Our Name
Read more about Ted Bauer's Lasting Legacy.
How did a regional, urban business school whose charter dedicated it to serving the urban working professional attract the affection and financial support of a Harvard businessman listed in the 2001 issue of Forbes Four Hundred Richest Americans?
A matchmaker was involved. After graduating from Harvard and serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Ted Bauer worked as a securities analyst on Wall Street and at night attended business school at New York University. In his fifties, he co-founded AIM Investments in Houston. When the company was 20 years old, Mike Cemo, a University of Houston graduate and creator of AIM's national sales powerhouse, discovered that the company had 400 employees from his alma mater. He suggested to UH and Ted Bauer that they should talk. Obviously, there was a synergy between the school and AIM that was contributing heavily to the company's success.
On July 12, 2000, a sixty-year-old business school, formerly known as the College of Business Administration at the University of Houston, received the largest up-front award to any single college in the history of the university. Eighty-one year-old Ted Bauer endowed the college with a gift of $40 million. The business school took his name, becoming the C. T. Bauer College of Business. The Bauer College has flowered into a true alma mater - "nourishing mother" - energizing the university with new vigor, depth and richness implied in the words.
The endowment is heavily weighted into attracting and retaining world class faculty, developing innovative curriculum and special programs. The revised undergraduate curriculum debuted in Fall 2004. By 2005, the faculty was double its 2000 size. Five graduate certificate programs were launched.
Melcher Hall, home of the Bauer College and the most heavily trafficked building at the University, received a complete renovation giving it a downtown corporate ambience. The lobby's neon ticker rotates current prices overhead while multiple flat-screen TVs on the media wall air CNN 24/7. The lobby is part of the AIM Center for Investment Management, deemed one of the best designed business school classrooms in the U.S. by American School and University Magazine. The center includes the ticker, video wall, 16-station trading laboratory, 36-seat classroom, and 20-seat executive conference room.
Ted Bauer's gift touched thousands of lives and inspired unprecedented support from corporations, alumni, and individuals, who are, in some cases, not Bauer graduates. In 2004, Compass Bank created the Charles E. McMahen Endowed Chair in Accountancy & Taxation. In 2005, Michael Cemo and Lanny Sachnowitz created Professorships in Marketing. Ted Bauer's commitment continues to power our quest for excellence as we create an environment from which tomorrow's business leaders are emerging.