BANGOR – In 1930, when now 89-year-old Clara Swan was a Husson College freshman, the school was known as the Maine School of Commerce and fit into one floor of a downtown building, with the Emple Knitting Mill upstairs and the Center Department Store downstairs.

Swan was a member of the college’s women’s basketball team, which played in the local YMCA, and she went on to become a professor, coach and administrator at Husson for 34 years.

Today, the college has its own campus and roughly 2,000 students.

Come her 90th birthday next April 28, ground is scheduled to be broken on the $1 million Clara L. Swan Center at the college, which will house a fitness center and a “human-performance” laboratory for research into injury rehabilitation and athletic performance.

On Monday, Husson officials went public with a $6 million fund-raising campaign already under way that has the Swan Center as one of its centerpieces.

Called the Legacy of Leadership Campaign, it will raise if successful more than twice as much as Husson’s last capital campaign in the early 1990s.

“Quietly over the past two years, we have raised gifts and pledges totaling $3.5 million and today we are going public to raise the balance of the campaign,” Leo Loiselle, chairman of Husson’s board of trustees, said at a campus news conference.

Bill Beardsley, the college’s president, said the campaign is “absolutely critical to Husson’s growth and vitality.”

“This outside funding from friends and alumni and colleagues means we can meet our future capital needs without raising our tuition to a level that Maine youth cannot afford,” he said.

The largest block of the money, $2.5 million, will go toward need-based scholarships, doubling the college’s scholarship endowment. About 80 percent of the school’s undergraduates receive some form of financial aid, and half qualify for Pell grants, federal aid for low-income students.

A half-million dollars from the campaign is to be used to fund a 20 percent renovation and expansion of the college’s library, including improving computer access to online resources.

Other projects earmarked for funds from the campaign are a fully endowed classical music recital series, which began last year, the college’s first science research lab, the new John Winkin baseball and field hockey complex, and the John Boucher soccer field. Several of the projects, including the soccer and baseball fields, are currently under way.

The Swan Center, which will be adjacent to the Newman Gymnasium, will house a “human-performance” laboratory. Faculty and students would use the center for research and clinical activities ranging from studying the physiological characteristics of disease and injury to assessing rehabilitation techniques to improving athletic performances by using motion analysis and performance-measuring technology.

“We believe there are no comparable facilities north of Boston,” Beardsley said.

Swan, who attended the event, said she was “honored and thrilled … and humbled” to have the center named for her. A native of Princeton in Washington County, she was Husson’s valedictorian in 1933 and later rose to the position of vice president for academic affairs. During her 19 years as Husson’s women’s basketball coach, her teams won 241 games and lost only 34.