Washington and Lee University will push forth with its plans for a $13.5 million Center for Global Learning this week after receiving final approval from the school's board of trustees. While the university still must raise $1.5 million in order to hit its fundraising goal, construction will begin on the facility due to house a whole slew of new classrooms, seminar rooms and instructional labs.
In addition to learning spaces, the center will feature an atrium, garden, international tea shop and courtyard, which will serve as a venue for various exhibits and events happening on campus. The building will also contain language departments, the Office of International Education as well as offices for visiting scholars from other countries.
The university says that the center will connect "8,600 renovated square feet of existing duPont Hall with 17,700 square-feet in a new building" and that the "groundbreaking technologies planned for the center will connect Washington and Lee with other students and faculty around the world and at its university partners abroad."
The plan is for the center to help encourage interdisciplinary approaches to global learning, attract top-tier academics from around the world to campus to teach and conduct research and to integrate more global learning into the classes taken by students across school grounds.
"The center will be the physical manifestation of the university's strategic plan for international education," Washington and Lee says, "which reaches beyond the traditional study-abroad, internship and faculty research opportunities that already exist."
Again, as mentioned before, the final phase of the project is contingent on the $1.5 million the university has yet to raise. Whether the facility will be completed in a timely manner will depend on how fast the money is acquired by Washington and Lee.
