Renovation of Memorial Hall has opened a door of opportunity to donors who wish to support the College of Business, Technology and Communication through naming gifts for the building’s many rooms and features.
Just as the building promises to be a magnet for student recruitment long into the future, it also provides a new avenue for BSU alumni and friends who seek to establish their own visible legacy or honor some other person, such as a family member.
In addition to the business administration and accounting programs, whose courses are all taught in Memorial Hall, the CBTC includes the Department of Technology, Art & Design, noted for its outstanding exhibit and graphic design programs, as well as the visual arts and applied engineering.
The college also leads Minnesota in delivery of online bachelor’s degree-completion programs in business administration and is a partner in an on-campus business degree-completion program at Anoka-Ramsey Community College.
Naming opportunities in Memorial Hall vary from $500,000 for the historic Art Deco lobby and lower-level concourse, to $200,000 for an executive conference room, $50,000 for group learning centers, to $10,000 for individual offices – and those are only a few examples.
Such gifts will fund the CBTC’s “2020 by 2020,” a plan to grow the college from about 1,300 current students to 2,020 by the year 2020 while raising the bar on every aspect of its academics and outreach.
“We are pursuing many important initiatives that will integrate students, faculty and employers in meaningful and deliberate ways,” said Dr. Shawn Strong, the college’s dean.
Other objectives of “2020 by 2020” include the ability to host student study tours to places such as Chicago’s Board of Trade or corporate headquarters in the Twin Cities, creating a more in-depth entrepreneurship program with real-world experience, launching an Executive in Residence program for visiting business leaders, and funding other initiatives to gain “gold standard” accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
An early naming gift came from the Carlson Companies, which named a suite of offices in honor of BSU alumna Trudy Rautio ’75, who retired in May as president and CEO of the Minnetonka-based travel and hospitality giant. Rautio serves on the BSU Foundation board and the Imagine Tomorrow campaign’s National Campaign Committee.
