Today, I am glad to share the exciting news that we recently finalized a gift agreement that will allow us to proceed with the construction of a new building in the north courtyard of the main Mendoza buildings; i.e., in between the Kelly and McGlinn wings. The three-story addition will add nearly 20,000 square feet of classroom space, team/seminar rooms, a large student lounge designated for undergraduate students, as well as faculty and staff offices to our current building. We expect to break ground in 2025.

The most significant feature of the addition will be a large auditorium to be used primarily for teaching foundational undergraduate courses. The mostly flat design means that students are never far from the front of the room — or the professor — to make the classroom experience more engaging. Its larger capacity allows us to teach more students and expand access to our Foundations courses to more non-business majors.

We’ve made great strides in the past few years to advance the College as a leading business school guided by our Catholic identity, including our new Ph.D. programs, an increase in the size of our faculty, growth in our master’s programs and the revised Undergraduate Business Core, to name a few developments. This new building is another major step toward achieving the College’s strategic goals, particularly in providing our students with an unsurpassed educational experience and giving us more space to grow our faculty and staff.

I close with a heartfelt thanks to the many of you who have demonstrated a spirit of patience, flexibility and collaboration as we have made adjustments to manage significant space constraints. This includes those who have served on project teams to figure out complex office moves and those who have had to make an office move (sometimes more than once!) to accommodate growth in the College.

Finally, I want to thank Natalie Sargent and Patrick Brennan who were instrumental in securing the gift to make the addition possible, and of course, I am very grateful to the benefactor family, who wishes to be unnamed at this time, for their incredible generosity.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn