Completion of new building planned for Fall 2016
After 14 years, the University of South Carolina School of Law is closing in on the finish line of its $75-million fundraising goal for a new building.
The fund currently sits at “a little over” $66 million, according to Dean Robert Wilcox.
That’s $9 million short of its goal, but Wilcox hopes to close that gap by February, when the design for the building will be brought to the board of trustees for approval to move into the next phase of development. He said the school has been situated in its current Main Street location since 1973.
“It’s close enough to get excited and see this get started soon,” Wilcox said.
The university has committed $30 million to the project, and the state legislature has allocated $10 million. The fund has also already received a bond bill from the state worth $5 million, Wilcox said.
About $16 million has been pledged privately by alumni and other community members, Wilcox said.
Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., has written letters to potential donors, and the School of Law’s fundraising team has also been trying to get additional money from the federal government in the form of new market tax credits, Henry McMaster told the board of trustees Friday.
But applications for those credits are very competitive, McMaster said, so federal funding isn’t likely to close the gap.
McMaster, a graduate of the School of Law and the former state attorney general, was hired by USC to head the fundraising effort last August.
“I am confident we are going to get the money,” McMaster told the board. “It’s just a question of time.”
If everything goes according to plan, Wilcox hopes construction will begin in February 2014 and finish in time for classes to start there in Fall 2016 — nearly 20 years after the project began.
Wilcox attributed the project’s extended time frame to the 2008 economic downturn and a lack of university funding that only recently ended.
When it’s open, Wilcox thinks the School of Law will be more attractive to potential students and faculty and could help boost its stature among other law schools in the Southeast and the nation.
“It’s going to be a state-of-the-art building that will help improve how law is taught here in the next decade,” Wilcox said. “We have a good program, but we need a building worthy of that program. I have every expectation that when we move into that building and when we bring in other people from law schools, the law world and courts that it will have a tremendous impact on the law school.”
The School of Law suffered a blow in this year’s U.S. News and World Report rankings, dropping out of the top 100 law schools in the nation, moving to No. 109 from 87.
It is one of only two law schools in the Southeastern Conference not in the top 100 nationally. Only the University of Mississippi School of Law ranks below USC at 135.
Law schools at Vanderbilt University, the University of Georgia, the University of Alabama and the University of Florida all rank in the top 50, and schools at the University of Tennessee, the University of Kentucky, Louisiana State University, the University of Arkansas and the University of Missouri rank in the top 100.
Texas A&M, Mississippi State University and Auburn University do not have law schools.
The upcoming move has other effects across the university, as well. The College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management awaits a move from the Carolina Coliseum to the renovated Law Center upon the completion of the new law school.