How This Women’s College Got Its First New Academic Building in 50 Years

There are at least two visible ways to gauge the vitality of a college campus: The bustle of students flowing through it over the years, and the hectic action of hard-hat crews building and upgrading the place.  Trinity Washington University, a Roman Catholic women’s school, has recruited a steady stream of young women from low-income neighborhoods in and around the nation’s capital during the past two decades. But the 119-year-old school, on a placid campus in Northeast Washington, D.C. dotted with magnolias and statues of saints, has not opened a new academic building in more than a half century. On June 3, that changed as Trinity dedicates a $38 million classroom and laboratory center for subjects from clinical nursing to microbiology.