may know, your tuition alone does not cover the cost of providing the education that you receive at the Abbey, so it needs to be supplemented through various fund raising endeavors. This means that we do not have a readily available source of funding for new construction. We had looked for inexpensive ways to quickly renovate, but there aren’t any. We need a capital campaign to generate the large sums of money needed, and we have been moving ahead as quickly as we can.
I can’t provide you with a detailed timeline at this point, but I will keep you informed as we move ahead. Below, I’d like to bring you up-to-date on what we have done over the past year and what is currently underway to alleviate these problems.
For perspective, the total cost of what we have completed over the past two years -- all the new faculty and staff hiring, new courses introduced, renovated classrooms, new athletic teams, and beautification and renovation of the campus (including Holy Grounds) -- is a fraction of what we will need for the construction of new resident halls and renovation of existing resident halls, plus a new dining facility to better serve you and our future students. The projected cost of construction for the first phase of our master plan will total approximately $20 million, while we have spent less than a tenth of that amount in each of the past two years to improve our campus and the college.
Such capital development requires more planning and dramatically different fundraising and financing approaches. While our efforts are not as visible as other activities on campus, we have been doing the following to move as quickly to construction as we can:
We also began our first construction since 1989 with the August 22 groundbreakings on the new adoration chapel and alumni house. We have been obtaining the construction permits for this construction and expect the final permits to be approved this month.
While these are quite small endeavors dollar-wise (combined, they total just over $1 million), they are important to help us generate support for additional construction like the dorms (which are nearly $10 million buildings). A generous alum, Johnnie Lowry, donated the funds to construct the alumni house, and we will soon be launching the campaign for construction of the chapel, with every dollar donated being matched by a group of benefactors to enable us to quickly generate the funds necessary.
These small construction projects don’t in any way hinder our ability to launch the larger construction, but, on the contrary, actually help by raising awareness of what we need to accomplish and proving our ability to execute.
One final note: with the large influx of new students over the past two years, we recognize that dining services are affected. We have formed a food committee, which has already met, and will be obtaining continual input from you to try to make that aspect of student life as positive as we can.
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Last month in The Crusader the problems in the residence halls were raised in an article entitled “What’s Happening with Our Dorms?” We are aware of all the difficulties of living in these old buildings and we agree that many of the issues discussed in the article need to be improved.