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Lynton Wilson Building | ? | 6-8 fl | Planning
Liberal arts at Mac get $10m boost
Wade Hemsworth
The Hamilton Spectator
(Oct 30, 2007)
McMaster University is planning to build a landmark liberal arts building with Lynton (Red) Wilson's name on it.
Wilson, the university's new chancellor, is making a $10-million donation to the university, specifically targeted to the humanities and social sciences. Those faculties, collectively called the liberal arts, have taken a back seat in the McMaster building boom of recent years to medicine, science, engineering and athletics.
The new building's location, budget and timing have yet to be determined, but the most likely site is the current location of Wentworth House, near the Sterling Street entrance, a building considered to be near the end of its useful life.
The Wilson building is expected to be a signature piece of architecture, tentatively pegged at six to eight storeys with 100,000 square feet of space, at a cost of roughly $40 million.
Though fundraising is still in its early stages and the project has to go through several phases of planning and approvals, the university anticipates construction will be underway by 2010.
The building is to incorporate flexible, innovative spaces that promote communication and collaboration, with an open lobby, smart classrooms and other innovative features.
"It's a strong and powerful message for us," said the university's dean of humanities Suzanne Crosta. "To have us there right at the entrance will signal the importance this university attaches to humanities and social sciences."
Nicknamed Red because of the red hair of his youth, Wilson, 67, graduated from the university 45 years ago with a degree in economics.
He went on from McMaster to serve in the Canadian diplomatic corps, later becoming Ontario's deputy minister of industry and tourism, and serving as a top executive with some of Canada's most prestigious corporations, including the Bank of Nova Scotia, Bell Canada Enterprises and Nortel Networks. Today, he is chairman of CAE Inc., a billion-dollar company that designs and manufactures flight simulators and military training systems.
"My overriding interest is in the development of the next generation of leaders," Wilson said. "To help achieve that goal, I believe, we need to support the liberal arts."
The university is in the early public stages of a three-year, $400-million fundraising campaign, whose broad priorities include the liberal arts -- an area that is traditionally tough sledding for university fundraisers.
Wilson told 300 guests at yesterday's announcement that the foundations of leadership -- in business and elsewhere -- are all to be found in a liberal arts education.
"It's really about a way of thinking, and the analytical and judgmental capacity associated with it," he said. "With those abilities come great rewards. An educational system that fails to nurture those abilities fails not just our students, it fails our society."
University president Peter George called Wilson one of the best advertisements for a McMaster education.
"If we do not give our liberal arts programs the attention and the resources not just to survive, but to thrive and to excel, we put nothing short of our culture and our society at risk," George said. "We lower our ceiling of achievement and we erode our otherwise limitless potential."
George, who is also a McMaster economics graduate, is making his own $100,000 gift to the liberal arts with his wife Rev. Allison Barrett.
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However they are in the process of renovating quarters so I can't see it shutting down any time soon.
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