Our Man in Arlington

Last Friday, I attended my first meeting of the Joint George Mason University/Arlington County Advisory Board.

The Advisory Board was formed several years ago to facilitate communication between the growing Arlington GMU campus and the community and, not incidentally, to develop broad-based support for the university's programs in Arlington.

While it was my first meeting as a new member of the board, it certainly was not my first contact with the university. I was on the GMU Board of Visitors from 1983 to 1991. In 1999, I threw caution to the winds and enrolled in the GMU School of Public Policy PhD. program to pick up where I left off when I left graduate school (ABD) for the glamour of a Washington career. I am not exactly a neutral observer here.

When I was appointed to the GMU board in 1983, GMU in Arlington consisted only of an unaccredited law school located in the old Kann's Department Store on the corner of Kirkwood Road and Fairfax Drive. The law school had literally been bought by GMU and the GMU Foundation, which also bought the department store and land around it that subsequently was sold at a nice profit to build the huge Federal Deposit Insurance Company national educational facility next door.

Remarkable things have happened there since those early days. A glittering new law school building has been built on the corner. The building also houses the internationally known economic think tank, the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies. The Mercatus Center houses two Nobel Prize winners! And the Law School has just been listed as thirty-eighth in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, a meteoric rise in the slightly more than twenty years of its existence

Across the parking lot, the "Original Building" houses several Masters Degree programs of the School of Public Policy as well as the Mason Enterprise Center, which offers six different services for small businesses and entrepreneurs. This only scratches the surface of the multitude of programs that are now housed in the old department store. The theme that distinguishes all of these programs is the marriage of academics and practical applications for a multitude of public policy issues.

Much greater expansion is planned. The new "Phase Two" building will rise out of the current parking lot with 230,000 square feet of office and classroom space. (For a comparison the Law School has 130,000 square feet.) This building is scheduled for occupancy in 2007. Phase Three will be the destruction of the old building and a new building in its place. This is not scheduled to happen for fifteen or eighteen years. When the whole project is finished, the Arlington campus will serve more than ten thousand students in a multitude of public policy oriented disciplines.

If this weren't enough, the GMU Foundation is planning soon to build 192,00 square feet of office space and 13,000 square feet of retail space on land it bought on Washington Boulevard, adjacent to the Fairfax Drive campus. The building's revenues will be used to provide reasonable parking in the area for students, staff, and faculty of the school. GMU estimates that when the campus is completely built out, it will serve some 10,000 students.

The real meaning of all of this is not the bricks and mortar, but the fact that a world-class law and policy educational program is being built right here in Arlington. This has incalculable benefits for the community, and the advisory committee is here to help both the university and the community realize those benefits. Just another example of why it is so exciting to live in Arlington.