OVERVIEW
A Decade of Renewal is the story about the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ significant investment in its flagship university to create a special place as a leader in the next generation of American higher education. Over the last ten years (2011 - 2021), many new buildings have been constructed and old facilities renovated, all with a focus on efficiency, sustainability, aesthetic value, and academic excellence. The story is told using an innovative web application with pictures, a map and storyboard to pull it all together into an impressive tale of an institution building on a solid foundation and creating extraordinary momentum for the future.
Access the story map and either follow the storyboard along the bottom chronologically, or explore the story through the map by picking the project flags to get to the pictures and narrative for each.
In his Faculty Senate address of January 29, 2015, Chancellor Subbaswamy noted that UMass Amherst was ranked 30th among national public universities by U.S. News and World Report. He said, “Over the past ten years, UMass Amherst has moved up farther and faster than any other leading public University,” clearly a campus on the move. He also mentioned that over that period, UMass ranked 4th nationally in improvement in admissions selectivity and 10th in graduation rate improvement. It is no coincidence that the renewal of campus facilities and the construction of well-designed, state-of-the-art buildings have lead to successive years of attracting students with ever-higher GPA’s and test scores. It is often said that students make up their minds about attending a college within the first 30 seconds of stepping onto campus. That’s why “building campus, not just buildings” was one of the Guiding Principles of the Campus Master Plan adopted in 2012.