"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, but more importantly to the learning experience. "Technology is going to empower learning and empower students in ways we can't even dream about now. So the technology-enhanced classroom has to be focused on how it enhances student learning, as opposed to just being there for the sake of show."
Sudharshan acknowledged, however, that a major challenge in designing a new business education facility is today's rapid pace of innovation in technologies. Construction of a new facility could last up to five years — plenty of time in today's world for the new high-tech gizmos of 2007 to be rendered obsolete by entirely new concepts.
Envisioned is a building that would enable Gatton to double its MBA student capacity and boost the college's undergraduate population by at least 30 percent. In order to maintain the university's own standards for student/faculty ratio and to retain its accreditation, Sudharshan said, Gatton must increase its faculty. "By looking at the total number of research articles at our Top 20 benchmark institutions, we need an increase in faculty of 50. The two numbers are coincidentally the same. That 50-faculty member increase would take care of the increased student demand, as well as our research production to match our Top 20 goals," Sudharshan said.
More space and updated technology, Sudharshan suggested, would enable the college to expand its programming to accommodate the changing landscape of the contemporary business environment — from corporate bureaucracy to entrepreneurship. "An example would be an enhanced focus on entrepreneurial education, which would allow our students to be not only educated broadly in business or in a specific functional area, but also to have a specialization, an entrepreneurial ability not only to create new companies in Kentucky but also to give them the wherewithal to do so."
Sudharshan said the new facility would also enable UK to offer the continuing executive education programs Kentucky now lacks. "As our workforce becomes even more highly trained in management, business and economics, they will contribute more to the state's economy by creating jobs and making their contributions to their firms more valuable. We're hoping to create a cycle of upward development."
The fate of the Gatton proposal depends on whether the General Assembly authorizes funding for the project. "If that project is approved — and ... that's been recommended by the Council on Postsecondary Education — bonds would be authorized. We would sell those bonds within the next biennium, which is to say that the general fund will be responsible for paying the debt service on those bonds for the next 20 years," said CPE interim president and former state budget director Brad Cowgill. "The useful life of that building will be greatly in excess of 20 years. We will get a lot of payback on that investment."
Cowgill said UK officials have realized that the level of bond capacity they plan to request for UK facilities is a fairly large number by historical standards. "So they have sought to supplement that in the case of the Gatton School with about $25 million worth of privately raised money," he said.
A rendering of the proposed new facility was not available at press time.