An Interview With Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard

And in the new curriculum you are also allowing students to take more electives in the first year, in part so that they are better prepared for their summer internships. Explain how that will work.

Exactly. Many students come to us without being 100% sure about what they want to do. The rap on us is that we are all about finance. It’s not true. I think students come wanting to do almost anything. But for many of them, particularly if it’s not something they have done before, they need to take a prominent elective before recruiting. In the new core, they can do that very quickly.

In my discipline of finance to be able to take capital markets very early as opposed to waiting just makes me a heck of a lot more literate in those interviews. So in addition to improving choice, the bigger impact it will have on students is their preparation. I think it will help with satisfaction as well because I do think students are rightly concerned.

Firms are increasingly using the internship as a way to recruit. That is why anxiety is rising in MBA programs. Students know the internship is not a first date. It’s probably a match. So the anxiety around early recruiting rises. My way of thinking about satisfaction is to find the pressure points that you know are causing anxiety and work on those. So things that sound unrelated like the number of available classrooms and this structure of the core are directly related.

Another long-time pressure point for students at Columbia has been Uris Hall. Of course, you’re getting a new campus but that won’t come on line for another four or five years.

We have raised $350 million and the university is going to put in another $100 million for our new campus. But we still have $150 million to go. The thesis I have used when fundraising is that this is about transformation.

My beef with Uris Hall isn’t that it is ugly, although frankly it is. My beef is it’s not designed for learning today. We have put a lot of money into it. As I remind the trustees, ‘I’m repairing the plane while it’s in the air’ because every generation of MBA students only live here two years at a time. The problem with Uris is if you think about how you want to teach, it’s very non-linear where you have students being able to breakout and come back together. You would have lots of informal spaces in a building where ideas happen. That is not Uris. Uris is filled with theater-style classrooms, a cafeteria, a library and faculty way up in the clouds.

The new building offers us a chance to reimagine what a business school should look like. Rarely do you get a chance to do it all over. You’re not just adding a string of pearls. You’re building it all from scratch. It’s about twice as much space as we currently have for the same number of students. So what that means is many more classrooms.

Who cares? Well, one of our problems in satisfaction is that we have to force students through a march from morning through night because of our classroom constraints and it just builds in conflicts with a lot of evening activities. I don’t mean social. I mean McKinsey and shrimp toast over at the faculty house. The goal I gave the architects was I want people out of class by late afternoon and done. We are not going to be teaching past a particular time. How many classrooms do we need to pull that off?

But it is the informal spaces in the building that I am most excited about because they give students the opportunity to have a community. It’s kind of hard to find a space to talk in Uris. It’s a bench or standing in the hall. That’s not a way to get ideas flowing or to make people happy. So I think the building is integral to improve student satisfaction. When I first said that to people who are writing big checks, they said, ‘You think students want a more handsome building?’

I don’t think students care that much about it. But they do want these amenities I’ve described. They want a day that is not so conflicted with recruiting activities. They do want a space where they can sit down and talk to people. And of course, in New York, everything is more expensive than it should be and everything takes longer. With this project, I thought I was going to be on Social Security by the time we would open. It was all legal and regulatory issues when I started. The university was able to assemble 17 acres of land in Manhattan, which is in itself something of a miracle. At Stanford that might be a garden, but not in New York.

When will you open?

The current calendar is late 2017. I also wanted to make sure we didn’t open before other parts of the campus because our fundraising is doing better. I just didn’t want to move into a construction site so I slowed the gears down.

What will the total cost be?

About $600 million, soup to nuts. So we have $150 million to go. I should be able by the end of this academic year to close that gap to $100 million. And then it will take another couple of years to get the rest. Once I get within $100 million, I am comfortable asking their permission to commence. They frankly would give me the permission already. It’s my own sense of risk aversion when the numbers are this big.