Harper College students settled into classrooms with $12,000 lecterns and caught their first glimpse of $250,000 dental chairs as the Avante Center for Science, Health Careers and Emerging Technologies opened Monday, marking another milestone in the community college’s years-long effort to upgrade its campus.
The $80 million project, which opened for the first day of class, gives Harper an advanced health science facility at a time when the Palatine school is trying to go beyond its traditional mission as a community college to offer four-year degrees.
“This helps make the case,” Harper President Robert Breuder said.
The building includes 27 classrooms, nine lecture halls and 38 laboratories. Some of its shiniest features are what planners call state-of-the-art technology for nursing, diagnostic imaging and dental hygiene classrooms.
It’s also built with a human touch–a working greenhouse decorates the upper floor, and a cafe serves freshly brewed coffee.
Tax watchdogs call the project excessive, saying the 288,500-square-foot building was yet another attempt by Breuder to push too far.
“Dr. Breuder is more concerned with bricks and mortar than things he should be, like curricula,” said William Huley, president of Northwest Tax Watch. “It’s more about empire building than the core mission of a community college.”
Ever since Breuder became Harper’s president in 1998, he has attracted both strong praise and severe criticism.
Supporters say Breuder, 59, is trying to bring the college to a new level, expanding an aging campus with a performing arts and conference center and, now, Avante. The name of the new science and technology building signals the administration’s aggressive approach. In Latin, it means “moving forward.”
Critics, meanwhile, howl at the price tag.
To fund Avante, Harper, which covers the northwest suburbs, asked residents in 1999 to give the school $124 million. Voters rejected the idea, but in 2000 agreed to pay $88.8 million for the new building.
Breuder himself earns one of the highest compensation packages among college leaders, bringing in almost $195,000 a year.
Perhaps the most controversial of his ideas is to offer four-year degrees in underserved areas, such as nursing and dental hygiene.
It’s a move that Harper officials say is necessary to expand access to advanced degrees and bring in more students and money.
The idea has faced fierce opposition from state overseers and area universities. Before the four-year degree can happen, legislators must amend the state Community College Act, which limits 2-year schools to offering associate’s degrees.
Breuder has made no apologies, saying Monday that community colleges have to change with the times and that the new building was much needed. Old classrooms, he said, were cramped, with nursing instructors sometimes holding two classes simultaneously in the same room.
And students seemed to agree–at least about Avante.
“This is a nice building to take classes in,” said Dan Gibala, 20, a pre-pharmacy student from Mt. Prospect.
“The technology and everything is here,” he said, adding that the old setup made it hard to get into popular classes because their size was limited by how many students could fit.
In the new dental hygiene clinic, 18 dental chairs–each ringing in at $250,000–are equipped with monitors that can project images of patients’ mouths and compare them to pictures of what they should look like.
“Students are going to get a top-quality education,” said Kathy Hock, the program’s coordinator.
A diagnostic imaging wing of the building, meanwhile, allows students to learn radiology and ultrasound techniques.
A “Mega Lab” includes more than 90 flat-screen computers.
And 75 lecterns convert rooms into “smart classrooms,” equipped with document cameras (think high-tech overhead projectors), DVD players and individual computers.
“If you’re in good space, you feel good,” Breuder said.
