Ali Houshmand doesn’t just see Rowan University’s West Campus project as 220 acres of smart growth.
He sees it as the first shovel of dirt in what he hopes will become something much bigger: a regional health‑innovation corridor, stretching from Baltimore to New York, that could rival — and, in some ways, surpass — the original Silicon Valley.
On a media call announcing Rowan’s $690 million West Campus Development Project, Houshmand repeatedly came back to a bigger map. He talked less like a local college president and more like an economic development czar drawing a circle around the Route 55 corridor.
Rowan’s big launch
BINJE has produced a number of content items on the launch of Rowan’s $690M West Campus project:
The lead: Breaking down the details (cost, logistics, approvals, timeline) of the effort;
Wellness Village: An inside look at transformative spot for health and housing;
Q&A: You’ve got questions; we’ve got answers
“If you put a circle around Philadelphia, you have 36 research-one and research-two universities, and you have at least 15 medical schools in here,” he said. “Within Philadelphia alone, you have nine medical schools within a 25-mile radius. You have the best eye hospital in the world. You have the best Children’s Hospital in the world. You have the best Cancer Institutes in the world.”
Then he asked the question that clearly has been in his head for years: With that kind of density of talent and institutions, why hasn’t this part of the country branded itself as the global hub for health, life sciences and “destination medicine”?
Houshmand, Rowan Provost Tony Lowman and Fairmont Properties Founder Randy Ruttenberg spoke exclusively to BINJE and two Philadelphia-area outlets to offer details on the plan. Much of this story, and others in the package, come from that conversation.
On the call, Houshmand was not shy about the comparison to Silicon Valley.
He said that if you draw the same rough‑radius circle around Silicon Valley, you actually find fewer major research universities and fewer medical schools than you do between Baltimore and New York.
The Bay Area also has fewer people — roughly 14 million, by his count — compared with 44 million in this East Coast corridor. And, he noted, the cost of housing in places such as Palo Alto is dramatically higher than in South Jersey.
“Over there, the property value in Palo Alto is about $3.5 million dollars, whereas in here, it is about $450,000,” he said. “And we have roads and highways and everything else — and the greatest health brains in the world.
“We have them here. We can turn this (area) into the greatest ‘destination medicine’ in the whole globe.”
Houshmand, long a thought-leader in higher education for his willingness to think outside of the box, made it clear: He isn’t talking about Rowan trying to compete head‑to‑head with the likes of Penn, Princeton or Johns Hopkins. In fact, he stressed the opposite.
“What I’m proposing is not Rowan taking the lead,” he said. “I’m saying that all of us look at this thing as a region.”
He rattled off a list of top universities that includes Johns Hopkins, Penn, Rutgers, NYU and more, calling them “giants in medicine” and arguing that the real play is to get governors and states to think like one ecosystem.
“This should be at the governance level,” he said — urging the leaders in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New York to look at the potential.
His call to action comes at a time the school is launching a 220‑acre West Campus expansion in Harrison Township and Glassboro.
Houshmand feels the Wellness Village and the Center for Manufacturing Innovation that are part of that project are the proof‑of‑concept — a way to show that a public university can sit at the middle of a district where:
- People live in a health‑focused, intergenerational community;
- A major health‑care provider (Inspira) is building and operating new facilities;
- Senior‑care providers like United Methodist Communities are testing new models of intergenerational housing;
- Engineers and scientists are working in an innovation park next door on medtech, advanced manufacturing and “food as pharmacy”;
- Students are embedded everywhere, in thousands of internships and clinical placements.
Houshmand talked about using the southern half of the West Campus project — the Wellness Village and academic expansions — as a laboratory where students in nursing, medicine, veterinary medicine, music therapy, animal‑assisted therapy, nutrition and more get real‑world experience.
The northern half, with the Center for Manufacturing Innovation and digital engineering work, becomes a place where that same region’s companies can test and build products, he said.
“This facility will provide a tremendous amount of opportunities for our students to have internships,” he said. “Our nurses can work in some of the retirement facilities. Our students in music can do music therapy. Our students in (veterinary school) can do animal therapy.
“How can we then use that as a laboratory for our students to get internship, to be able to learn?”
Houshmand ties all of that back to one of his broader critiques of higher education: That employers spend too much time retraining graduates, and that universities need to provide students with much more applied environments.
Houshmand was blunt about what it will take to be successful and transformative.
“This is truly the mecca of health care,” he said of the region. “We can solve the global health care issues (here) if these states really start getting together.”
The risk, in his view, is not just that the opportunity is missed, but that South Jersey gets left behind if it doesn’t find a way to plug into that broader map.
For now, it’s all about the West Campus project. Financing needs to be secured. Municipal meetings need to happen. Traffic, energy and water questions have to be answered. And, of course, the other schools and health systems have their own priorities and politics.
But Houshmand is very clear about why he pushed Rowan not to sell the land when a lucrative warehousing offer came in a few years ago — and why he’s willing to talk in national terms about what is, today, still mostly fields and site plans.
He reminded reporters that Rowan bought the land more than 20 years ago with the idea that it would eventually support a major expansion of the university’s mission, not just sit idle on the edge of Glassboro. The West Campus project, he said, is intended to finally put that land to work for both Rowan and the broader region.
“What I’m saying is that we are sitting in a gold mine that we have been selling like copper,” he said.
He’s betting that if Rowan can show what that gold mine looks like on 220 acres in Gloucester County, it might be enough to convince a few more governors, hospital CEOs and university presidents to start to see any even bigger circle of influence.
Here is a big-picture overview of the entire scope and vision of the project, presented in an easy-to-digest Q&A format.
Here are a number of stories from BINJE on recent moves by Rowan that connect to the vision of the West Campus project:
Rowan unveils AI-powered digital engineering hub;
Rowan, FDU join forces in health care education;
Rowan celebrates grand opening of first veterinary school;
Rowan receives $1M for transportation, engineering research;
Rowan conference to tackle state’s energy future;
