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GREENSBORO — UNCG's board of trustees will meet this week to hear Chancellor Linda Brady's recommendation for the campus' quad buildings. The question: whether it makes more sense to tear down the seven buildings and replace them with more modern structures, or to preserve and renovate them.

The buildings that make up the quad are some of the oldest on campus — and in the worst shape. Built between 1919 and 1923, they have gone without $32 million in maintenance in recent years, including updates to bad wiring and plumbing. They also lack air conditioning, fire sprinklers and handicapped access.

The discussion became heated in April when preservationists — including some students, staff, faculty and alumni — protested the demolition of the buildings. After a series of meetings and on-campus forums on the issue, the school's board of trustees asked Brady to take the summer and bring back a recommendation.

“What we were asked to do was take two steps back from the quad issue,” said Carol Disque, vice chancellor for student affairs.

“The trustees wanted us to look at what our larger housing goals are on campus. So, we came up with a strategic housing plan and the quad is going to be part of that.”

As Brady told the trustees in August, all the available research shows students perform better when they live on campus, from grades to retention and graduation rates. For that reason, the school is committed to doubling the 25 percent of students who now live on campus.

The school projects that slightly more than 4,000 students will live on campus this school year. About 2,000 of those will be freshmen.

According to Disque, UNCG expects to have more than 16,000 undergraduate students by 2020. To reach its goal of housing half those students, the school will need more than 8,000 new beds.

Landlocked on about 200 acres, the school is nearly out of places to build dorms. Since no state or tuition money goes toward campus housing, the dorms are maintained on what the school makes from renting rooms to students.

School officials say that's a problem when they are offering small two-person rooms in outdated buildings to compete with ever more modern apartments just off campus.

The worry is that more students will vote with their feet, abandoning on-campus housing because they can't get what they want.

According to a report on building options, gutting the dorms and renovating their shells would actually decrease the number of beds they could offer. That would mean a new 600-bed dorm would have to be built somewhere else on campus, in addition to the renovation.

Whether renovated or rebuilt, the school estimates the new quad would cost more than $100 million. With a down economy driving construction costs lower, a quick decision could save money.

But people like Mike Stout of Preservation North Carolina argue there are costs the university isn't adequately considering.

“You might make your current students happier if you built more modern buildings,” said Stout, who is regional director for the group. “But the alumni who have their memories in those buildings and on the campus are the ones who make donations, and I think demolishing historic buildings like these on their campus is going to alienate those people.”

Stout's group was heavily involved in preserving the Chancellor's House, which faced the wrecking ball in 2003. More than $2 million in private money was raised to help move the house about 900 feet and have it reused as a visitor's center.

“We were able to work with the administration then to help preserve a historic piece of the campus,” Stout said. “We would like to do that again, though obviously this is a much larger project.”

A direction for the quad will likely be decided at the trustees' meeting Thursday, when they will discuss the future of campus housing and hear the chancellor's vision of the quad in that plan.

“I think either way we go, with renovation or rebuilding, we're going to get a great result for students,” Disque said. “And that's the goal here.”

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com