Campus Facilities

The 60-acre Rockhurst campus is in the heart of the cultural district of Kansas City. A mix of rustic stone and contemporary classroom buildings surrounded by beautiful, shaded walkways provide the perfect atmosphere for study and relaxation. The campus is a short stroll from Kansas City’s brightest cultural attractions, including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Country Club Plaza, the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology, the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, the Stowers Institute of Medical Research and the Brush Creek Riverwalk.

Around the Kinerk Commons

• Sedgwick Hall (1914). Rockhurst’s oldest building on campus houses the Mabee Theater; classrooms; and faculty offices.
• Conway Hall (1938). Conway Hall houses the Helzberg School of Management, offering undergraduate business and economics as well as graduate programs, including the Helzberg Executive Fellows MBA. It also houses the business and human resource offices; computer services and physical plant operations, including computer laboratories; a large lecture hall; classrooms; and faculty offices.
• Van Ackeren Hall (1954). Administrative offices for the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Graduate and Professional Studies are located in this building, as well as psychology and education laboratories and additional space for the physical therapy, occupational therapy and communication sciences and disorders programs. The Gervais Learning Center, faculty offices and faculty mailboxes are housed in Van Ackeren Hall.
• Massman Hall (1957). Massman Hall provides facilities to serve both the campus and the community. Space is provided for students, faculty, administration, alumni and guests of the University to mingle and relax. These facilities consist of the Thomas More Dining Room, a combination dining, banquet and meeting room; private dining rooms; the Mabee Chapel; the Rock Room, which provides Planet Sub and Starbucks along with lounge areas; an on-campus student pub; and general meeting rooms. The Office of the President, the Richardson Advancement Center, the Alumni Office, Rock Stop (the financial aid, registrar and and student accounts offices), the Barnes & Noble Bookstore, the IKON Mail and Copy Center, the Office of Admission, and Student Development offices. The Student Body workout center in Massman Hall features free weights and cardio equipment.
• Greenlease Library (1967). Greenlease Library contains approximately 400,000 items, with study and reading areas for 500 students. Group study areas, a computer laboratory and University archives are located in the library. More information about this building is detailed in the section “Library Facilities.”
• St. Ignatius Science Center (1996). This addition to the Rockhurst campus houses lecture halls, laboratories, student resource centers for physical therapy and occupational therapy, and faculty offices. The biology, chemistry, math and physics departments are housed here. More information about this building is detailed in the section “Science Laboratories.”
• Student Activities Hall (2000). Spacious and attractive, the Student Activities Hall is available for student and other university-sponsored events. It is located east of the Convocation Center and reservations for its use can be made through the physical plant.
• Greenlease Art Gallery (2000). The Greenlease Gallery is home to the University’s Van Ackeren collection of religious art. The collection comprises works from the 15th to 18th centuries. They include sculpture, textiles, paintings and altar pieces from the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods. The gallery also features space for the series of temporary exhibitions Rockhurst shows each year. Many University receptions and social gatherings are held here.
• Bell Tower and Pergola (2000). The 93-foot tower, nearby pergola and fountain were added as part of the largest campus improvement and expansion plan in Rockhurst’s history. The project extended the central quadrangle, adding more green space and an attractive gathering place for the campus community. Reinforcing the Rockhurst mission, the bell tower bears the inscription, “Learning, Leadership and Service in the Jesuit Tradition.”
• Kinerk Commons (2006). As a parting tribute to outgoing Rockhurst University President the Rev. E. Edward Kinerk, S.J., the University named the campus quadrangle the Kinerk Commons. The dedication of the quadrangle honors eight years of service that Fr. Kinerk gave to the Rockhurst community. His legacy is commemorated with a stone bench and plaque on the southwest side of the Kinerk Commons.

Physical Recreation Facilities

• Mason-Halpin Fieldhouse (1938) is home to varsity basketball, volleyball, and the athletic training room. The fieldhouse offers permanent seating for 1,500 and accommodates 2,000 for special events.
• The Convocation Center (1973) is adjacent to the Mason-Halpin Fieldhouse and contains a 10,065 square foot multipurpose room designed to accommodate basketball, volleyball, and general physical education activities. It also houses a weight room and two handball/racquetball courts. The Athletic Department offices are located in the center, as well as an equipment room, storage areas, and shower and locker facilities.
• The Student Body workout center in Massman Hall features free weights and cardio equipment.
• Outdoor physical recreation facilities include the Wilfred C. Bourke Athletic Field, an artificial turf soccer field; and the Shaw Volleyball Court.
• Loyola Park hosts a baseball field, softball field, and six tennis courts.

On-Campus Housing

• Xavier-Loyola (1958), Corcoran (1962) and McGee (1966) Halls. These student residence halls accommodate 640 students in double rooms. Each building contains a laundry, lounge, chapel, and computer facility. McGee was renovated in 2008 and Corcoran in 2009.
• Town House Village (1994). This housing option features residence for 200 students with priority given to upperclass and graduate students. The townhouses offer a mixture of apartment-styled units with one, two or three bedrooms. The centrally located community center houses gathering areas, laundry facilities, and a computer room.
• On-Campus Houses (2006). Located just north and south of the main campus, these houses hold approximately 120 upperclass students.

Adjacent to the Campus

• Claver Jesuit Residence (1991). The residence offers living, meeting and chapel facilities for 30 Jesuit priests, scholastics and brothers who staff and serve the University, the parish and Rockhurst High School.
• North Garage (2012). The 423 parking stall garage was erected in 2011 and provides much needed parking capacity to the campus. Completed in early 2012, it includes over 10,000 square feet of commercial retail space to support the campus as well as the surrounding neighborhoods. It was constructed using environmentally friendly methods and is pending LEED silver certification.
• St. Francis Xavier Church (1950). SFX is a parish church adjoining the campus, where students may attend Mass and which the University uses for some services.

Science Laboratories

Major grants from government and private sources have enabled the University to provide 70,000 square feet of modern facilities for teaching and research in the Division of Natural, Applied and Quantitative Sciences. Facilities within the St. Ignatius Science Center are designed to encourage faculty, student, or faculty-student cooperative research.

In the fall of 1996, the science center opened, housing the faculty and laboratories of the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics. Additionally, this facility includes laboratories for the occupational therapy education and physical therapy graduate programs, two student resource centers, two computerized classrooms, two multimedia auditoriums, and two seminar rooms.

The Department of Biology has five laboratories equipped for general and advanced courses, and two student/faculty research laboratories in the facility.

The Department of Chemistry maintains seven instructional laboratories, including two devoted entirely to instrumentation, plus two research laboratories. Nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared, ultraviolet, visible and mass spectrometers, including Fourier transform instrumentation, are maintained for student use in all classes and individual research projects. Instrumentation is also available for gas and liquid chromatography, atomic absorption spectrometry, and electrochemistry.

The Department of Mathematics and Physics maintains three separate laboratories for general physics and advanced physics. In addition, the department maintains the James and Elizabeth Monahan Student/Faculty Research Laboratory for the use of students majoring in one or more of the two departmental disciplines.

The Departments of Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy maintain four laboratories for clinical practice and/or research.

All science students have access to hundreds of up-to-date computers across campus. In addition, students with their own computers can also access the Internet through the campus-wide wireless network.

Library Facilities

Greenlease Library
Fall and Spring semester hours:
Monday–Thursday 8 a.m.–12 midnight; Friday 8 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
Saturday 12 noon–4:30 p.m.; Sunday 12 noon–12 midnight

The Greenlease Library is on the northwest corner of the quadrangle. It is a member of MOBIUS, a consortium of more than 60 academic libraries in Missouri that share a common online catalog system which identifies more than 20 million items owned by member libraries. Students and staff may access books from member libraries by using an online request system. The library’s nearly 400,000 physical format items include: books, DVDs, CDs, videocassettes, audiocassettes, journals, newspapers, microfilm, microfiche, slides, and artwork. The electronic collection is accessible to students and staff both on and off campus and includes: more than 100 databases covering all areas of the curriculum; more than 50,000 periodicals; more than 2,000 electronic books. The library is a member of the Federal Depository Library Program and each year receives thousands of government documents in print or electronic formats. Additional services include: university archives; research assistance in person and through the Ask-A-Librarian chat reference service; interlibrary loan; online research guides and tutorials; computer lab and wireless Internet access; an assistive technology workstation; collaborative group study areas; seating for 500 and photocopiers/printers. More information can be found on the library website at www.rockhurst.edu/services/library.

The Carl Ferris Medical Library for Research College of Nursing is located at Research Medical Center. In addition to reference materials, the library stocks 250 print journals related to nursing and approximately 1,200 book titles are catalogued in all areas of medicine. The library has several electronic resources such as 420 journal subscriptions, 3,000 journal titles, and several point-of-care products.

Computer Services

The academic and administrative computing systems that are supplied and supported by Computer Services are of great importance to the Rockhurst Community. Computer Services consists of fourteen staff members and encompasses the helpdesk, desktop support, computer programming, faculty development, and network administration.

The infrastructure at Rockhurst University is a hybrid system, providing both wired and wireless networking access from any building on campus. Every residence hall has a wired network port for every student that it houses, along with wireless access for convenient computing. The Rockhurst community has access to over 250 thin client computers running Windows 7 and Office 2010 in various labs across campus. There are a number of available open physical network ports, a campus-wide wireless network, and three twenty-four hour computer labs. As a result, network and internet resources are available anywhere on campus. Access to the campus network is not limited to the geographical boundaries of the campus thanks to a secure web-based VPN solution for all faculty and staff. One of the main focuses for Computer Services is making any technology asset available at any time and from anywhere. Computer Services also provides a robust 100mb Internet Connection for use by the campus.

Computer Services also offers single-sign on access to all the most important web resources available in one place called the campus portal. The portal is available by visiting https://my.rockhurst.edu and logging in with a Rockhurst username and password. Access to e-mail, WebCT, Livetext, and Rockweb are just some of the benefits of using the campus portal. Access to the library on-line databases was added in 2010.

Computer Services works closely with Dell, HP and Wyse as its core computing hardware platforms and Cisco as its core networking platform. Computer Services utilizes VMware to consolidate server resources and also provide a Virtual Desktop Environment in the computing labs that saves money, saves energy and works just like traditional servers and PCs. Computer Services supports a total of 45 servers running Microsoft Window Server and nearly 800 desktops, thin clients and laptops across the entire campus. The University’s administrative system runs on a Linux-based operating system. This system uses Oracle database software and front-end applications from SungardSCT and Evisions.

For more information about Computer Services and what we provide for the campus, please check us out on the web at http://help.rockhurst.edu.

Research College of Nursing Facilities

Research College of Nursing is located in a residential area in South Kansas City less than three miles from Rockhurst University. It includes a main campus building at 2525 East Meyer Boulevard which houses administrative and faculty offices, the state-of-the-art Seelos simulation center and a large classroom. Research Medical Center is located acrosss the street from Research College of Nursing and houseses an auditorium, six classrooms and the Learning Resource Center. The Student Townhouse Village is also located on the Research Medical Center campus which provides housing for students in the joint nursing program, Rockhurst students, and graduate nursing students.