Having completed my first six months as the chief administrative officer for the Delaware State University Downtown campus, it’s a great time to let our community know what we’ve accomplished, where we stand now and what’s in store over the next few years.
I’ll begin with an admission: When President Tony Allen told me that he was considering me for this position, it took me by surprise.
My career in higher education has always been about making whole systems work. As Delaware State University’s vice president for student life since 2014, I had been responsible, at one time or another, for residence halls; student government and student activities; summer camps and campus events; the student judiciary system; transportation; career services; and too many others to count. What they have in common is that they are the foundational elements that must work — even if often invisibly — for the university itself to educate and graduate students.
So maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
Taking charge of the former Wesley College campus is a continuous exercise in modifying existing processes and (more often) creating entirely new ones.
We assumed responsibility for the DSU Downtown campus on July 1, 2021, and started housing students and offering courses only seven weeks later. A lot of people believed that it was just a matter of turning the lights back on, but it was far more complicated. In less than two months, we transferred an entire academic college to a new location, generated a detailed strategic plan for repairing, renovating and upgrading historic infrastructure that had suffered too many years of deferred maintenance, and — most critically — dived into the economic, cultural and social life of downtown Dover.
It’s going to take at least three years and $15 million to make the most critical infrastructure changes, and our community needs to know that we’re committed to using local contractors and services (with an emphasis on minority-owned business) to do as much of that work as possible.
Developments to watch for during that time include the relocation of our Early College High School to downtown and the use of the downtown athletic complex as a training area for many of our Division 1 sports, as well as potentially for ECHS/Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association tournament football games. We’re also expecting to build the university’s new Early Childhood Innovation Center on land that’s part of this campus.
These plans have been subjects of great interest over the last few months, as my team and I have met with Dover and Kent County political, business and religious leaders about the future impact of our campus. They have come away from those meetings, I believe, with a firm conviction that we mean DSU Downtown not only to have an economic impact on central Delaware but to be an integral part of the city’s life.
We are the new kids on the block, I tell them, and we are going to be good neighbors.
They always ask how we’ve kept our promises to the Wesley College legacy students, faculty and staff who joined Delaware State University. That makes me smile because we have a great story to tell about that.
More than two-thirds of Wesley’s existing students chose to continue with DSU, and all of them have experienced lower costs and close attention to their academic success. To select a single example, when we imported the highly acclaimed master’s in occupational therapy program into Delaware State University, we cut the cost of attendance for every student by $5,000 annually and provided each of them with an iPad to use in their clinical rotations. That word has gotten out: Enrollment in the MOT program grew by 50% in its very first semester because no similar program in the middle Atlantic region can beat us on quality and cost.
Dozens of former Wesley faculty and staff have made successful transitions to larger, public institutions, and many have already advanced to new responsibilities. Wanda Anderson was recently named associate vice president for housing; Dawn Howard Bailey as assistant vice president for human resources; and Tracy Lundblad as director of veterans’ affairs.
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve yet managed to sit down with a quiet cup of coffee for half an hour just to reflect on the future because there hasn’t been that much free time. Whether it’s improving residential conditions for the 150 students living on the downtown campus or making sure that our nursing, social work, psychology and allied/public health majors can transit quickly between downtown and the main campus, everyone here has been swept up in the heady experience of building something new, exciting and highly worthwhile.
None of us — my team, Dean Gwen Scott-Jones and her faculty or the students making history along with it — would have it any other way.
Dr. Stacy Downing is Chief Administrative Officer for the Downtown DSU campus.
