The DeMoss Learning Center will be the academic nerve center for the foreseeable future. The schools of communications, business and government, education, and religion, as well as the colleges of arts and sciences, and general studies will be housed in the center. Only the science labs will stay where they are. The university's distance-learners, who now number 5,000, are also projected to grow. The entire campus was hard-wired with fiber optic cable in 1997.
Students can register and pay for classes on-line via the computer.
Very few small, private colleges can say that, Borek said. Borek said the DeMoss expansion is just the beginning of the work to come. Half the money has been raised for a visitors center, modeled after the DeMoss Center with Jeffersonian architecture. A student union building is planned behind the Vines Center, and again, half the money has been raised for it, Borek said. Plans include creating more grassy spaces, to make Liberty more of a walking campus, Borek said, and a mall effect that will extend from Thomas Road Baptist Church, once it's relocated across U.S. 460, to the university's chapel.