By Marshall Swanson

What would it look like to do an episode of Extreme Makeover at USC? Well, don't change the channel because Extreme Makeover: Carolina Edition already is in production.

ABC crews won't actually show up on the Horseshoe, but the face of Carolina is changing in two dramatic ways. First, Carolina's campus home is getting a makeover with plans to build five million square feet of innovative research campus space. That's in addition to the ongoing renovations and remodeling of several older campus buildings.

Second, about 600 new faces—including many younger faculty members brimming with energy and new ideas—will join the campus during the next few years.

So prop up your feet for a few minutes and get the scoop on Carolina's extreme makeover. As one USC administrator put it, “it's a once-in-a-life-time opportunity.”

New Spaces

Think of the area in Columbia known as the Congaree Vista, the city's arts and entertainment district that offers a lively mix of restaurant and retail venues.

Now picture the area adjacent to the Vista from USC's Horseshoe west to the Congaree River and add residential living, recreational venues, and research laboratories.

That's the vision of the University's new research campus called Innovista that is taking shape with five new buildings and two parking garages.

In much the same way that USC's new Greek Village, Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center, and Colonial Center have transformed the look of the campus for those approaching USC from the Blossom Street bridge, the 56-acre Innovista campus will have a transforming influence on the rest of the city.

“The area spreading across Assembly Street and moving toward Huger and eventually the river is ready for this,” said Harris Pastides, Carolina's vice president for research and health sciences, noting that “positive development” has begun on the Vista side, but that slightly south of that area there remain abandoned buildings and available land.

Pastides envisions the area as a thriving “environment, community, neighborhood, and district” where creative minds flour-ish and innovation occurs 24/7.

“It will be a place where scientists work alongside students to develop new knowledge that will lift South Carolina's economy while also providing for the enjoyment of art, sports, shopping, entertainment, and the company of other creative people,” he said.

Innovista won't be a fence-bound ivory tower like some other university research campuses. University planners instead see the inno-vation district as a place where high-tech research flourishes amid entertainment and retail establishments, restaurants, public sculpture, and performance venues.

If you've driven down Assembly Street between Pendleton and Greene, you've probably already seen the first phase of Innovista taking shape. That's where the new research building for the Arnold School of Public Health is nearing completion, soon to be followed by an office building for the school.

Next up will be the Horizon Center, featuring two buildings totaling 235,000 square feet and a parking garage at the corner of Blossom and Assembly streets. One building will be University-owned and the other will be privately developed—both will be focused on future fuels research with scientists from USC and private industry.

Foundation Square will follow in the block to the west of the Arnold School of Public Health bounded by College, Park, Greene, and Lincoln streets. A second parking garage will be constructed there with two biomedical research buildings that will house researchers in cancer and neural science and private-sector partners in commercial research and development.

One building each in the Horizon Center block and Heritage Foundation Square will be owned by Craig Davis Properties of Cary, N.C., to house companies and federal government tenants who will collaborate with USC researchers. Davis, who has extensive experience in research campus development, is assisting USC with Innovista. His firm will help attract industrial and commercial clients to the enterprise.

The USC buildings will be financed with a combination of University funds, state research infrastructure bonds under the S.C. Life Sciences Act, and funding from the City of Columbia, Richland County, and federal agencies.

The first phase of construction is expected to be complete in 2007 and will include more than $140 million in bricks and mortar.

“The University has been constrained by space more than any other single factor,” said Pastides, adding that its second limitation was the lack of a critical mass of faculty who could contribute to the research mission of the University. Those factors and the need to transfer scientific and technological discoveries from campus to the real world helped drive development of Innovista.

“Our situation was exacerbated by the way new buildings had been built in the past, which was to go out and raise money and put it in the bank before building,” Pastides said. “You can't get ahead of the game that way. You're always trying to catch up.”

All of the new 100 faculty members hired under the Centenary Plan probably won't be working in the innovation district, Pastides said. “But these are the kinds of buildings that we need to recruit these new young stars, and we're well underway in the hiring.”

Bringing the innovation district to fruition will come only with hard work, followed by the implementation phase. “I don't take any of this lightly, and it's not a done deal,” Pastides said. “The harder work is ahead of us, but we've got good leader-ship with President Sorensen and Provost Mark Becker, and the deans, department chairs, and faculty are on board. With all of that teamwork going forward, I'm very hopeful of success.”

New Faces

“I've never seen anything like this,” said Gordon C. Baylis, USC's associate provost for faculty initiatives. He was referring to Carolina's plan to replace 350 faculty members who will retire in the next five years and two more programs that will increase the faculty by 250.

The intent is to dramatically increase the quality and quantity of the University's research capabilities as well as USC's overall educational experience for undergraduate students.

Two faculty recruitment plans, the Centenary Plan and the Faculty Excellence Initiative, are at the center of Carolina's vision for the future. The Centenary Plan is bringing in 100 new research faculty who will devote themselves to research and other externally funded projects.

Many of them will contribute to the University's strategic priorities across a wide spectrum of disciplines, but chiefly in future fuels (e.g.., hydrogen fuel cell research), biomedical sciences, environmental research, and nanotechnology.

The Faculty Excellence Initiative is recruiting 150 new professors—above and beyond replacements for those who have re-tired—to bolster USC's scholarly excellence in a number of fields. These new faculty will help reduce the professor-to-student ratio in the class and infuse the University with new energy.

“Improvement of the educational experience for students has all sorts of components, and reducing class size is an obvious one,” Baylis said. “But simply reducing class size isn't enough. You've got to have real leaders who will provide quality, as well. In the sciences, those are typically big-name researchers, and in the arts and humanities they're the people who will build on the quality of scholarly and creative work.”

The Faculty Excellence Initiative, which is funded by tuition revenues, is aimed, in part, at interdisciplinary teaching and research, particularly cluster hiring.

For example, three different academic departments might have a shared vision in a field like communicative disorders in which individuals with a common research interest might be hired in public health, psychology, and physics—then collaborate with one another in their work.

“Cluster hiring provides a critical mass in an area very quickly and telegraphs to the world that there is something interesting going on that gets noticed,” Baylis said.

What does the average South Carolinian stand to gain from the University's plan?

“It's very clear that states that have embraced high-tech industry have a better standard of life and less cyclicality in their economies,” said Baylis, noting that South Carolina has suffered from the ups and downs of such industries as agriculture, textiles, and manufacturing whose fluctuations “have been horrible for the people of the state.

“Study after study shows that those areas that invest in research have attractive high-tech industry and that it smooths out the economic cycles enormously.”

Added Pastides, “Any university that hopes to be a faithful index to its people must be taking science and technology out of the ivory tower in favor of doing meaningful things with it that improve society.”