Donation, name change help UH business school

THE ISSUE Real estate investor and alum Jay H. Shidler has donated $25 million to what now is called the Shidler College of Business.

THE University of Hawaii's business college at Manoa suddenly has a brighter future because of a $25 million donation by real estate investor and UH alumnus Jay H. Shidler. As thanks, the university is renaming the department the Shidler College of Business, following a national trend.

Shidler's donation is the largest single gift to the UH Foundation. It will be used to provide more scholarships, attract instructors, lecturers and researchers to endowed positions and create a full-time master-of-business-administration program, now limited to evening classes.

The business college will be the first UH department named for an individual, but the move is hardly pioneering, especially with business schools. The world's first collegiate business school was founded by steel magnate Joseph Wharton in 1881 at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Wharton School remains the nation's most prestigious.

In the last two years, several public business schools have sold their naming rights, according to Business Week. The University of California-Irvine's Graduate School of Management has been named for Hot Pockets inventor Paul Merage after his gift of $30 million, and UC-San Diego's business school has been named for billionaire investor Ernest Rady for a similar gift. Oklahoma State University named its business school after energy company executive William S. Spears gave an undisclosed amount.

Vance Roley, dean of the Shidler College of Business, said the goal will be to push the undergraduate business program into the nation's top 25 public business schools and its graduate program into the top 50 by 2013. Its graduate and undergraduate international business programs already are ranked in the top 25.

The school has long had an Asian focus, and part of the money will be used to energize its MBA program in China and expand its Vietnam executive MBA program, located in Hanoi, by adding a Ho Chi Minh City branch.