RIC business school unveils high-tech upgrades

The letters outside say “Alger Hall,” but if you knew the 47-year-old building that since 1999 has housed the Rhode Island College School of Management, you know this isn’t it. The yellow brick walls on both ends look familiar, everything else is brand-new.

A year and $5.5 million worth of renovations have transformed Alger Hall into the sort of modern, high-tech facility that today’s business schools require: highly computerized, with top-notch audio and video; Wi-Fi-enabled; and with plenty of versatile gathering spaces.

Dean James Schweikart calls the revamped building “one of the finest teaching facilities in New England, certainly for teaching business and economics.”

Under a single roof, in only 28,000 square feet, the new Alger Hall does pull together all the major amenities. Schweikart and top RIC officials made sure it would: “I went around and visited just about every campus in the area to see what they had,” the dean said.

The RIC School of Management offers bachelor’s degrees in accounting, computer information systems, economics, finance, management and marketing, as well as a master’s degree in professional accountancy. This spring, 142 bachelor’s degrees were awarded.

The quality of RIC’s business education facilities is particularly important for Rhode Island because, unlike most other colleges in the state, RIC caters primarily to local residents, and its graduates tend to stay in the area. RIC is also the most affordable four-year college here, with a year’s in-state tuition for 2005-06 costing only $3,888.

Given all this, RIC never lacks for students. But asked whether the upgrade would boost the school’s competitiveness, President John Nazarian said it “certainly will.”

“You can have good teachers, but if you don’t have a good environment, I think it affects the quality of the teaching and learning experience,” he said.

“I also think it makes it easier to recruit faculty,” added Orestes P. Monterecy, director of capital projects. “When you go into an old building, it makes a bad impression, but with a new building like this, it makes a big difference.”

Indeed, as faculty members moved in over the last few days, they raved about the sleek new design, the new equipment, and the new Alger Hall’s generally bright and airy feel. They’d been out of the building for a year, while it was refurbished, but for a quick reminder of its former look, they just had to glance across the lawn, to a still un-renovated twin.

Built in 1958, Alger Hall was one of the six original buildings on the Mount Pleasant campus, with 30 classrooms, two art workrooms, six music practice studios, a lecture room, labs, conference areas and study rooms.

Before the upgrade, Alger housed not only the School of Management, but the labor studies program and some administrative offices. The new, slightly expanded Alger Hall, however, is all for the School of Management, the new home base for about 1,000 students and 27 faculty. That’s not to say that other RIC departments won’t use the building. The college is open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and when business faculty aren’t using some of the eight classrooms, other classes will come in. And a small event room and a new, large assembly room for up to 348 people will host RIC functions.

“It’s a high-end, school-wide assembly space,” Nazarian said of the room, which has surround-sound audio, high-definition video, Wi-Fi service and all the amenities for anything from an academic or business conference, to a fund-raising dinner.

The classrooms are also in a different league: two computer labs and six classrooms, all with overhead projectors, VCRs and DVD players, cable TV feeds and high-end audio. Each also has a custom-built instructor podium with a Smart Technology Sympodium computer and monitor – the next generation of “smart boards,” controllable right from the podium, with a direct feed from the professor’s screen to the overhead projector.

For the usually cash-strapped RIC, making this kind of improvement is a huge step, and it took years of planning and lobbying to get the money. Even then, while the college splurged where it mattered – technology, security, good design – it also squeezed the most out of its pennies, commissioning all the furniture from Correctional Industries, and recycling everything from a conference room table, to file cabinets.

The whole idea was to make the biggest possible impact on student learning, said Monterecy.

“It allows you to do a lot more in the same amount of time, and to do it in a more modern environment,” he said. “You can go right onto the financial broadcasts, live, which we couldn’t do before. You can watch the stock market on the Internet. You can show student work on the screen. …

“Students love it,” he added. “They’re excited. They love stuff like that.”