Bringing together faculty and students from a variety of academic disciplines to encourage collaborations in environmental teaching and scholarship. Bowdoin College says that’s a goal of a new environmental studies center being built on the Brunwick campus.
College officials say the new facility is being funded with a $10 million lead gift from David and Barbara Roux.
The Rouxs have extensive family ties to Bowdoin. David Roux himself is a member of of the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees. He says the building will be designed to house faculty, research facilities, lecture halls, an auditorium and student study space.
Roux says there are people writing literature and biography dealing with the environment.
“There’s social science and economic issues, there’s politics and there’s a wide range of science and research, and so the idea is to have one place where people who have this shared interest can collaborate,” he says. “What you hope is that your most capable institutions take on and grapple with the most important problems of the day, and it is hard to overstate how important the environmental issues are that face us.”
The new building, tentatively named The Roux Center for the Environment, is expected to open in the fall of 2018.
