The Tepper Quad at the heart of Carnegie Mellon is the new home of the Tepper School of Business
These days, new business school buildings have become a dime a dozen. In the last few years alone, Yale, Northwestern Kellogg, Texas’ McCombs, Cornell and UC-Berkeley Haas have put up sleek modern structures filled with the latest gee-whiz technology to beam classroom discussions all over the globe.
But today’s grand opening of Carnegie Mellon University’s new Tepper School of Business is something entirely different. The new $201 million Tepper Quad symbolizes a dramatic shift in the way business education is changing.
For one thing, it stands at the center of the Carnegie Mellon campus, not in some faraway corner on the periphery of the university’s grounds. Its location and its size—the 315,000-square-foot structure is now the largest building on campus, with each of its five floors more than an acre in area—makes it a magnet for non-business students and faculty to come and collaborate with the Tepper School. The building signals the deathknell of the old model of a standalone business school, uninvolved and disinterested in other disciplines of study.
‘IT’S REALLY A NEW MODEL FOR BUSINESS EDUCATION’
Pepper School of Business Dean Robert Dammon
For another, the new Tepper Quad is more than just a new home for the business school. The school’s new home now houses the university’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, a 15,000 square foot space where students from across campus will collide to explore new ideas and create new startups. It also is home to the university’s new Welcome Center, where all visitors will come to begin their campus tours. As much as 40% of the space in the building, in fact, is expected to be used by non-business students and faculty.
Those two facts alone signal what Tepper Dean Robert Dammon sees as the latest attempt of a business school to convene meaningful collaborations with the rest of the university. Dammon envisions his MBAs and business undergraduates working together with students from computer science, engineering, design, public policy, and the humanities to solve the big challenges of the future.
“It’s really a new model for business education in general,” believes Dammon. “We wanted to build a facility that would be a vibrant hub for collaboration and cross campus interaction. It really does put the Tepper School, not just at the center of the campus geographically, but gives us an opportunity to be at the center of the intellectual environment here. We want to be a school that is much more deeply connected with the other disciplines on Carnegie Mellon’s campus. We have a very strong belief that our students can be better prepared to deal with the challenges of the 21st century by engaging with students and faculty from all across campus.”
TWO DOZEN NEW CLASSROOMS, THE UNIVERSITY’S LARGEST AUDITORIUM & TEN STARTUP GARAGES
Those are bold ambitions for a building that vastly improves the living and learning environment for Tepper students who will fill the 24 classrooms, the 600-seat auditorium, the 18 breakout spaces, the ten startup ‘garages’ in the new entrepreneurship center, the new dining and cafe options, and the 7,500-square-foot fitness center. It is a stunning structure, fronted by a spacious academic grove and right next to the WQED television studios where episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were flimed. Inside the Tepper Quad, the large curving terraces on each level provide for informal gatherings, places for people to collide and collaborate. But as Sevin Yeltekin, senior associate dean of education at Tepper, notes, “This is a beautiful building, but what goes on in the building is far more important than the actual structure itself.”
Dammon strongly believes that placing the Tepper Quad at the university’s center acknowledges a major change in direction for business education overall. “In the early days of business schools, I think there was in fact a lack of intellectual rigor involved in the education,” he says. “As a result, many other parts of the university felt as though business folks should be on the periphery. And that’s in fact where they ended up. Over the years it developed to the point where both the business school was happy to be on the periphery, and the rest of campus was happy to have them on the periphery. We want to be just the opposite of that. At the Tepper School we want to be at the center of the intellectual activity on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, and this building really does put us there.”
Carnegie Mellon’s business school was not immune from the trend. In common with many rival schools, Tepper’s old haunt was at the edge of the university’s campus, facing Schenley Park. “It was certainly peripheral,” agrees Yeltekin, a professor of economics at Tepper since 2005. The older building, she adds, also lacked enough room for undergraduate business and economics students. “They didn’t really have a physical home in our old building. We just didn’t have the space to run their classes there. Now they have a common space where they can come, they can interact with classmates, do homework together, share ideas, study, and live a little bit in the space as well. And we’re in a more central space on campus and we have quicker access to some of the schools that we tend to have a lot of collaboration with.”
Inside Carnegie Mellon’s new Tepper Quad, hone to the Tepper School of Business
The exterior of the Tepper Quad
‘SOLUTIONS TO THE MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS ARE NOT GOING TO BE FOUND WITHIN THE SILO OF A SINGLE DISCIPLINE’
The change is a reflection of how global and complicated today’s challenges have become. “The solutions to the most important and pressing problems of business and society are not going to be found within the silo of a single discipline,” insists Dammon. “They really requires interdisciplinary collaboration and thinking beyond just one discipline. That means outside the walls of the business school as well, bringing in engineering and computer science, and even the arts and humanities, to help solve these major societal challenges. That’s what this building is all about, to bring people in to really work on interdisciplinary problems that are important to both business and society.”
Befitting Dammon’s vision, Tepper is celebrating its grand opening on Friday, Sept. 14th, by inviting faculty, students and alumni from the entire university to a major event called Intersect@CMU. It will bring to campus leading business executives from Amazon, Facebook and IBM, along with faculty who teach everything from public policy and computer science to robotics and electrical engineering. They will explore a bevy of topics from artificial intelligence and machine learning to blockchain technology (you can register for the lifestream of the event here).
The new Tepper Quad is ten years in the making. At least two years before Damon took over the deanship nearly eight years ago, there were discussions about the need for a new building. “When I came on board as the dean in 2011, we put together a strategic plan that really followed a parallel path to the discussion on our building,” recalls Dammon, who had been a professor of financial economics at the school since 1984. “The two of those really came together, as the strategic plan emphasized the need for a new model of business education of the future, involving greater interdisciplinary collaboration across all of Carnegie Mellon’s campus. That set the stage for a new facility, one that would allow us to achieve this new vision.”
HEDGE FUND BILLIONAIRE DAVID TEPPER WROTE A CHECK FOR A THIRD OF THE BUILDING’S $201 MILLION COST
Sevin Yeltekin, senior associate dean of education at the Tepper School
The groundbreaking for the Tepper Quad was nearly three years ago on Oct. 30, 2015. Just to prepare the site for the structure, crews removed 216,000 cubic yards of rock and earth during the mass excavation. As is often the case in major building projects, there is no shortage of bewildering statistics, from the 82,000 square feet of exterior glass, including skylights and canopies, to the 230,000 bricks on the facade of the building.
One big obvious hurdle, of course, was the cost of a new business campus. The university agreed to pony up a third of the $201 million, but Dammon had to find the rest. David Tepper, the hedge fund billionaire and MBA alum who had already provided in 2004 the $55 million naming gift for what had been the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, agreed to pay for a third of the new building. Dammon then had to gather up the final $67 million from hundreds of other alumni donors.
The vision to reach work more collaboratively across campus is not especially new at Carnegie Mellon. Founded in 1949, Carnegie Mellon’s business school was different from the beginning. The school brought together economics, mathematics and behavioral sciences to study business from a more scientific perspective. The business school was among the first to be given an IBM mainframe that took up the entire basement of the old facility. In the 1960s, two prominent faculty members, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, leveraged that IBM machine to create complex mathematical models of business problems. Simon, an economist and political scientist, who would win a Nobel Prize in economics, and Newell, a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology, began modeling the cognitive processes of individuals. Their early work eventually led to the field of artificial intelligence.
‘WE THINK OF OURSELVES AS THE PEOPLE WHO PUT THE SCIENCE INTO MANAGEMENT’
Two of the founding fathers of AI then were not merely at Carnegie Mellon; they were at the business school. It was one of the earliest examples of the major benefit of interdisciplinary research. Quips Dammon, “I often times tease the dean of the school of computer science that they’re nothing more than a spin off from the business school,” quips Dammon. “But it’s true. We’ve had dramatic impact over the years, not only in the creation of management science as a new way of teaching and researching business, but also in areas like artificial intelligence, which has carried on now with the school of computer science. This is why we’ve always been very comfortable with technology. That’s why this school really sits at the intersection of business technology and analytics.”
Adds Yeltekin, who by training is an economist, “We think of ourselves as the people who put the science into management. We’ve always had a very analytical approach to thinking. Sometimes people call us a quantitative school. But I think the message there is a little bit lost in the sense that it’s not about number crunching. It’s not about who can add up a lot of data or produce a lot of tables. It’s about the scientific way of thinking. We want to be able to draw conclusions from that analysis and then use those conclusions for thinking about what are the prescriptive policies, whether you are a decision maker in a business, whether you go into a think tank or you go into the policy arena.”
Unlike other schools that organize faculty by discipline, Tepper has long had an interdisciplinary tradition even inside the business school. “Our faculty are not organized or siloed by different concentration areas,” explains Yeltekin. “It’s a mixture and that has already started to sprout some interdisciplinary research ideas which we think are very, very important.”
Vast curving terraces on each of the five floors provide lots of space for informal gatherings
Faculty offices in the Tepper Quad
‘WHEN WE BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER, THEY EXCHANGE IDEAS, THEY BRAINSTORM, THEY COME UP WITH BETTER SOLUTIONS’
If there is one place in the building that will likely serve as the epicenter for interdisciplinary collaboration it is the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship on the second floor. Before moving into its new space, the university’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship was scattered in multiple rooms across campus. “Now we have one place in the dead geographic center of campus that everybody can come, and gather, and work together,” says Dave Mawhinney, executive director of the center. “It’s a kick ass and take names space. The Swartz Center is literally a two-minute walk from the school of Computer Science, from the Robotics Institute. It’s a five-minute walk from the School of Engineering. It’s a half a minute walk from the Heinz School of Information Sciences and Public Policy.”
David Mawhinney, executive director of the Swartz Center For Entrepreneurship
Half of the ten teams currently in residence are working on applying artificial intelligence to products and services, with just one team led by a recent Tepper graduate. Four of those startups have been formed by students from the School of Computer Science. An undergraduate student is working on an inventory management system. Two other recent Tepper grads are developing a business called ‘entrepreneurship through acquisition’ to help business owners with no family transition plan.
WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE? THE NEW BUILDING WILL BECOME A VIBRANT HUB OF MULTI-DISCIPLINARY LEARNING
“Being together, even in this virtual world of the Internet, is very important,” believes Mawhinney. “When we bring people together, they exchange ideas, they brainstorm, and they come up with newer and better solutions. So the Swartz Center is a community where lots of people from different backgrounds can come together to share ideas. It’s a workspace where you can talk to a peer company, you can talk to a mentor, you can talk to an entrepreneur in residence to help get beyond a challenge.”
The Tepper Quad, which unofficially opened a few weeks ago, has already changed the way faculty and studnets are interacting with each other. “Having these open spaces where people organically bump into one another, whether it’s on the landings, in the classrooms, or in the cafeteria, creates more conversations,” believes Yeltekin. “Those conversations about research ideas and classroom teaching can continue effortlessly here. They don’t have to break up because we don’t have quite the right arrangement for people to feel comfortable.”
Giving a visitor a tour of the vast open spaces in the building, Dammon seems overjoyed with the school’s new home. Now he aims to turn it into a vibrant hub of multi-disciplinary learning and research. “That’s what it’s all about for me,” he says. “I believe that’s where research needs to go, and I believe that’s where our education has to go. If we can look back five years from now and say we achieved what we set out to do, which is to create this hub of activity, this vibrant hub of interdisciplinary collaboration, that will be a success story for us.”
Pure at Rohr Commonsin the Tepper Quad is a 2,825 squre foot dining and food service space offering a variety of locally sourced foods with a focus on health and fitness. Photo by John A. Byrne
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