News Story

When the Board of Regents approved purchasing the former Concordia University campus on May 21, it followed a successful blueprint for serving the public good that has been honed since the 1800s:

Take advantage of land opportunities when presented, and then thoughtfully grow the university’s capacity to educate, heal and improve society.

U-M will buy the approximately 140-acre parcel at 4090 Geddes Road from Concordia for a negotiated price of $60 million. The tentative closing date is June 30, subject to environmental review and completion of due diligence.

“We do this to fulfill our mission and envision a future for the university and society,” President Domenico Grasso said during the May regents meeting. “We are confident that this development will amplify the university’s many contributions to Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County.”

The property includes administration buildings, classrooms, residence halls, athletic facilities, the historic Earhart manor, and a chapel.

Leadership has said it doesn’t have immediate plans for the space — and that is intentional.

“Our job is to protect the future from the present, and that includes thinking proactively in the long term,” Regent Paul Brown said May 21. “We’re an institution that thinks in centuries.”

Examples of how U-M followed similar paths throughout its history:

• In 1919, the university bought the property that now contains its existing main hospital. It was not constructed until 1925.
• The foundation of the property that was to become North Campus was purchased in 1949. North Campus was developed into the 1960s, and continues to grow.

“We don’t know what we’ll do with (the Concordia campus), but we know that we are an institution that is here to do the public good,” Brown said. “On North Campus, for instance, we just put in an amazing robotics building. In 1949, we had no idea that would be a necessity.”

Brown said the university is interested in preserving public access to parks, the Huron River and providing athletics facilities for local K-12 schools. Any future plans for the property will follow careful review and due diligence, including coordination with local officials, neighbors and community stakeholders as this process moves forward.

A more recent example of U-M stepping in to benefit the community was in 2007, when pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced it was leaving Ann Arbor after 50 years of developing new medicines in the northeast corner of the city.

Its sprawling 174-acre campus, with 2 million square feet of research labs and offices, and 2,000 employees, would have closed during the height of the recession. But by summer 2009, U-M bought the property for $108 million and renamed it the North Campus Research Complex.

Today, the North Campus Research Complex is anything but an empty campus; it’s a major source of innovation and research.

More than 3,500 U-M faculty, staff and students use the facilities daily. The Medical School, the College of Engineering and the Office of the Provost have invested more than $300 million to transform the space and operate it — at a tenth of the cost it would have taken to build similar facilities from the ground up.

• Scientists from medical and engineering fields explore the interaction of living tissue and manmade surfaces in the labs of the Biointerfaces Institute.
• Advancement for well-being grows at the Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation and the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.
• Researchers from the Frankel Cardiovascular Center and Rogel Cancer Center move their fields forward from their labs at NCRC.
• Michigan Medicine’s clinical pathology space that handles the testing of blood, tissue and other specimens from patients at U-M Health hospitals and clinics and other hospitals statewide.

“This is a unique and unexpected opportunity presented to our university by Concordia officials, who asked us to consider buying the property and to continue an educational mission at a location that has served students for more than 60 years,” Grasso said.