President Breaks Ground on East Campus Project

All that was missing was his lunch pail when University of Oregon President Richard Lariviere donned a fedora hard hat on Monday and climbed into the cab of a backhoe to scoop a ceremonial first shovel of gravel at a ground-breaking for the university’s new East Campus Residence Hall.

“Calling it a residence hall doesn’t really do it justice,” Lariviere said. The 185,000-square-foot facility, which is expected to cost as much as $75 million, will blend a residential setting with in-house academic offerings such as honors classes and language immersion programs in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Lariviere compared the concept — which includes a living space for a faculty member who will serve as resident scholar — to those of such classic universities as Oxford and Cambridge. The new residence hall is being built at the southwest corner of 15th Avenue and Moss Street, and is expected to be open for fall term of 2012. It will house about 450 students.

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