In 1965, Eric Sprott joined the rest of the bachelors of commerce class in graduating from Carleton University. Forty-five years later, the facilities of his namesake business school have hardly improved.
Touring the campus, one would be hard-pressed to know that the Sprott School of Business even existed, let alone had a world-class bachelor of international business program and a commerce program with top-tier concentrations.
At most universities the size of Carleton, the business school is highly valued, but at Carleton the university administrators ignore it and leave Sprott faculty, staff and students little to work with.
For many universities it is hard to imagine a business school without faculty status, but up until 2006 that was the case at Carleton.
The prior Carleton presidents refused to grant this status, preferring to have Sprott lumped into arts faculties, or in the Faculty of Public Affairs. So instead the school of business and its student society and clubs were shoved into Dunton Tower with very inadequate space.
President Roseann Runte announced two years ago at the SBSS Business Banquet that we would eventually get a building in the future, but there isn’t much movement on that front. I attended the Campus Master Plan meeting last year to see how things were coming along in regards to a building for the Sprott School of Business. While there are preliminary designs and plans, there has been zero student involvement on what is needed in this future building.
Carleton is patting itself on the back with its co-curricular record, but there has been grossly inadequate student space and Carleton evidently doesn’t want to hear from its student leaders on the student space required.
The building committee seems to have this idea that the business program doesn’t need any space and that we can easily share with the arts students.
But the fact is, business students are required to work in groups for the majority of their classes and they need to do extensive research.
However, in the MacOdrum Library there are only nine group study rooms and one Bloomberg Terminal. That doesn’t even come close to accommodating the 1,797 undergraduate business students, not to mention that we’re supposed to share these facilities with 19,000 other Carleton students.
In Dunton Tower, there is no general student space. The total undergraduate business student space consists of the SBSS office, one room where all 11 other Sprott clubs have to share, and two (non-Sprott) computer labs which close at 3:45 p.m. on weekdays and are not open on weekends.
Furthermore, our faculty is smaller but comparable in size to Carleton’s Faculty of Engineering and Design (FED).
My buddies over at the Carleton Student Engineering Society get much more student space. Yet it seems the priority was getting FED its fifth building before the business faculty even gets one.
Interestingly, the administration wanted to move us to the River Building, which I’m told would have given us less space.
The major business schools that Sprott competes with, Telfer (University of Ottawa), John Molson (Concordia University), Desautels (McGill University), Queen’s University, Schulich (York University), Rotman (University of Toronto), and Ted Rogers (Ryerson University) all have business buildings. Queen’s, Rotman and Sauder (University of British Columbia) are expanding theirs. Smaller business schools such at Brock University, Wilfrid Laurier University, University of Victoria and University of Prince Edward Island all have state-of-the-art facilities. But for some reason, Carleton’s business school has remained unchanged.
It’s rather interesting that Carleton prides itself on developing leaders but the business faculty, which is the faculty best able to develop leaders, is ignored and underfunded.
Carleton needs to help out their business students who have come here to join the likes of Eric Sprott. They need to step up to the plate and do something.