Chairman of the Wabash College Board of Trustees Steve Bowen ’68 believes new residence halls and a new student center are just as important as fraternity houses and athletic fields.
Ten years ago the board decided to invest $35 million to build, re-build and refurbish the nine College owned fraternity houses. Bowen said that at the time, improving fraternity houses was imperative.
“When we undertook the fraternity partnership initiative,” Bowen said, “we were faced with deteriorating houses. The fraternities, at the time we started this, were a huge percentage of the student population. I think this year we had a surprisingly high number of incoming freshmen pledge. Back in those days, that was just par for the course. Since that was such an important part of our housing stock, we decided we need to address that.”
Even when the Board made the strategic decision to do construction on fraternity houses, they knew that addressing independent living units had to be an imperative down the road.
“We’ve always known,” he said, “from the time we spent the first fraternity dollar that we would have to do something equitable as far as the independent men are concerned.”
“We had our master planners here at the meeting,” he said, “and they were talking about things we can do- where new dorms might go, how they might be configured. There’s been a lot of planning work done. Can I give you a timetable? Certainly not with this market and everything else. But it is something the board feels very strongly about.”
Bowen also noted that the Board felt it was important to have a vibrant Campus discussion of what type of student center students’ want. He emphasized the importance of having a place where fraternity and independent men alike can come and use the space.
Even before the construction of a new student center or new residence halls, the Board is committed to building new athletic facilities. Bowen said the project, which will include turfing the football field, creating new practice fields, as well as new a baseball stadium and soccer fields, was something the Board was planning on doing even before the advent of the Strategic Plan.
“We have been planning to address athletic fields for some time,” he said. “The condition of the football field is a problem – we spend a lot of money every other year restoring the grass. The baseball diamond is inadequate. It’s hurt our recruiting - We’ve gotten player feedback to that effect. We felt that we needed to upgrade our athletic facilities.”
Bowen noted the funding for the fields was never a problem. Although they could have borrowed the sum to do the improvements or launched a capital campaign to get the funding, enough alums had expressed interest in contributing to the updates that derivation of funding from other sources wouldn’t be necessary.
“In an order of magnitude, (the improvements) are relatively small dollars,” he said. ”We decided we could get to that because we’ve had people tell us they’d like to contribute – a baseball player alum, for example, might like to make a contribution to a new baseball field.
Bowen also said any future fundraising would not be encumbered by the athletic field improvements.
“We don’t think this gets in the way of a capital campaign at all,” he said. “We could have gone out and borrowed this money and taken care of what we thought was an immediate problem.”
Impending construction was not the only item of great discussion on campus. The death of freshman Johnny Smith sparked great campus discussion regarding the future of the college. Bowen had no comment, except to say that he supports the efforts of President White and the administration. His sentiments echoed those that were communicated in the President’s Tuesday mandatory Chapel.
“We have a Gentleman’s Rule, and at the very least that means obeying the law,” Bowen said. “I think that’s clear and fundamental.”
Bowen said one of the most valuable aspects of the Board meetings is the interaction the Trustees get with students. He noted the board is always trying to find new ways to interact with the student body.
“Last year we started what we hoped would be a tradition,” he said. “We had dinner with the juniors the night of the January meeting. I assume we’ll plan to have dinner with the juniors this year. We wanted to get input from people that were then going to be here to see the follow up.”
“There are trustees who come down early. We have a number of trustees that have funded immersion trips, scholarships and internships. Those trustees come down frequently the Thursday night before the weekend meeting to take students to dinner.”
Bowen noted the board is committed to meeting when students are on campus. They’ll even change the meeting date to accommodate this desire.
“This meeting was originally scheduled next weekend,” he said. “Because it was in the middle of fall break, we didn’t want to be here when students weren’t on campus. That’s why we’re meeting this weekend.”
“I think trustees have gone out a lot on a one on one basis and talked with students. We are interested in more formal ways of interaction.”