HARTFORD — Can Hartford become a real college town?
The Hartford Consortium for Higher Education sure hopes so.
The anticipation of two new downtown campuses in the next two years has educational leaders dreaming of a Hartford where college students are more visible, and where city students can aspire for higher education without having to travel to a leafy suburban campus for a peek at college culture.
“I want to see college students playing Frisbee in Bushnell Park,” Martin Estey, the consortium’s executive director, said this week. “Where are they? There are thousands of them here. There are thousands in the region, but they are not coming downtown, except on Saturday night to the Union Station.”
Leaders who are part of the consortium, a group of area colleges and universities that is supported by the MetroHartford Alliance business chamber, talked about the possibilities on Tuesday.
One idea is a more marketed push across the consortium to expand classroom lessons into Hartford neighborhoods, where a college course on architecture brings students to the steps of Victorian homes, for instance, or a lesson on immigration inspires a first-person interview with one of the city’s many immigrants.
Propelling that vision are the big moves by UConn and Trinity College, projects that Estey said he believes can inject more of a “college town” vibe that not only helps revive downtown, which can appear deserted on most weekends, but also puts a spotlight on the colleges angling for a Greater Hartford presence.
Trinity plans to open a campus at 200 Constitution Plaza in early 2017, months before UConn’s $115 million Greater Hartford campus is expected to open near City Hall in the former Hartford Times building — around the corner from the Front Street entertainment district of restaurants, Infinity Music Hall, a movie theater and new apartments that recently opened up to tenants.
They would join a downtown that includes UConn’s MBA program out of Constitution Plaza, Capital Community College on Main Street and the University of St. Joseph’s School of Pharmacy on Trumbull Street. The pharmacy school bears a prominent sign outside the XL Center complex, where the doctoral program has operated since 2011.
Rhona Free, president of the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, said there are plans to bring some undergraduate programs to the Hartford campus starting in fall 2016, “because we really do want to have lots of students in downtown.
“We envision them walking with their backpacks, up and down the street … I think there will be a tipping point where this will become a college town,” Free said, “and everything that college students need and want will be right here.”
Trinity College President Joanne Berger-Sweeney said the college, which bought the former Travelers Education Center on Constitution Plaza for $2 million, is still contemplating how to use the five-story building. Some ideas under discussion are housing graduate courses, creating a common space that area colleges can use for education, and perhaps having an entrepreneurship wing.
“We’re not going to just take one of our departments and move it there,” she said. “It’s going to be something that’s really unique to the area.”
Although Trinity’s main 100-acre Summit Street campus is only a couple of miles from the downtown site, Berger-Sweeney said the college wanted a place “in the heart of this city, where we can walk to Capital Community College, or we can walk to St. Joe’s, or we will be able to walk and interact with the people of UConn.”
Consortium board chairman Wilfredo Nieves, president of Capital Community College, has talked about wanting to involve more colleges in Capital’s Hartford Heritage Project, an effort to get students into city neighborhoods, cultural attractions and landmarks as part of their studies. An American literature class this fall is being held at the historic Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe homes.
“To be candid, what we haven’t done as well as we should is help people to know who we are and what goes on” in the region’s colleges, Nieves said Tuesday. “This year, we are focusing on a strategic plan that’s going to be really bringing us out — a coming out for us in terms of [explaining] who we are, what we do and the important role that education, and particularly higher education, plays in the Greater Hartford area.”
“The conversation has started,” Estey said Tuesday after the consortium unveiled a new website at www.hartfordconsortium.org, a portal for the group’s programs that include the Hartford Promise scholarship fund.
Hartford Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez said the consortium’s goals are linked with the public schools’ aspiration to become a college-going city. One of Narvaez’s targets is to have all Hartford students be accepted into at least one college by 2020. She said some people have questioned whether that goal is realistic, that not all students are destined for college.
“I say, ‘You’re probably right, but they deserve the choice,'” Narvaez said. “And we are not going to make that choice for our students. Because if you grow up in the suburbs, that expectation of college is in the air you breathe and our students in the city deserve nothing less.”
Courant Staff Writer Kathleen Megan contributed to this report.
