The Duncan Student Center at the University of Notre Dame will open in full to students, faculty, staff, and the greater Notre Dame community on January 15 (Monday). With extensive recreation and relaxation space, career services facilities, three dining options, space for student organizations, and space for student-focused programming, the facility will soon exist as a place to nurture education. community atmosphere for which Notre Dame is so well known.
“The Duncan Student Center is the physical embodiment of the integration that we hope our students will explore as they pursue their interests, cultivate their well-being and discern their future,” said Erin Hoffmann Harding, Vice President of Business female students. “I look forward to seeing how our students will bring this facility to life and use its spaces to further enrich and animate our campus community.”
To commemorate the opening, a day-long community celebration will take place from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on January 15 with a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony at 11:30 a.m. in front of the first floor foyer. Food samples from the property’s three micro-restaurants will be served from noon to 2 p.m. Staff operating in the new building will also be available throughout the day to offer guided tours of their spaces on floors 2, 3, 4 and 5.
The first floor of the new student center will house flexible and state-of-the-art meeting rooms, an innovation space, lounges, dining rooms and offices. Spaces include the Jan and Marty Hiller Midfield Commons, a comfortable setting for studying or socializing; the Hagerty Family Café, which serves Intelligentsia coffee and desserts; and two additional dining options, Modern Market, a farm-to-fork concept, and Star Ginger Asian Grill and Noodle Bar, a Vietnamese micro-restaurant.
The Thomas and Thérèse Grojean family loft will occupy the second floor to provide a setting where students gather over food, school work and relaxation. The loft also houses much of the student media suite, which will provide a media lab atmosphere with newsrooms and radio studios visible through clear glass and an open TV studio. Student media operations for NDTV, internet radio The Voice of the Fighting Irish (WVFI), WSND-FM, Dome yearbook, Scholastic magazine and The Juggler will all move to the space.
Also on the second floor, graduate students will have a dedicated graduate student lounge and study space near the new home of graduate student life and the Graduate Student Union. The office of Residential life will also move to the southern portion of the second floor to facilitate access to services such as housing, rector support, AR development, summer housing, and off-campus student support.
Commissioned artwork designed to celebrate the diversity that exists among Notre Dame students, faculty, and staff will also be installed on the first two floors in spring 2018.
The Smith Center for Recreational Sports facility on the third and fourth floors will provide triple the fitness space currently available at Rolfs Sports Recreation Center and complement existing space in Rockne Memorial and new recreation grounds in the north dome of the Joyce Center. . A three-story climbing wall, which will span the second, third and fourth floors, will be surrounded by a 1/6 mile suspended indoor track with an adjacent basketball court. These features, along with a variety of new equipment, will allow RecSports to expand its fitness programming.
The fifth floor features an expanded Career Development Center, with over 40 interview rooms and meeting space for the benefit of students. Many rooms will be made available to students in the evenings to study and organize meetings of student organizations. The center will also centrally locate Undergraduate Career Services, Graduate Career Services, Mendoza Graduate Career Services, and an Employer Engagement Team to engage with alumni and recruiters.
The seventh floor houses the beautiful and flexible Dahnke Ballroom, a 500-seat facility that can be subdivided to accommodate smaller events.
Floors eight and nine have premium and club seating for football matches as well as space for visiting coaches and athletic department officials. The Rasmus Family Club opened in the fall of 2017 to enhance the football matchday experience and provide a stunning environment for pre-match festivities.
Planning for the Duncan Student Center has ensured that the facility will complement the student organization space and administrative offices located within the LaFortune Student Center. Duncan will operate in conjunction with LaFortune, which will continue to house departmental offices, student organizations, and administrative offices and fulfill its historic role as a student center at the heart of campus.
Notre Dame alumnus Raymond T. Duncan, his wife, Sally, and their family donated toward the construction of the new building before Raymond passed away in 2015. A graduate of Notre Dame in 1952, Duncan served as president and chief director of Duncan Oil Inc. in Denver, Colorado, and founded Silver Oak and Twomey Cellars in Napa Valley and Sonoma County, California. Additionally, he was the founder of the Purgatory Ski Resort near Durango, Colorado. He was also a former member of the Advisory Board of the College of Arts and Letters and a retired member of the Advisory Board of the Snite Museum of Art. The Duncans’ support of the University also includes a 2007 donation to build Duncan Hall, which houses more than 230 male students, and the establishment of the Duncan Endowment for Excellence in American Art, which supports acquisitions, exhibitions, publications, education from the Snite Museum. research programs and projects related to American art. The Duncans are also generous supporters of other areas of the University, including the Institute of Liberal Arts Scholarship, the Monogram Club, the Department of Athletics, and the McCormack Scholarship.
