Drury breaks ground on $27M Enterprise Center

Tim Cloyd: Campus event space is doubling in the building project.

Rita Baron: The Enterprise Center is intended to be a beacon on Drury's campus.

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Two decades after its last academic building project began, Drury University kicked off the construction phase of its Enterprise Center with an Oct. 29 groundbreaking and naming ceremony.

The O’Reilly family provided the lead donation for the newly dubbed C.H. “Chub” O’Reilly Enterprise Center, a $27 million, 56,700-square-foot building. Drury officials say the family’s naming-level gift amount is undisclosed for the project, which is entirely funded by private donations. Rita Baron, Drury Board of Trustees chair, said funds were raised from 180 donors.

The donation is from Rosalie O’Reilly Wooten, Larry O’Reilly, David O’Reilly, and Charlie and Mary Beth O’Reilly; Rosalie, Larry, David and Charlie are siblings, and all but Charlie graduated from Drury.

“We really feel good about putting his name on this,” Wooten said of her dad. “We have a lot of great respect and feel that we owe Drury a lot for what it has given our family.”

Chub O’Reilly earned an associate degree in business at Drury in 1965, Baron said, noting he took night classes while raising a family and running a business. He co-founded O’Reilly Automotive Inc. (Nasdaq: ORLY) in 1957 with his father, Charles F. O’Reilly, according to Springfield Business Journal archives.

“He really put a high value on gaining more knowledge in a very general sense to help run his business and for his personal satisfaction,” said Wooten, a 1964 Drury graduate and emeritus trustee.

The O’Reilly Enterprise Center is the first capital project under construction as part of the university’s 25-year master plan, said Baron. It will span three stories and house the Breech School of Business Administration and Department of Political Science and International Affairs. Other features include a 10,500-square-foot conference center and event space called the Center for Executive Education, a café, and the Robert and Mary Cox Compass Center, which brings academic advising, career planning and development and academic life coaching under one roof.

“As a designer myself, it is very gratifying to see how form and function will come together in such a cohesive and compelling way in this project,” said Baron, who is principal of architecture firm Baron Design & Associates LLC.

The project site is at the southeast corner of Drury Lane and Central Street. The last academic building project completed on campus was the $19 million Trustee Science Center, which opened in 2002 after two years of construction, according to Drury officials.

Taking care of business
Aside from the $27 million secured for the O’Reilly Enterprise Center construction, Drury President Tim Cloyd said the university raised $3.8 million in endowment gifts to support deferred maintenance of the building.

Both the cafe and Center for Executive Education will be for public use, Cloyd said.

“It’s a really big upgrade,” Cloyd said of the event space. “Our current ballroom space doesn’t seat but about 175. This will double that. It will also create divisible rooms and spaces where conferences could be held.”

Clifton Petty, dean of the Breech School of Business Administration, said the new building will incorporate interdisciplinary learning.

“Our curriculum and the way that we teach business is increasingly addressing a more complex world and more complex business environment,” he said. “The new Enterprise Center reflects that reality and what we’ve already been teaching toward. This just gives us a better platform for continuing to cross those areas.”

The current Breech School building, built in 1959, was designed for lecture spaces and more traditional classrooms, Petty said. The Enterprise Center will have more space for smaller breakout work areas with technology available for expanded in-person and virtual learning options. The long-term plan for the current Breech building remains undetermined, he said.

“This new building certainly has spaces where we can lecture, but it’s more conducive to the breakout groups and project work,” Petty said. “That’s exciting to us because we feel it will further develop those skills and help our students.”

Even with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Petty said undergraduate enrollment in the Breech School of Business Administration is around 500 in 2020 – equal to 2019’s enrollment. Drury’s Master of Business Administration graduate program has about 45 students, a nearly 5% increase from 2019, he said.

“There has been discussion of having a new Breech School of Business for a long time,” Cloyd said. “Had we done it sooner than this without the additional insights we gained from COVID, new technologies and that kind of thing, we might not have been as happy with it.”

Future investment
Cloyd said a new student center is likely the next major construction project to be tackled in the master plan, but no timeline is in place.

The plan also calls for construction of residential halls and other academic buildings, as well as ending car traffic on Drury Lane just north of Central Street, making the majority of the campus center a pedestrian promenade, according to past SBJ reporting.

Drury spokesperson Mike Brothers said general contractor Nabholz Corp. is scheduled to wrap up the Enterprise Center construction by fall 2022. Project designers are with New York City-based Cooper Robertson & Partners LLP and St. Louis-based Trivers Associates Inc.

Baron said the new center is intended to be a beacon on Drury’s campus and the region.

“It’s great that we’ve gotten to this point,” Baron said. “It feels really good and gives me energy to continue and make sure we finish everything going forward with the master plan.”