The University of Kentucky will appeal to the 2008 General Assembly to finance a new high-tech home for the Gatton College of Business and Economics.
UK proposes a $100 million facility west of Memorial Coliseum on The Avenue of Champions between Lexington Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard. The property is now used by the university as a parking lot. The relocation would shift a significant portion of student traffic much closer to Lexington's downtown area where efforts are underway to better integrate the city with its two university campuses.
Although one among the university's 16 colleges, Gatton produces 20 percent of the university's undergraduate degrees. College officials say the school's circa-1960s Limestone Street quarters have become overcrowded and its 20th century technology is sadly outmoded. As a result, Gatton officials warn that they can no longer meet student demand, even as the commonwealth is relying on such refined skills and talents to improve the state's competitive posture.
"Since our college contributes significantly to the economic well-being of the state, we would expect and hope that the political party in power, the leadership, would get behind the goals of the state to support us and support our new building," said Gatton Dean Devanathan Sudharshan.
Sudharshan cited data from the Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE) indicating that more than 85 percent of business school graduates in Kentucky remain in the commonwealth upon graduation. "Given that a large number of business school students stay on in Kentucky, and the fact that our students provide significant leadership in many domains of work and life in Kentucky, our impact is significant and we feel should be supported," he said.
Plans call for a new and more spacious facility. "We have two constraints both in the physical size of the classrooms and in the number of classrooms," Sudharshan explained. "We have to cap our daytime MBA population at 75 because we don't have classroom space and we don't have breakout room space. And in many of our benchmark schools, a lot of the teaching now is done with much higher technology than we have.
He asserts that improved technology is critical not only to achieving Top 20 status