By Bob Allen
Baptist-affiliated Samford University has purchased property adjacent to its campus in Birmingham, Ala., from Time, Inc., so it can relocate its College of Health Sciences.
Southern Progress Corp., a Time subsidiary, decided last year to sell the 28-acre property, which includes three buildings, that houses Birmingham operations including Southern Living and Cooking Light magazines.
The $58 million deal includes a long-term lease for the magazines and other Birmingham operations that have downsized so much over the last decade that they take up only a fraction of the total square footage.
Samford sold the then-undeveloped property to Time in 1986, as part of a strategy to build endowment. Recently the university launched a long-term investment strategy, which included purchase of a five-story, 122,654-square-foot, Class A office building on 12 acres across Lakeshore Drive from the university campus, for $19.7 million, in 2014.
Samford President Andrew Westmoreland said the new purchase ensures adequate space for the anticipated growth in its programs for health professions, nursing, pharmacy and public health and allows for all academic programs of the College of Health Sciences to be brought under a single roof.
“The moving of several programs currently housed in existing buildings on the current campus will enable us to address critical space requirements for many of our growing academic programs and to accommodate the addition of new areas of study,” Westmoreland said. “We are now afforded a rare opportunity to develop plans that will influence Samford in ways that stretch far beyond our lifetimes, so extraordinary wisdom will be required to guide our steps.”
Samford, one of three colleges affiliated with the Alabama Baptist State Convention, was founded in Marion, Ala., as Howard College in 1841. Surviving two fires and a Civil War, the school relocated to East Lake, now a suburb of Birmingham, in 1887.
The school moved to its current location in Homewood, Ala., in 1957. It was renamed in 1965, after achieving university status, because there was already a Howard University in Washington, D.C. The new name, Samford University, was in honor of Frank Park Samford, a businessman and philanthropist who served 34 years as chairman of the board of trustees and died in 1973.
Today Samford enrolls nearly 5,000 students from 44 states and 25 countries. Last year Samford was ranked third in the south for regional universities by U.S. News and World Report and as Alabama’s top-ranked university by Forbes.