Hanover
But Dartmouth has not eliminated the site as a possible location for a smaller dorm, officials said.
An engineering study last month revealed that a 750-bed complex would be too expensive to build on the rocky ledges of College Park, and so administrators are giving up on a project of that size in that location, Hanlon said at a faculty meeting on Monday afternoon. Instead, he said, the Board of Trustees has asked administrators to study smaller projects, which would allow officials to consider both College Park and other locations on campus.
“We have now determined the cost of building 750 beds is simply beyond our financial capacity,” Hanlon said. “That project is just off; we just can’t afford it.”
Hanlon didn’t give a clear timeline for this next phase of study, nor did he say what other sites were under consideration.
The prospect of a large dormitory complex in one of the college’s few remaining downtown green spaces sparked opposition from nearby faculty departments and from many students. College Park contains the Bartlett Tower, a symbol of the school, and the Shattuck Observatory, an 1850s-era structure whose fate was in question under the initiative.
Hanlon and other administrators said the beds were needed for “swing space” while the college renovates or demolishes older residence halls. College Park is the only space big enough to fit a 750-bed project, he said.
Dorms potentially slated for renovation or replacement include the Choates, located just north of Webster Avenue, and the River cluster, which is west of the Thayer School of Engineering.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy, which has faculty offices in Shattuck Observatory, the Department of Earth Sciences and the Department of Chemistry voiced opposition to construction in College Park.
Among other objections, they noted that vibrations from the work could disrupt sensitive experiments.
“Such a major development would impede our ability to effectively teach undergraduate astronomy, disrupt in the intermediate term the research efforts of our experimental condensed matter physics program, and possibly result in the loss of a prominent beacon of Dartmouth’s scientific and architectural heritage — the Shattuck Observatory,” physics and astronomy professors said in an Oct. 17 letter.
Administrators at the time floated the idea of relocating or building around landmarks like the observatory — a workaround the professors who wrote the letter said would be insufficient.
“I am, of course, delighted with this decision,” Marlene Heck, a senior lecturer of architectural history, said in a Monday evening email. “However, I wish that the college could have admitted that College Park is not a building site and that they now understand the significance of this small wooded parcel. I have no doubt that architects will be able to find many appropriate solutions to our building needs that don’t require the destruction of historic landscapes.”
Hanlon announced the change in plans near the beginning of a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the Hopkins Center for the Arts. There were no questions from the scores of faculty present on Monday afternoon.
In other business, Hanlon announced that a report is coming next month from a task force studying the possibility of a 10 to 25 percent increase in Dartmouth’s undergraduate enrollment. Given that Dartmouth had 4,310 undergraduates in fall 2016, that change could mean as many as 1,100 more students.
The college president has argued for expanding the student body, saying it would add to the diversity of the undergraduate population and increase Dartmouth’s influence in the world. The task force’s report will be made public after it arrives, he said.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.