Campaign Update

Campaign Helps to Transform Creighton

By Bruce Rohde, Bsba'71, jd'73
Campaign steering committee chair

As you have been paging through the issues of Creighton University Magazine, you know that Creighton is boldly designing its future. If you have strolled across the vibrant, expanded campus, you have seen for yourself what bold strategic vision, inspiration and commitment can generate. This transformation has been possible because of all the alumni and friends who have helped advance Willing to Lead: The Campaign for Creighton University.

If you haven’t had the chance to visit the Creighton University campus recently, I invite you to do so. And once there, make a point to not only see the buildings, landscaping and community being created — from the western edge to the student-centered east campus living and learning environment — but also take the time for a closer look.

As you tour the campus, you’ll see our most important assets — our students and our faculty. You will observe students hurrying to class or chatting on the mall — students such as Tyler Gassaway, who will graduate in 2010. Tyler has stated that scholarship assistance was crucial to his decision to attend Creighton. He says Creighton is “everything you could ever hope for in a university,” and that he finds the Creighton community to be “unbelievably embracing.”

Alumni and friends play important roles in supporting students by funding scholarships, ensuring that high-ability students who could not otherwise afford to attend Creighton are able to benefit from all that the University has to offer.

You will also observe faculty members — meeting with students, discussing issues over coffee with a colleague, or heading to class. Our donors make it possible for professors, such as Wendy Wright, Ph.D., who holds the John C. Kenefick Endowed Chair in the Humanities, to be all that they possibly can be, sharing their expertise and creativity with students. Donors who endow faculty chairs, professorships or deanships, or fund academic programs, further Creighton’s tradition of excellence in Jesuit, Catholic education and research.

As you continue on your tour, you will see the Hixson-Lied Science Building, the University’s bold initiative that includes 200,000 renovated square feet of the Criss/ Rigge science facilities and an additional 110,000 square feet. Hixson-Lied is an integrated science center that fosters creative collaborations among Creighton’s health science students, faculty and researchers, assuring Creighton’s continuing competitiveness in science education.

As you walk east, you will notice Davis Square and Opus Hall, the University’s newest living communities for juniors and seniors. Because of these comfortable, convenient apartment-style residences, more than 500 juniors and seniors are choosing to live on campus, and the whole Creighton community benefits from their presence and their mentoring of younger students.

You can’t miss the newest structure, the Mike and Josie Harper Center for Student Life and Learning. Creighton’s largest construction project in 50 years, set to open in August, will be the signature campus building for decades to come. The fourstory Harper Center will be a pulse point, bringing many student and academic services together under one roof, and will serve as Creighton’s front door, welcoming prospective students, parents, alumni and other visitors.

Classrooms, the campus bookstore, the Alumni Sports Café, offices and other areas in the Harper Center will soon be bustling with students. These state-of-the-art spaces will bear the names of alumni and friends who, like those whose names are on and in Creighton buildings large and small, believe in furthering Creighton’s highest aspirations. These individuals, as well as the many who choose to give anonymously, have made a decision to align their own legacies, or the legacies of former professors or family members they have chosen to honor, with Creighton University.

All the buildings you will see — and the infrastructure you can’t see — are designed and created with one goal: to fulfill Creighton’s academic mission. That mission is dedicated to empowering students to engage the world and giving them the tools to change it responsibly.

The Willing to Lead Campaign is based on a shared and inspired vision and determined strategic planning. It pulls together the energy and expertise of all of us: alumni, faculty, students, staff, board members, administrators and the wider community. Such commitment is indeed infectious — and transformative.

Thank you for all you do to support Creighton University.