Harvard Business School history

Established in 1908, the school became the first postgraduate school of business to require an undergraduate degree for admission. The first dean was Edwin F. Gay, and the new graduate program lasted for two years, leading to the master of business administration, or MBA, degree. The original faculty numbered 15, with 33 regular students and 47 special students. According to an original school announcement, “the school does not pretend to graduate men who will begin at the top or high up in their several lines of business. It does aim to teach them how to work and how to apply powers of observation, analysis, and invention to practical business problems.”

Among the first faculty members were Herbert Knox Smith, commissioner of corporations, James Jackson, ex-chairman of the Massachusetts Railroad Commission, and Frederick W. TAYLOR, the efficiency engineer. In 1912, the school used its first “case study,” adopting an idea used widely in law whereby a particular case is studied both on its own merits and in the context of similar cases that have gone before. In 1924, it adopted case studies as its primary educational teaching technique. In the same year, George F. BAKER donated $5 million, and the school opened its own campus in Boston on the Charles River. Within a few years, it had more than 750 full-time students living on campus. The Harvard Business Review, a leading management journal, was begun in 1922.

In 1963, the school admitted women to the MBA program for the first time. The school expanded its offerings to both MBA and doctoral students over the years, and its publishing arm, the Harvard Business School Press, became a diversified publisher of management books after its inception in 1993. The institution continually ranks among the top graduate business schools in the country and is a leader in postgraduate management education. One of its graduates, George W. Bush, became the first MBA to be elected president.

See also WHARTON SCHOOL.

Further reading

• Copeland, Melvin Thomas. And Mark an Era: The Story of the Harvard Business School. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. 
• Cruickshank, Jeffrey L. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School, 1908–1945. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1987.