About the Qubein Arena and Conference Center

The conference center can hold as many as 1,500 people, be subdivided into nearly a dozen breakout rooms and become a place that can captivate any audience with an audiovisual system that includes 54 speakers and a screen that’s 43 feet wide and as tall as a two-story home. But the center is more than just a beautiful room with a wall of windows. It’s a place of connection for so many. Students will find an invaluable mentor when they conduct research with a faculty member and present their findings during a symposium inside the conference center. They’ll intern in the building, gain work experience in their major and attend a career fair where they’ll impress recruiters, land a job and see a dream become real. Well-known speakers will come. Global leaders, too. Paired with the arena, the conference center will bring the world to HPU and the city of High Point and offer limitless possibilities that will help the community at large grow.

When students see the arena, they talk about the big city and the NBA. No wonder. The wood panels in the ceiling remind many of what you’ll find at Madison Square Garden, the scoreboard is the second largest in North Carolina and the architects who designed the arena created the home court for the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder. The HPU Panthers, both the men’s and women’s team, will play on the Tubby and Donna Smith Court. They’re two alumni who met on campus decades ago. They married, raised four children and Tubby went on to a storied NCAA career that included winning the 1998 national championship with Kentucky. Now, he’s back coaching his alma mater on the court that bears his name.

Walk into the hotel and the first thing seen is the grand piano. It sits at the base of a grand marble staircase that stretches like a curved letter X beneath a crystal chandelier and a fine-dining restaurant on the second floor. But the boutique hotel offers more than simply beauty and panache. It really is one big classroom. Students in hospitality management, HPU’s newest major, will learn firsthand what it takes to run a hotel. And they will do just that in the Jana and Ken Kahn Hotel with the help of HPU professors and Sheri Decker, the hotel’s general manager, a veteran of the hospitality industry with nearly 40 years of experience. The Kahn Hotel will become a learning lab integrated into the curriculum of the Nido R. Qubein School of Communication. This academic configuration will set HPU apart and give hospitality management majors vital experience to succeed in their career.