Business School to break ground on long-awaited executive center

The School of Business will hold a groundbreaking ceremony for its Fluno Center for Executive Education April 17 at 3:30 p.m.

The eight-story, state-of-the-art learning center will be built in the 600 block of University Avenue. It is slated to open in early 2000.

Those scheduled to attend the groundbreaking include Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, Madison Mayor Susan J. M. Bauman, Chancellor David Ward, School of Business Dean Andrew J. Policano, and Jere and Anne Fluno, for whom the facility is named.

The center will include classrooms, an amphitheater and dining facilities. It also will have 100 residence rooms for program participants. The ability to offer overnight accommodations is a key aspect of successful executive-education facilities offered by top business schools across the country, because it makes possible a total-immersion educational experience for participants.

The business school currently offers executive-education courses to more than 16,000 executives and managers each year at locations across campus. The Fluno Center will allow the school to focus its programs at one site. Participants in continuing-education courses from other units of UW–Madison, including the College of Engineering and the Medical School, also will use the facility.

The $22.5 million construction is being funded by private gifts and bonds and without state money. Jere and Anne Fluno, of Lake Forest, Ill., contributed $3 million toward the center. Jere D. Fluno, a 1963 graduate of the business school, is vice chair and a director of W.W. Grainger, a leader in the distribution of maintenance, repair and operating supplies in North America.

Other major gifts for the building were given by Irwin Smith, chairman of Columbus Circle Investors, and from the Eugenie Mayer Bolz Family Foundation on behalf of John and Robert Bolz of Madison.

The university will build a 300-stall underground parking structure below the Fluno Center to help alleviate the parking shortage in that section of campus and to serve those attending seminars.