WSU board vote paves way for new Ilitch business school

The largest donation in the history of Wayne State University started with a conversation a year ago between the school's president and the scion of one of Detroit's business empires.

Christopher Ilitch, president and CEO of the umbrella company over the Little Caesars pizza chain and the professional sports teams Detroit Tigers and Red Wings, wanted to brief Wayne State University President M. Roy Wilson on a major development. The company was planning to tie the city's downtown and Midtown neighborhoods together through a massive entertainment district featuring a new hockey arena. The university's main campus sits in Midtown.

During the conversation, Wilson said he listened and brought up his own action item: building a new $50-million business school in the city's downtown. "It wasn't a pitch or anything," Wilson said in an interview. "I noticed the look on his face, but he didn't say much."

But Christopher Ilitch recalled Friday that he was so captivated by Wilson's idea that he pitched it immediately that night to his parents, Mike and Marian Ilitch, the company's founders.

"It took all of about 20 minutes for them to say we want to build that business school," Ilitch said in an interview. "My parents are constantly looking for ways to make the community a better place."

The WSU Board of Governors voted Friday to accept the donation and to name the school the Mike Ilitch School of Business in honor of its largest benefactor.

One member, University of Michigan law professor Dana Thompson, abstained, saying she needed more information about the project but did not receive it before the vote.

The school is planned for land in the shadow of the new arena at the southwest corner of Temple and Woodward.

The donation by the Ilitches — $35 million to build the school plus a $5-million endowment — will help provide the latest piece in a massive development puzzle known as arena district or "District Detroit." north of downtown. It has been billed as one of the city’s boldest and most significant developments since the Renaissance Center of the 1970s. The sweeping investment could create as many as 2,000 new residential units and surrounding neighborhood stores linked by the M-1 light rail line under construction.

School officials describe the gift as the largest in the history of the university founded under its current name in 1934. The contribution is also among the top 10 in amount ever given to a public university's business school, officials said.

Mike Ilitch, whose family company is building a new Detroit Red Wings arena adjacent to the proposed business school site, said at a news conference after the board's votes on the donation and renaming that he was thrilled by the reception to his gift.

"It's just fired me up that I want to get out there and do some more stuff," Ilitch said. To which, Wilson responded: "I feel like I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't say that we would love to give you the opportunity."

In an interview afterward, he said, "We love the city so much, to see my name on the building, I feel like my life is starting all over again."

Ilitch said that he has begun to think about his legacy but added that he wanted to spend more time thinking before he contemplates his next investment. "It's probably the biggest deal of my life," he said of the Wayne State donation.

Sitting by his side, his wife, Marian Ilitch, said that she has longed for the Detroit of the couple's youth, and now, less than a year out of the nation's large municipal bankruptcy, she sees it in the city's near future.

"I just wanted to see the city come back in the worst way," she said. "It was a labor of love," adding, "I had no idea it would take this long."

The building marketed as "Detroit's business school" will sit on property owned by the family and leased by the university for up to 95 years at $1 per year, officials said. It would be south of the university’s main Midtown campus.

It was unclear how quickly construction for the replacement building would begin — as soon as possible, university officials said — but the school is expected to be completed by 2018.

Part of the reason for the move from the Midtown campus is to bring graduate business students closer to the growing professional community in downtown. Those students might be better able to pursue a degree part-time if classrooms were closer to their downtown workplaces.

Today, the business school has more than 31,000 alumni, many of whom are executives for brands such as Carhartt, Aetna, Cadillac and Lear, according to the university. The school, with an estimated 3,000 students, staff and faculty members, will be one part of a larger redevelopment effort by the Ilitches and others in the northern greater downtown area.

Last year, Christopher Ilitch announced a $650-million redevelopment plan for a new Wings arena and larger entertainment district covering a mostly vacant stretch on the northern edge of downtown.

The arena is on schedule to be finished in the fall of 2017, company officials said earlier this month.

Starting with one pizza shop in 1959, Mike and Marian Ilitch built their Little Caesars pizza business into one of the nation’s biggest, then branched out into sports and entertainment. Since the 1980s, the Ilitch family has won praise in Detroit for their revival of the Fox Theatre, the building of Comerica Park and Hockeytown Café and their ownership of the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Red Wings.

But the family has drawn controversy and criticism, too. They have banked large expanses of land near their Fox Theatre and let it sit undeveloped for years. Their projects like the arena have benefited from generous amounts of public funds as subsidies. And historic preservationists have slammed the family for their neglect or demolition of some of their properties.

Now the Ilitches say they are focused on more charitable giving to benefit the city and its residents. Contributions from the Ilitches are now estimated at nearly $75 million to Detroit-based nonprofits in the last 10 years, including the business school donation, according to the family.

The Ilitches’ gift is the most visible achievement of Wayne State’s ongoing $750-million fund-raising campaign. The university intends to seek additional support from university alumni and friends to complete the new facility, which is estimated to cost $50 million in total. In 2014, the Ilitches donated $8.5 million to the Wayne State University surgery department.

"They have been incredible role models. They have been incredible mentors to me," Christopher Ilitch said of his parents in an interview. "I think there is no more meaningful way that they can help this community for generations to come than by building the Mike Ilitch School of Business to help the future leaders of our community be educated and trained."

Wilson, Wayne State's president, said he was a little skeptical at the time of the proposal from the Ilitch family but ended up being pleasantly surprised with the outcome. "I thought there might be a catch," he said. "But there wasn't."

Contact Matthew Dolan: 313-223-4743 or msdolan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @matthewsdolan. Free Press Staff Writer John Gallagher contributed to this report.