Stanford to acquire Belmont’s Notre Dame de Namur University campus
Stanford College intends to get Notre Dame de Namur University’s Belmont campus, a move that would give Stanford far more area to grow its academic systems and provide the struggling Notre Dame with a economic lifeline to continue to be afloat.
Beneath an agreement signed by the two universities, Stanford has exceptional rights right up until June 2025 to obtain the house, while NDNU will receive a deposit to safe its instant foreseeable future. NDNU and Stanford will continue being independently-operated establishments the place students will acquire levels entirely by way of their respective universities.
“We are delighted to be arranging for the future of the Belmont campus in a way that strengthens each universities and our respective connections to the community,” Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne said in a prepared statement. “We have a opportunity to visualize new and revolutionary tutorial utilizes for the web site that are grounded in its prosperous heritage and embrace the dynamism of the Bay Place.”
The arrangement marks the 2nd offer lower this month by a revered Bay Location non-public college or university to save alone from money spoil. Previously this thirty day period, Mills University — a private women’s liberal arts faculty in East Oakland — signed a merger with Boston-based mostly Northeastern University to jointly establish new educational courses that will be presented less than the Mills-Northeastern umbrella by the Fall of 2022. The higher education will turn into a gender-inclusive campus.
Notre Dame de Namur College — a tiny personal Catholic college recognized in 1851 in the center of Belmont — is the 3rd-oldest university in California and was the initial authorized to grant baccalaureate levels to gals.
But in new yrs, NDNU has struggled with enrollment and fiscal worries, forcing officers to lay off team, get rid of athletics and finally shutter its undergraduate college totally. As of this drop, the college has an enrollment of just 203 graduate learners, with 8 entire-time faculty and 34 aspect-time school, according to its site.
As recent as past 12 months, NDNU officials were thinking about closing the university permanently. Having said that, in January, the school’s Board of Trustees resolved to keep it open up and focus its continued transformation into a largely graduate and on-line college supplying master’s diploma systems in education, small business and scientific psychology.
The determination to continue to be open was primarily based on a “high degree of confidence” that the college would be ready to promote the campus to a “compatible organization” and give NDNU with the important resources to “see the university by means of to sustainability,” then-NDNU President Dan Carey said in a statement at that time.
The school’s recent president, Beth Martin, stated the new arrangement with Stanford will give NDNU the “flexibility to grow all over again in new and remarkable ways.”
“We will be equipped to proceed the systems for which we are so properly acknowledged, and to incorporate new programs directly focused to transforming college student requires, together with a combine of in-man or woman, hybrid and totally on line applications,” Martin explained in a statement.
NDNU’s campus is positioned off Ralston Avenue west of El Camino Serious on 46.3 acres of precious land in the middle of Silicon Valley. The Belmont campus characteristics 24 structures made up of 320,000 sq. ft of house, such as two academic properties, four household halls, three flats buildings, a library, recreation middle, eating corridor and chapel.
For Stanford, the property’s present use as a college campus and its spot on the Peninsula in the vicinity of community transit and Stanford’s present key and Redwood City campuses ended up significant components in its pursuit to order the property.
If the invest in of the NDNU campus is finalized, it would become Stanford’s next important enlargement past its key campus in modern decades. Its initial arrived when the university opened a 35-acre Redwood Town campus in 2019 to provide as home to countless numbers of college workforce whose positions vary from progress to finance and information and facts know-how.
Stanford Provost Persis Drell explained in a statement that the college does not plan to transfer existing teaching and analysis pursuits off of its principal campus but that the new campus in Belmont would supply added area and services to “enhance those people routines by way of more regionally-targeted do the job.”
“This is a distinctive prospect for Stanford to aid bigger instruction in the region, link with people in a portion of the Peninsula in which we have traditionally not experienced as much of a existence and spend in expanding our educational mission in service to the neighborhood,” Drell reported in the assertion.
Stanford’s Land, Properties and Actual Estate Division will shortly start preparing and creating what the campus will seem like soon after the sale is finalized, even though the college expects that process to “take a number of several years,” in accordance to a news launch. Any website advancements proposed by Stanford also will will need to be authorised by the city of Belmont.