In attendance will be University President Lawrence Biondi, SJ; John Cook, an Atlanta businessman who donated $5.5 million for the project; and Dr. Neil Seitz, dean of the School of Business and Administration.

The business school expansion project includes a 60,000-square-foot building at Spring and Lindell, to be built adjacent to the present business school on what is now the Creighton parking lot. The new building, to be named John and Lucy Cook Hall, will be a three-story, three-sided structure that will connect to the west side of Davis-Shaughnessy Hall.

In November the University announced that Cook had donated $5 million for the expansion of the school's facilities to accommodate development of a full-time master's of business administration program. Cook is a 1964 graduate of the business school. He later donated an additional $500,000.

Cook is chairman and chief executive officer of The Profit Recovery Group International in Atlanta.

"This expansion, thanks to the generosity of Mr. Cook, will help us move our programs to an even higher level of excellence," Seitz said.

The new facility will include a cafe, a 360-seat auditorium, state-of-the-art classrooms, meeting rooms for students to study together and work on team projects, and space for student services such as registration and advising. The building also will house the Institute for International Business, Jefferson Smurfit Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Emerson Electric Center for the Study of Business Ethics and the Mercantile Bancorporation Women's Leadership Program. In addition, the building will have about 8,000 square feet of unfinished lower-level space to allow for future expansion.

There are 1,285 undergraduates and 480 graduate students enrolled in Saint Louis University's School of Business and Administration. The school has been ranked for several years as the best undergraduate business school among the Jesuit colleges and universities by the Gourman Report. The school's entrepreneurial program recently ranked fifth in the country in a survey by Success magazine.

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