Hankamer Opens New Building
Students setting foot on the campus of Baylor University to earn an MBA from the Hankamer School of Business will take classes in a brand new building, the Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation. The building is four stories tall and has 275,000 square feet of space. The Paul L. Foster Campus took 18 months to build and cost approximately $100 million, but Hankamer School of Business Dean Terry Maness told KWBU that every penny was worth it, since the school has needed a new facility since 2005.
“We kept adding, I think quality programs but we had the same square footage. So it got to be a real challenge,” stated Maness. “We knew that we needed to grow space to meet the growing needs, we had an increased number of students but also programs. But also we recognized we needed another kind of space.”
The building features a central atrium with collaborative study rooms and areas, classrooms, and space for more than 250 offices. The classrooms feature cutting-edge teaching technologies, including the equipment to facilitate video conferences.
“We’ll teach differently, because the classrooms allow for us to do things a little differently in terms of how we involve technology and the like – it facilitates,” said Maness.
“[The new development at Baylor] is a lot to take in at once but it’s great,” said Kevin Mitchell, an MBA student at the Hankamer School of Business. “As a student, I’m really in awe and I’m really appreciative of how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time.”
