Worcester Polytechnic Institute will take over the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute after Becker College, MassDiGI s host, closes following the end of the spring semester.
WPI previously offered to host the video game center when Becker announced in late March it would close its doors because of financial difficulties. That was made official in an announcement at the center on Monday.
Timothy Loew, the MassDiGI founder and executive director, called the institute and WPI a perfect match. Like Becker, WPI, located only a few blocks away, has an internationally renown video game design program, which started in 2004 as one of the first such undergraduate degree programs in game design.
Becker College’s Worcester campus so blends into its neighborhood west of downtown someone could pass through and, if it weren’t for the blue Becker banners on a few dozen buildings, barely notice it’s a campus at all.
But how seamlessly Becker’s roster of late 19th-century and early 20th-century buildings fit amid the blocks of shaded streets just off Elm Park puts pressure on Worcester and Becker to ensure the buildings find new useful life after the school closes after the spring semester.
“They are extremely important properties in the city,” said Deborah Packard, the executive director of Preservation Worcester, an advocacy group for historic preservation.
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When Nichols College launched a fundraising campaign in 2015, it set a goal of $45 million. It surpassed that in just two years, and six years later, the campaign is wrapping up with a total of $66 million.
The Dudley school, which announced the end of the campaign Wednesday, said the campaign was ambitious to begin with: The initial goal was already more than triple the amount of the school s biggest campaign until that point.
Ultimately, the fundraising allowed Nichols to pay for a new academic building, the Fels Student Center, and major renovations and upgrades to Lombard Dining Hall and to athletic facilities.The number of endowed scholarships was significantly increased, from 21 to 83, and new academic offerings were added, including learning programs such as the Nichols Consulting Group and the Center for Intelligent Process Automation, and co-curricular initiatives including the Institute for Women’s Leadership and the Emerging Leaders Program.