Redrawing Shaw

Shaw University preps for a new district—and with it, a new era for Downtown Raleigh.

is a type of symbiotic relationship where all species involved benefit from their interactions. The term also perfectly encapsulates the vision Shaw University President and CEO Dr. Paulette R. Dillard has for the forthcoming The ShawU District after the school’s rezoning was approved by the Raleigh City Council in June.

“It’s a district within Downtown Raleigh that gives the opportunity for separate entities to interact, support [and] make each other better,” she says of the project. “It gives the city the opportunity to experience African-American culture at its finest, while our students get an opportunity to participate in a diverse community that is a top city.” … Translation: It’s a win-win.

For Shaw, founded in 1865 and boasting the distinction of being the first historically Black institution of higher education in the South, location is everything. Its main campus occupies 26 acres on the southern border of Raleigh’s Downtown boundary—and the acquisition of this property is undeniably the school’s greatest endowment.

A desire among university leaders to leverage their real estate for long-term sustainability—one of the priorities agreed upon in their 2025 strategic plan—spurred talks of rezoning. And, so, the school engaged the Urban Land Institute in a land-use study in 2019 to begin exploring options for driving revenue and growth.

The university got the report back in February 2020, and a month later, the world shut down. But sheltering in place had its silver linings. “[It] gave me a little bit of time to actually think about what this really means when you think about the university, its value proposition and what is the ‘why’ for Shaw,” reveals Dillard, who, as the school’s 18th president, constantly walks a tightrope between progress and preservation. And she kept coming back to the same solution: location, location, location—“where you can walk to internships, you can walk to museums, you can eat anywhere,” she says. “You’ve got everything.”

That vision for student-community engagement echoes one we’ve seen play out with Campbell Law School’s move to open a DTR campus. Shaw students would likewise benefit from bridging that gap between campus and community. Proximity to the developing world-class Dix Park alone would benefit a wide swath of studies for such Shaw programs as computer science, accounting, recreation management, political science, marketing, communications and others, says Dillard. 

So too would “spending time in internships or shadowing individuals in companies such as Red Hat, Cisco Banking, Raleigh Magazine, News & Observer and state government agencies,” she adds. “I refer to these arrangements as affording us expanded classrooms focused on practical applications,” she says, adding the intention to have young Shaw scholars pay it forward as well. “We also want students to work with public and private K-12 schools to tutor and mentor, and to engage in volunteerism to advance community engagement.”

Since the Urban Land Institute report recommended increasing density on campus via taller buildings to boost property value, Dillard and her team looked to other historically black colleges or universities (HBCUs) for inspiration, namely Howard University in DC, as they began to navigate the changes. Shaw’s real estate advisory firm, Hayat Brown, had also worked with Howard on 10 mixed-use commercial development projects on previously underutilized land, resulting in more than $1.4 billion in development and $200+ million to improve the university’s student housing portfolio.

If Dillard were to dream up a wish list of the kinds of mixed-use spaces Shaw might include: “I love The Dillon, and I would love to have a residential and retail complex—coffee shop, bookstore and sandwich shop.”

“Is it risky? Yes,” Dillard admits. “But the fact that Shaw is here was a risk.” Case in point: When the university broke barriers in 1882 by becoming the home of the first medical school in the U.S. to offer a four-year curriculum. And Dillard is confident Shaw can do it again. “Here is another whole new opportunity for Shaw as we rethink the higher education landscape,” she says. “We’ve got to do things differently.”

A lot of the angst around the rezoning, she says, “was many of our alumni and the community thought the vision was to make Shaw indistinguishable from the city and just have everybody over here and it’s no longer Shaw—but that is counter to the vision. If we don’t do what students need who actually use it, we’ll end up just being a placard on the pavement.”

Moving beyond the classroom doesn’t mean completely erasing the boundaries between college and city. Rather, Dillard hopes The ShawU District will reposition the two as neighbors who get along, collaborate and help each other thrive. 

Shaw’s next step is to prepare the campus master plan, a guide that will “define the physical features of The ShawU District to support the university’s vision for a reimagined core campus with a physical, social and professional connection to Downtown Raleigh, but with its own distinct and recognizable The ShawU District identity,” explains Jay Brown, chairman and managing director of Hayat Brown.

To address that master plan, Dillard imagines what can go within that footprint and how it addresses lifelong learning and workforce development, in addition to how it meets the needs of the 21st century student who still wants to have a college experience. “How do you take the amazing resources that are already here—the performing arts center, the museum—and create this unique experience that can only be achieved at a small, private, flexible institution?”

Looking ahead, Dillard sees The ShawU District as an unparalleled destination for cultural enrichment and social acceptance. “I think about it especially around the polarizing issue of race and diversity,” she says. “I think having an HBCU is an opportunity to interact in this environment where it’s not political. I’m not doing DEI training; I’m just being your neighbor. … It’s an opportunity to experience it not in a combative way, and our students at the same time get to experience a diverse city.”

Dillard hopes Raleighites can begin to view The ShawU District as the first step toward reaching that mutualistic sweet spot. She paints a picture of an area where parents push their babies in strollers while music played by the Platinum Sound marching band drifts through the air. “We want to be an environment that shows that kind of thing can happen naturally,” she says. “You come, you feel comfortable; we go, we feel comfortable—because we’ve gotten to know each other. Because Raleigh has The ShawU District.” theshawudistrict.com