A second building, Patterson Hall, which was named after a former trustee and most recently housed the Communications Department, is set to be demolished later in the campaign, said Mark Weinstein, spokesman for Cedarville University. Weinstein said the building is currently used as the working station for Danis Construction.
The Bolthouse Academic Center is a 47,820 square-foot Georgian-style facility with three floors of classrooms, a coffee and dining space and faculty offices for the School of Education and Social work and departments of English, literature and modern languages, history and government, psychology and social work.
The facility will be located along State Route 72. The university says its defining feature will be an 84-foot dome rising above Cedarville’s main street.
The space is named for trustee emeritus William Bolthouse.
“This building will be much more than bricks and mortar,” Thomas White, president of Cedarville University, said in a statement. “It will be a space where faculty intentionally disciple students, where conversations are shaped by biblical truth and where young men and women are equipped to boldly engage the culture for Christ.”
The academic center is the final major project of the university’s campaign for One Thousand Days Transformed. This campaign has funded several other campus improvements such as $40 million for the Scharnberg Business and Communication Center, $7.5 million for the Chick-fil-A dining commons, $3 million for the Civil Engineering Building, $8 million for the Callan Athletic and Academic Expansion, and $42 million for multiple residence halls.
The official campaign ends in October.
The university said the building was not set to be built until 2027, but an anonymous $15 million gift in October 2024 helped the project move ahead of schedule. The university is raising an additional $4.8 million to complete the project.
The evangelical university in Greene County has seen a huge increase in student enrollment in the last few years. In 2018, the university announced enrollment surpassed 4,000 for the first time. In 2023, Cedarville counted more than 5,000 students. The university said they now have more than 6,000 students.
Reporter Brooke Spurlock contributed to this story.
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