Renovations have begun at Hewitt Hall, which will become the new home for SUNY Oswego’s School of Communication, Media and the Arts.

The project has been in the planning stage since 2018 and is expected to be finalized by fall of 2023. After three years of designing, Michael Riecke, assistant professor at SUNY Oswego and a member of the planning committee for Hewitt’s renovations, said they were ready to get started. 

“These projects take time. I think [SUNY] Oswego knew that Hewitt was a building that was going to be targeted at that point in the long range,” Riecke said. 

Before he joined the planning committee, there had been several meetings and tours to get an idea of what they were aiming for in terms of space, one of which was at Buzzfeed. 

“We also wanted to see how other universities were utilizing space that they had renovated recently,” Riecke said.

Locally, trips included Syracuse University’s recently renovated Newhouse School of Public Communications. 

“The one we really had our eyes on was Montclair State University in New Jersey because they had recently undergone a pretty sizable renovation of their communication facilities,” Riecke said.

Factors that caught the committee’s attention include that the institution is roughly the same size as SUNY Oswego and demographically had a lot in common.

One reason for the renovations is that over the past 10 years, SUNY Oswego’s broadcasting program has run out of space in Lanigan Hall.

“Long ago, we really outgrew the space that we were providing for our students,” Riecke said. “It was beyond time for us to have some sort of expansion.”

The school’s enrollment in the School of Communication , Media and the Arts has actually gone down slightly over the past few years. That aligns with national trends attributed to decreased high school graduation and birth rates.

“Our numbers are not growing rapidly at the moment nor have they in the last couple of years. We’re pretty stable,” Riecke said. “Many years ago, we had already started to run out of the right amount of space to operate our broadcasting program.”

The plan is for the student media organizations to stay in their current spaces and have the new space aimed toward academic programs.

Once finalized, Hewitt will house a large broadcast studio and a fully fitted production control room adjacent to the studio aside from a sound stage as well as a screening room, among others. The renovations will cost $65 million and the funds will come from the SUNY Construction Fund.

The new space will also incorporate virtual reality suites. The graphic design department has discussed having its designers outline those spaces said Jessica Reeher, chairperson of the Communication Studies department.

“I think you’re going to see a little more collaboration within the school’s departments, especially with the cinema and screen studies coming into the School of Communication, Media and the Arts this past year,” Reeher said. “From a news perspective, it’s a whole new way to tell stories about what’s going on in the world. Instead of just hearing about a story in Pakistan, you can perhaps be there along with the reporter.”

The department will host a groundbreaking event at 2:15 p.m. on Oct. 1 to mark the closing of Hewitt Hall for renovations. President of SUNY Oswego Deborah Stanley will be present at the event along with SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras.

“Our hope is that not only will this give us more space so that we can keep our students closer to the tools that they need to access,” Riecke said. “[But] we can keep all of our faculty in one building and our hope is that it creates more of a community sort of feeling.””

Tomas Rodriguez | The Oswegonian