By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When the dignitaries gathered in front of the former Hanna Hall on the Bowling Green State University campus Saturday to apply shovels to dirt, they were marking work that had actually begun 10 months ago.
Over Christmas break last year, crews and machinery descended on the parking lot on the other side of Hanna Hall and dug in to relocate utilities lines.
From left, Patricia Maurer, Robert Maurer, Peggy Schmeltz, and her daughter Janet Bauer. Schmeltz, whose husband William was dean of the College of Business, was also one of the major donors recognized at the groundbreaking.
That marked the beginning of work on a new home for the College of Business, and the future of business education at BGSU.
But that gap between actual and ceremonial work is insignificant compared to the more than decade the project has been considered, a period that spanned the administrations of four university presidents.
Hanna Hall is now a shell and to the east the footers and foundation outline what will be a 50,000-square foot addition — twice the size of the original building.
Inside visitors have to use their imaginations to envision what President Rodney Rogers boldly declared will be “the most innovative space in the United States, if not the world.”
The Robert W. And Patricia A. Maurer Center will be completed by summer 2020, and ready for students by the beginning of that fall semester.
BGSU celebrated this new chapter in its history on the Saturday morning of homecoming.
Business Dean Raymond Braun said that the center with its active learning classrooms and open design with space for collaboration will prepare students for the modern business environment. The design team, he said, traveled to corporate offices to see what was needed.
President Rodney Rogers speaks.
The Maurer Center was created to help students develop the critical thinking, presentation, and teamwork that the business world requires, Braun said. The time of professors in front lecturing and students taking notes is over.
All the classrooms in the Maurer Center will be active learning classrooms.
Nijah Slaughter, a junior business administration student from Detroit, testified to the value of that approach.
She came to BGSU because of the high rankings of the business program, and her time here has confirmed the wisdom of her choice.
Her experience at BGSU has been “nothing short of amazing.” She believes that the new center will further enhance the education of future students.
In active learning classrooms, she said: “The professor engages you in discussions with your peers where you solve problems and practice your presentations. You definitely cannot come unprepared, check your phone or fall asleep in one of these classrooms.”
Student Nijah Slaughter talks about her hopes for the Maurer Center.
And with a Starbucks bakery in the building, she quipped, students may have no reason to leave the center.
Michael McGranaghan said a belief in the importance of higher education moving to the active classroom model was one of the reasons he and his wife, Mary Lee, made a donation topping $1 million to the project. The dean’s suite will be named for the McGranaghans.
They both graduated from the College of Business back in 1980. He went on to work for Johnson & Johnson.
He said that the active learning classroom puts the facilities to best use. If higher education does not take this approach, it will lose out to online education.
While touring the project, he said he’d like the university to make sure prospective students see the renderings of what the finished center would look like. That will provide a major incentive for them to enroll.
Looking from inside Hanna Hall, the 50,000-square-foot addition takes shape.
Rogers said that the center draws both on the past and the future. The west face of the building will maintain the traditional look of Hanna Hall, while the east face will feature contemporary design with extensive use of glass. Inside the eastern exterior wall of Hanna will be maintained.
Maurer, a 1965 graduate, said afterward, that he would have liked to have kept the Hanna Hall name for the traditional part of the building.
The Maurers are pleased to see the university giving new life to its legacy buildings. They both studied business at BGSU when it was taught in Hayes Hall.
“It was an old building then,” Patricia Maurer said.
She said that former President Mary Ellen Mazey and then Provost Rogers were “very convincing” in their pitch for a new school of business.
“They saw a vision of great things for BGSU,” she said.
Michael Schuessler, a senior project manager for BGSU, Michael McGranaghan, a major donor, and Kristi Peiffer, a BGSU project manager, look over a schematic of the new Maurer Center.
The project will cost $44.5 million, all of it from local funds. Material distributed at the groundbreaking stated that the university is seeking $16 million to complete the project as part of its $200 million comprehensive fundraising campaign.
Rogers said that the campaign, which will be used for endowing faculty and staff positions, scholarships, named facilities, and named programs, has raised $135 million already.
The new home for business, Rogers said, is a long time coming. He remembers being approached by finance professor Daniel Klein shortly after he arrived in 2006 as dean of the college. Klein told the new dean that BGSU needed to improve its facilities.
“We needed to not just catch up, but get ahead of our competition,” Rogers said. “And that’s what this facility will allow us to do.”
