Concordia University Wisconsin’s latest building project is well underway.
With just months left until The Robert W. Plaster Free Enterprise Center is fully operational, a handful of CUW’s leadership received a sneak peek of the progress on Monday, March 4.
With state-of-the-art features, such as a functioning speech, language, and hearing clinic and an incubator and collaboration space for nurturing business start-ups, the approximately 41,000-square-foot academic building promises to be a place where entrepreneurial collaboration and health care innovation can occur together. The building will be an important resource to continue to raise up leaders who can live out their vocations for the good of the Church and world.
The three-story building is expected to be ready for occupancy by the start of the fall 2019 semester. Named after the Robert W. Plaster Foundation, the building will house Concordia’s thriving Batterman School of Business, which graduates more students than any other single academic school in the university. For the past several years, the Batterman School of Business’ MBA program has topped the Milwaukee Business Journal’s List of largest MBA programs within a 100-mile radius of Milwaukee, and the Green Bay Packers announced the program as its “Preferred Academic Partner” last fall.
In addition, Concordia students studying health care will be invited into the space. With half of CUW’s six academic schools devoted to health care disciplines, there exists a built-in opportunity to fuse business and health care learning with a distinctly Christian approach. The new building will continue to support Concordia’s efforts in this realm. It will feature:
- Multiple classrooms, offices, and mixed-use rooms such as laboratories, work rooms, analysis centers, and public areas.
- A dynamic, cross-disciplinary “collaboratorium”, or incubator/collaboration space that will match students with educational mentors and successful community entrepreneurs to foster the formation and launching of new products into the marketplace.
- The Speech, Language, and Hearing Clinic that will offer speech, language, communication, swallowing, and hearing assessments for the community. The clinic, which will involve students in Concordia’s School of Health Professions, will deliver top-notch health care while providing experiential learning opportunities for students.
- A meeting space for the Rx think tank, which is a consortium of Wisconsin business leaders who share a goal to consumerize health care by incentivizing, educating, and empowering consumers in transparent markets.
The Robert W. Plaster Free Enterprise Center is made possible thanks to the support of multiple donors. There is still opportunity to give to this important project. Those interested in supporting the mission of Concordia University may click here.
— This story is written by Kali Thiel, director of university communications for Concordia University Wisconsin and Ann Arbor. She may be reached at kali.thiel@cuw.edu or 262-243-2149.
If this story has inspired you, why not explore how you can help further Concordia's mission through giving.