KEY POINTS:
At the edge of John Hood Plaza at the new Business School, the groundsman is preparing to cut the grass. Professor Barry Spicer points out reflections in the curved glass wall - the distorted gothic spires of the university clocktower on Princess Street and, to the right, the top of the Vero Centre and other monuments to the office in the Shortland St skyline.
Spicer, dean of Auckland University's faculty of Business and Economics since 1996, is pleased. "Now the school sees itself," he says. Indeed it does - both in the mirror glass and in the $220 million edifice on the hillside beside Grafton Rd. Before this, the faculty's seven departments were dotted around the campus.
But while Spicer sees town and gown connections in the reflections and in the view to the port below - the school's new place in the old university, the city offices where future graduates will work, and the shipping supply chain for our international trade - others see an expensive building strutting its stuff.
The building cuts and thrusts. Its facade, in bands of shiny glass and aluminium, curves as a bay out to jutting headlands. Glass blades sweep past the building's ends, slicing the air. It means business.
To understand how such a beast arrived at the university, it's necessary to return to the plaza named after former vice-chancellor John Hood - now at the University of Oxford, having his ideas for reform voted down by outraged dons.
Hood was a champion of the knowledge economy, a vision to lift New Zealand's woeful OECD economic rankings. In 2001 the University and the Government co-hosted Catching the Knowledge Wave. From this talkfest about economic transformation through smart thinking, the idea of a new business school sprang.
Spicer and Hood wrote the initial plan, Agenda for Action, which evolved into Building a World Class Business School - a proposal to ask the Government for $25 million to match funds raised by the private sector.
The Government agreed and fundraising kicked into high gear, with business eventually stumping up $46 million for the project - including $7.5 million from multimillionaire Owen Glenn, who the building is now named after. It needed all the money it could get. From an original budget of $80 million, the building cost ballooned to $220 million.
What the university gets for its money is more than a building. This is a structure for transforming knowledge into wealth.
"Our fundamental objective is to make this school relevant and important to wealth creation and value creation for its graduates," says Spicer.
But to get there required university culture to change. Geoff Whitcher, commercial director of university developments, explains: "Universities have been trained basically to do two things - research and teach. A lot of people wanted to keep a distance from business, even to the extreme that business represents the forces of darkness and evil."
It was time for the "third stream" - universities run more like businesses and in partnership with business to develop money-making spin-off companies. Academia needed to wake up and take responsibility for the dissemination of its research into the community where it could do good as quickly as possible.
Spicer surveys the ASB Atrium - a unifying vertical void that the building's six floors peer into and which opens through a seven-storey glass wall to a view of the Stanley St tennis courts and the domain. Spicer brought the atrium idea back from Boston after looking for the best in design from business schools around the world. "Spaces are about people, people are about spaces," he says. These spaces are also about naming and branding. The Ernst and Young Seminar Room, the Fisher and Paykel Appliances Auditorium (nicknamed "the fridge" because of air-conditioning teething problems), the Edith Winstone Blackwell Case Room, the Sir John Logan Campbell Board Room. By now you wouldn't be surprised to find the Ubix Urinal.
At the foot of the grand atrium stair is the entrance to the teaching floor - a large cave-like space where students gather before lectures, with clusters of tables and computers to one side for collaborative teaching.
Here the walls celebrate business - a business laureate hall of fame and colourful, backlit panels telling New Zealand's business history. The storyboard begins with whaling - "the first global
industry". Other panels trace entrepreneurial spirit and success - the Anchor trademark, pinus radiata, Farmers Trading Company, business school builder Fletcher Construction, kiwifruit, Sir Edmund Hillary, Fisher and Paykel, AJ Hackett, manuka honey and of course the Land of the Rings - "the best supporting country in a motion picture".
The floor accommodates 2400 seats in several lecture theatres that will be used by other university faculties bringing an influx of students across Symonds St. In full use, on high rotate, Spicer estimates up to 16,000 bodies a day may pass through the lecture hall doors.
Business is now centre-stage in campus. "The business school is the only faculty in a university that can touch and involve itself with all the other faculties," says Spicer.
He's talking about reaching out to other schools such as medicine and engineering to transform their knowledge into wealth via programmes aimed at commercialising innovative ideas.
These include Spark, the university's entrepreneurship competition; Chiasma, a biotechnology network and business planning competition; the Icehouse business incubator, specific degrees - such as the Master of BioScience Enterprise aimed at producing "business savvy" bio-technologists; and Excelerator, the school's leadership programme.
But the bulk of the business school's teaching is of the more mundane kind: the bachelors of commerce (BCom), property (BProp) and business and information management (BBim) - courses that some refer to as fodder for the financial professions.
Spicer agrees that many doing such courses end up as spokes in the wheels of business, but he says the school changes the way many of them think.
"Rather than simply thinking, 'I'm going to come to university and I'm going to go out there and get a job in an accounting firm or a property company', they are actually thinking to themselves, 'I could create my own business or contribute in an entrepreneurial way to some other business'."
According to the latest Tertiary Education Commission's Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) rankings, business education doesn't do very well. Unlike long-established disciplines with well-developed research cultures, most business courses get a below average quality score. Across all disciplines in New Zealand tertiary institutions, the average score is 2.96.
Accounting and finance rates a lowly 2.15 and management, human resources, industrial relations, international business and other business gets just 2.58. Marketing and tourism gets 2.84. Only economics scores above average at 3.76 which puts it ahead of English language and literature (3.54) and on a par with engineering and technology.
But the overall low scores in much of what's taught at the business school suggest it's an academic field that's not particularly deep. The notion finds expression in some of the school's programmes. For the Spark competition prospective competitors can attend a 12-week course - Vision to Business - teaching the basics of business.
When it comes to comparing business schools around the country, Auckland University's doesn't get the top score. In accounting and finance that honour goes to the University of Waikato (3.5) followed by Auckland University of Technology (3.4) and the University of Auckland (3.3).
At 4.4 Waikato also wins convincingly in management, human resources, international business, industrial relations and other business. At 3.5 Auckland comes fourth behind Victoria (3.9) and Otago (3.8) Universities.
In economics, Auckland (5.0) is ahead of Waikato (4.6) but behind Otago (5.3). Auckland also leads in marketing with a 5.
The PBRF system uses a panel of experts to judge academics on their research and reputation, awarding them grades A through to C or R which means research inactive. While the Auckland University's business school claims the largest number of A and B scholars, its overall scores get dragged down by a significant number of Rs.
"We have a number of people who are principally teachers who are not doing research - typically teaching at the lower levels of the undergraduate programme. Property, for example, will have a lot of professionals teaching," says Spicer. "PBRF is in some ways a sideshow to what we're trying to do here, which is being a leader in enterprise development and wealth creation."
Professor Mike Pratt, dean of the Waikato Management School, disagrees. "The difference is all our people are researchers whereas Auckland has quite a long tail. We believe passionately in the importance of research-led, practice-relevant education."
Pratt is on the same page as Spicer in promoting the latest business buzzwords - enterprise, invention and innovation, wealth and value creation. But he's less convinced about knowledge economy ideals.
"That's a 90s idea, a bit of an old paradigm. The reality is our economy remains totally dependent on our primary sector, our manufacturing sector and our tourism."
He says "sustainable business" is a much more relevant concept for today's market. Pratt argues the way knowledge economy ideas were taken up here have given us a wrong steer; that our narrow focus on just three sectors - creative, biotech and information technology and communications - was never going to be enough.
"What's missing is that we've actually got to infuse enterprise, invention and innovation into everything - across primary industry, manufacturing and tourism."
Meanwhile, Spicer looks out to the container terminal below. "The port is a huge knowledge organisation. We need to find virtuous circles and opening doors that allow us to put interns into the port, have the port come talk to our people and be engaged with us in both research and teaching." It's an example of the "entrepreneurial ecosystem" necessary to create economic transformation.
Next week, the school has its official opening. Spicer, who steps down as dean when a new appointment is made later this year, will take satisfaction in his 10-year contribution to this vision.
Just how the school's ecosystem expands remains to be seen. But what is clear is that this university has embraced business with $220 million open arms.
