As President Michael Roth mentioned at last Sunday’s Wesleyan Student Assembly meeting, the closed Davenport Campus Center will become the new Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life. Allbritton will house faculty offices and classrooms for the social sciences as well as a Quantitative Analysis Center. While planning began in May 2006, the actual building will not open until at least next year.

Trustee Robert L. Allbritton ’92, who donated $5 million to the project and is the founder of The Politico, a newspaper and website that covers Capitol Hill, explained how current trends influenced the focus of the new Center.

“Public life is changing, in part because new media have accelerated the exchange of ideas among leaders in government, business, the arts and sciences, and grassroots activism,” he said. “I am proud to think that The Politico supports and informs this exchange. I believe that the Center for the Study of Public Life at Wesleyan also can help us understand and elevate our evolving public discourse.”

Excerpts from “A Proposal to Create: The Center for the Study of Public Life,” provided to the Argus by Dean of the Social and Behavioral Sciences J. Donald Moon, describe a building with intellectual disciplines similar to those in the Public Affairs Center.

“The center will play a key role in enhancing quantitative reasoning, intercultural literacy, and effective citizenship,” the document reads. “Like the earlier PAC, it continues our commitment to preparing our students for lives as active citizens and for leadership positions in different areas….It seeks to support Wesleyan’s tradition of the scholar-teacher by encouraging faculty research in a manner that directly benefits and enhances student learning and the new curriculum.”

Expanding on facilities already used by the social sciences in PAC, the Allbritton Center could relieve some of the congestion in the heavily used building.

“We’re planning on having a large classroom equipped with computers,” Moon said. “Right now the biggest computer-equipped classroom has about 20 computers. We need a classroom with 40 to 50 seats.”

Moon thinks it will be difficult to categorize classes and research at the center, which was called an “umbrella organization” in the May 2006 proposal.

“We would bring people to campus, mostly alums, that have experience in matters relating to public life,” Moon said. “The courses wouldn’t necessarily fit into existing departments. There would be support for faculty research, groups of faculty working on similar research.”

When asked when the center would be completed, Moon couldn’t pinpoint a specific date, though he said that active planning would begin next September. Construction will begin by the time at least 50 percent of the cost of the project has been donated to the university and at least 80 percent has been pledged.

Ultimately, the proposal for the Center aims to be relevant to the 21st century and “distinctively Wesleyan” as well.

“It is…crucial that the Center be conceived not merely as a center for academic conversation, not even one that enriches curriculum and teaching, but as one that does so in areas directly relevant to the study of and engagement with the natural, social, and political world in which students will be living,” the proposal reads. “Such an initiative is thus not only distinctive in its scale of ambitions for a liberal arts school; it is also distinctively ‘Wesleyan’ in its intent and direction.”