A simulated hotel front desk at Indiana University of Pennsylvania now includes a donor's name

Donor names end up on all sorts of college and university real estate, from imposing classroom buildings, to lecture halls, to flower gardens and even benches.

Indiana University of Pennsylvania has its share of those sorts of spots.

It also has this: A hotel front desk simulation lab that — as of Friday — is officially named for a donor, too.

The Statler Foundation hotel front desk at IUP isn’t something one expects to encounter inside a classroom building — in this case, Eberly Hall, home of IUP’s business school.

But it’s helping undergraduates who are studying hospitality gain experience in the good, the bad and the ugly of customer relations.

The Statler Foundation donated $125,000 in 2022 to construct the simulation lab for IUP’s Hotel, Restaurant, Tourism, and Event Management program.

“Students work in a series of role playing situations, being checked in, checked out — those difficult scenarios, customer problems,” said Stephen Shiring, assistant chair of IUP’s Department of Management and director of the Hotel, Restaurant, Tourism, and Event Management program. “It looks exactly like a hotel lobby.”

A dedication ceremony Friday officially marked the naming, after IUP’s Council of Trustees approved the proposal Thursday evening.

The Statler Foundation was created from the estate of hotelier Ellsworth M. Statler after his death in 1928, according to the foundation’s website. Its purpose is to advance education and betterment of the hotel industry.

Statler grew up largely in poverty in Somerset County and in Bridgeport, Ohio, according to the foundation’s website. He had to work during most of his childhood he had to work, and at age 13, he landed a job as a bellboy in a hotel in Wheeling, W.Va.

He never went to IUP or to college, Shiring said, but Statler advanced to hotel clerk and studied hotel management and bookkeeping.

He became a self-made millionaire, establishing what was the largest premier hotel chain of his day, according to the foundation’s website.

The Statler chain stretched from hotels in New York to St. Louis to Buffalo and Pittsburgh’s William Penn Hotel.

In 1954, Conrad Hilton, owner of the Hilton Hotel chain, paid $111 million for the Statler assets in what was the biggest commercial real estate purchase at the time, according to the foundation.

The gift toward the hotel front desk simulation lab is on top of the Foundation’s scholarship support for students in the IUP program.

There are about 100 hospitality proram majors annually, and IUP says it is one of the largest undergraduate programs in the state.