The Bloch School, UMKC

The Henry W. Bloch School of Management, commonly known as the Bloch School, can trace its origins to the establishment of the University of Kansas City School of Business and Public Administration in 1953. Now part of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the school was renamed in honor of H&R Block founder Henry Bloch, an advocate and supporter of the university and the business school for decades. The school's classrooms and offices are located within two buildings, Bloch Heritage Hall and Bloch Executive Hall, and the school is the second largest unit at the university. Home to the Entrepreneur Hall of Fame, the buildings are also the home of programs in business administration, accounting, entrepreneurship, real estate, and public administration.

In 1953, new president Earl McGrath changed the focus of the University of Kansas City towards an urban serving university. To that end, he founded the School of Business and Public Administration in the fall of 1953. The school operated in scattered locations around campus until the university was able to purchase the former mansion of Edwin and Martha Shields at 5110 Cherry St. in 1965. The home had been used previously by the Barstow School for Girls and for the past three years by St. Paul's Methodist Seminary as a classroom facility. St. Paul's had renamed it Oxford Hall, a name that UMKC retained. While Oxford Hall allowed for the school's dean and much of its faculty to locate in one facility, classes were taught in scattered locations around campus. As the school's popularity increased in the late 1970's and enrollment increased to over a thousand students, a movement began in the early 1980s to raise funds to expand Oxford Hall to create the classrooms and offices necessary to consolidate operations into one facility.

At this time, the dean of the school, Eleanor Brantley Schwartz, had reached out to the CEOs of area companies with an invitation to participate in the creation of the curriculum. It was an opportunity for these CEOs to tell the school what type of education they wanted graduates and potential new hires to have. One of the people who participated in this program was H&R Block founder Henry Bloch, whose ties to the university date back to 1947 when he was a university student for a year. His older brother Leon was a graduate of the university's School of Law. Henry Bloch had long used the university's extension education program to help train tax preparers for his company. Moreover, Bloch had been a member of various university booster organizations, including the University Associates and the UKC Trustees. In 1978, Henry Bloch and his family gifted money to create the Leon Bloch Law Library in the UMKC School of Law's new building at 52nd and Cherry.

When the request came to give his input into the School of Business and Public Administration's curriculum, he responded with enthusiasm. Entrepreneurship had long been a topic dear to his heart. However, it was not a discipline taught in business schools at that time. He suggested the creation of a program to teach entrepreneurship and encourage business students to start new ventures. This was the genesis of the Bloch School's current program. In 1985, as the school sought public and private funding for the expansion of Oxford Hall, Mr. Bloch donated $1 Million to the effort. In gratitude for all he had done, UMKC renamed the school in Mr. Bloch's honor at this time. Over the years, Bloch made repeated gifts of endowments and scholarships to the Bloch School, and he was generous with his time in attending events and making himself accessible to students, including attending graduation, to show his support.

In 2011, the Bloch family announced a $32 million gift towards the creation of the Bloch Executive Hall for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, a 68,000-square-foot building that opened in 2013 to support the school's entrepreneurship and management programs and allow it to increase its enrollment. The building includes innovative classrooms and labs that incorporate the ideas of Mr. Bloch, who had visited business education facilities around the country and the world.

Final Beam for Executive Hall, UMKC Today. April 15th, 2014. Accessed September 14th, 2024. www.umkc.edu/news/feature.asp?id=406.

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