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Isenberg
School Addition Named for Harold Alfond
The Board of Trustees last week approved the naming of the upcoming addition to the Isenberg School of Management for a major donor to the school. The 49,800-square-foot addition will be called Harold Alfond Hall in honor of Harold and Dorothy "Bibby" Alfond's $1 million donation to the project. Alfond and his family have a history of generosity to higher education. Over the last 50 years the founder of Dexter Shoe Corporation and part-owner of the Boston Red Sox and his wife have given more than $6 million to Colby College in Waterville, Me., where three generations of Alfonds have received undergraduate degrees. Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., built the Harold and Ted Alfond Sports Center, in part with a $3 million gift from Harold and his son Ted, a graduate of Rollins. Other recipients of the family's support include the University of New England in Biddeford, Me., and the United Way. Harold Alfond Hall, which will be built on the south side of the existing building, is designed to accommodate state-of-the-art teaching styles and distance learning, according to Lou Wigdor, director of Communications at the school. The school plans to use the addition to better serve students by providing a "coordinated student services facility" and a student center to facilitate interaction among undergraduates, graduate students and faculty, Wigdor said. In addition to distance-learning capabilities and a student center, the building will house caserooms, where students can learn by problem-solving, breakout rooms for small-group discussions, a computer lab, offices and several research centers. "The building is very much oriented around student services and teaching," he said. "Business education is dominated by teamwork, so the new classrooms will have a highly multimedia spin to them so that students can solve problems at their desk and also see what one another is doing on screen. Very significant is the student center; it will be a social glue, especially for the undergraduates. That's important, especially with the emphasis in the field of working in groups. Places like the Placement Office are going to get first-rate facilities, and that's important, too." The project is funded by the 1999 University of Massachusetts Building Authority bond issue. The project cost will be $13.6 million, according to Jim Cahill, director of Facilities Planning, and it is expected to be finished by the fall of 2002, according to Marty Smith, manager of Planning and Architecture. A groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for Nov. 3, Wigdor said. |
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