While construction of the university’s planned McDonough School of Business Center remains on hold, administrators expressed hope that the center will propel the undergraduate school into the upper echelons of American business education at a ceremonial groundbreaking Friday.
Over 50 people, including administrators, donors and board members attended the brief ceremony held on the west campus’ vacant Lot T, which will serve as the site for the new 170,000-square-foot structure. University President John J. DeGioia joined major donors and MSB officials in donning hardhats at the conclusion of the event as shoveled the first symbolic heap of dirt in the center’s construction.
“As this building rises, so [do] our aspirations for cDonough,” DeGioia said during the ceremony. “This is an exciting moment for the McDonough School of Business and an historic moment for Georgetown.”
The groundbreaking did not signal the start of construction on the business center, however. In a meeting three weeks ago, Vice President for Facilities and Student Housing Karen Frank explained that the university had not yet received building permits for the project.
The groundbreaking is “just a ceremony,” she said.
Frank was unavailable for comment on the current status of the permits, but construction has not commenced since the groundbreaking.
Plans for the new MSB Center call for the construction of new classrooms and administrative offices, as well as a 400-seat auditorium and an underground parking garage about a quarter as large as the garage beneath the Southwest Quad. Officials expect the center’s construction to be completed in spring 2008.
“This is a great day for Georgetown University and for its business school, its faculty and its students,” MSB Dean George Daly said during the ceremony. “Now we have no excuses. Now we must move forward and become the very best.”
The new center becomes the latest in a series of long-awaited construction projects that are undergoing or have been recently completed on campus. The $188 million Southwest Quad complex was completed in 2003, and the 39,600-square-foot, $30.8 million Davis Performing Arts Center opened in November.
The new Multi-Sport Facility is also awaiting a new phase of its construction, which will include new stands, locker facilities and a scoreboard, pending the completion of fundraising efforts.
Several speakers at the ceremony highlighted the role the new center will have as a central home for the MSB, which currently has classrooms and office space scattered across campus.
Timothy McBride (LAW ’75, ’80), one of the project’s principal donors, praised the alumni community’s willingness to financially back the project.
“I am pleased to observe that philanthropy is alive and well at Georgetown,” McBride said.
With DeGioia and Daly’s leadership, “the McDonough School of Business will achieve the stature and recognition it deserves throughout the globe,” he added.
The center’s fundraising campaign kicked off in 1997 with a $10 million donation from Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who was assassinated last year. Since then, hundreds of alumni have sent in donations, including a $10 million gift from John Fauth (GSB ’67), a member of the university board of directors.
Several notable MSB figures attended the groundbreaking, including Robert McDonough (SFS ’49), the man for whom the school was named following his $30 million donation in 1998, former interim dean John Mayo and former interim dean Reena Aggarwal.
The ceremony also featured a blessing by Fr. Brian McDermott, S.J., who sprinkled holy water over the dirt before the ceremonial turning of the soil, and a performance of the university’s alma mater by the Chamber Singers.
