The Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center

Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center - Campaign for Excellence

A Home of our Own: Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center

The groundbreaking for NC State’s new alumni center was held Saturday, Feb. 5.

There’s no place like home.

On an unseasonably warm February morning, Burley Mitchell (1966) spoke the famous line from The Wizard of Oz with pride and relief in his voice. His audience of 350, gathered at a Centennial Campus construction site, understood: Finally, after so many years and untold hours of work, the Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center was being built.

“Many of you here today have been clicking your heels and holding out your hands for almost a decade now as we dreamed up this building,” said Mitchell, president of the NC State Alumni Association. “And we dreamed up one of the finest alumni centers in America—one that offers elegance but, we hope at the same time, warmth and accessibility and all the conveniences of the latest technology.”

At 59,000 square feet, the center will occupy a bluff on Centennial Campus’s Lake Raleigh. It will serve NC State’s 145,000 alumni as a living room, a place to return for reunions, postgame receptions, parties, seminars—or a walk down memory lane with a cup of coffee and a stack of Agromeck yearbooks.

Graduates of NC State have had nothing like it. For nearly 60 years, the Alumni Association has operated from the 4,739-square-foot ground floor of a remodeled infirmary building. The Alumni Memorial Building occupies a beloved spot on campus, in the shadow of the Bell Tower and next to Holladay Hall, but it can no longer serve its constituents.

New alumni centers have had a “profound influence” on peer universities’ ability to serve their graduates, says Chancellor James L. Oblinger. The Park Alumni Center, he says, will serve as a home for alumni to celebrate important events in their own lives and the life of NC State.

“The Alumni Association will better be able to engage in the variety of constituencies that it serves—our graduates who are so important to us once they become our alumni, the fundamental core to life of NC State,” he says.

“NC State is a great university. And a great university should have great facilities. The Dorothy and Roy Park alumni center will be a great facility.”