Campus celebrates two new buildings

Two new buildings opened their doors during The University of Montana’s Commencement week.

Years of construction detours, noisy equipment and muddy sidewalks on two parts of campus ended, ushering in a new look and a new era for two of UM’s most respected and successful programs.

The College of Health Professions and Biomedical Sciences unveiled the new 42,000-square-foot addition to the Skaggs Building, and the School of Journalism dedicated Don Anderson Hall.

The Skaggs addition is the second major construction project on the building in the 21st century. An addition was finished on the then-Pharm/Psychology Building in 2000 and planning for the next phase began almost immediately, said David Forbes, dean of the College of Health Professions and Biomedical Sciences.

“If you want an active faculty with a productive scholarship program, part of the equation is space,” Forbes said.

The research program has been so successful that in the 2006 rankings for total amounts of grants and contracts awarded UM placed seventh among all pharmacy schools in the nation overall and fifth per capita. In both rankings UM was the highest-ranked program in a state without a medical school.

“That’s tall cotton to be in,” Forbes said, cautioning that the new lab space won’t mean a leap in ranking, but rather keeps UM on pace with much larger, better-funded institutions.

“Everyone else is moving up, too,” he said.

But it would be hard to argue that anyone has moved up farther or faster than UM. “It’s a really fun thing to go to national meetings and talk to deans,” Forbes said. “We used to be the bottom of the barrel and have accreditation difficulties. Now we take a backseat to no one.”

School of Journalism Dean Jerry Brown dresses like deans are supposed to dress. His tweed jackets and thin ties paired with sizable glasses and a bushy beard perfectly fit the academic stereotype. The ubiquitous cigars are the only things that keep him from being right out of an old movie. That is, until the last few years, when Brown got his hard hat.

The bespectacled dean was spotted more than a few times tooling around his current office — which hasn’t undergone construction for 70 years — in a brightly colored safety hat, about to leave or just returning from the controlled calamity of construction across campus at Don Anderson Hall, the massive project Brown oversaw for the vast majority of his time at UM and the new home of the journalism program.

The day before the J-school set a new crop of journalists upon the professional world, it dedicated a new home in the massive Don Anderson Hall, situated across the Oval from the structure built to house the program in 1936. “I’m generally stunned by the beauty of it (Anderson Hall),” Brown said.

Don Anderson, for whom the building is named, is best known for organizing the Lee Enterprises purchase of a number of Montana newspapers from the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. His obituary in 1978 referred to him as the “Abraham Lincoln of Montana journalism” for his work in liberating Montana papers from their corporate stranglehold.

The 57,000 square-foot-building will bring the print, photo and radio/television departments of the school back under the same roof for the first time in 27 years, a crucial move because of the increasingly multimedia nature of the industry, Brown said.

But multimillion dollar facility or not, Brown insists the school will differ very little from its beginning in Army surplus tents almost 100 years ago.“The mission hasn’t changed since 1914,” he said. “We don’t want to become a school of delivery systems; this is a place for journalists to know their place in democracy.”