The Atkinson Graduate School of Management (AGSM) has moved to Kaneko this semester, its classrooms now located where the Tokyo International University of America (TIUA) used to hold classes. AGSM used to occupy the Annex, shared with the Exercise and Health Sciences program, as well as the Mudd Building. However, AGSM desired its programs to be under the same roof, which prompted the transition to Kaneko.
This official transition occurred at the beginning of the spring semester of 2025 and, while in the middle of the academic year, presented an important, fleeting opportunity for AGSM, moving quickly for the lease to the TIUA classrooms. For many, the benefit of the school finally being unified outweighed the negative setback of the mid-year move.
According to Anne Gallagher, the associate vice president for budget and facilities, planning for the relocation project began during the spring semester of 2024. “You have to be quite efficient when planning,” she said. Gallagher worked with facilities and former Dean of AGSM Örn Bodvarsson to budget the project throughout the year. Kaneko seemed like a good fit, with AGSM students “all under one roof,” Gallagher emphasized. “I would characterize the move as going quite smoothly.”
While AGSM is credited with being the #1 business school in Oregon and second in the Pacific Northwest, students at AGSM have felt the impact of being housed exclusively in the Mudd Building, to splitting between the Annex and Mudd, and now to their forever home of the Kaneko classrooms, all in the past couple of years. “We kind of got kicked around twice,” MBA student Saida Seelig (’26) explained. They added, “It doesn’t feel like we’ve settled in yet, as a cohort.”
Ashley Nixon, who is an associate dean of academic affairs at AGSM, said that the “move is ongoing.” Facilities is still working to adjust the temperature throughout the building, along with working to outfit the building with charging towers in classrooms. As Seelig observed, students are also still adjusting, considering the move was recent. A new building means new routines for students, such as finding new places to park and routes to find classes.
Seelig claimed that they felt “the project was very rushed” due to AGSM students not being notified of this move until the summer before the fall semester of 2024. “The classrooms are still very much bare bones,” Seelig said. This may improve as professors make the space their own. Seelig also noted, “I’m taking four classes, and three of them are in the same room.”
The new AGSM school may take some time to feel like home, but the move has not seemed to inhibit learning in any sense. Nixon added that AGSM being under one roof with faculty and students “has the benefit of helping strengthen our community.”
Nixon said that “we [AGSM] have a multiple year lease with TIU,” which means the AGSM has no plan of moving in the near future. Gallagher also credited her team for working relentlessly on the project, claiming, “Everyone pitched in and did a great job of getting things settled in.” This move gives AGSM the chance to focus on community building in the shared space of Kaneko, with offices and classrooms situated close together.
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