Harvard Business School

In September 1905, Harvard Government Professor A. Lawrence Lowell wrote a letter to Frank W. Taussig, a powerhouse in the Economics department. Lowell and Taussig were not only colleagues, but also social acquaintances, with neighboring summer houses in Cotuit on the south shore of Cape Cod. Lowell’s note began with a reference to the train ride to Boston that they occasionally took together:

“I send you this to beguile your way up on the train. An objection to your plan of a course at Harvard to fit [men] for the civil service that appeals to me forcibly is the same one which was raised to a similar plan years ago, and that is that the course is to fit for a career that does not yet fully exist, and hence may prove a will-o’-the-wisp for a student who follows it.

“The problem in regard to the commercial course,” Lowell continued, “is a very different one. The question there, I take it, is whether the course we offer is the best training for general business, or whether a general training in academic studies is better. General business is a pretty vague thing, for which it is probably impossible to give anything like a professional training. When the same question was before the [Massachusetts] Institute of Technology some years ago (and I happened to be on the committee) I suggested the wisdom of carving out of business some profession, such as the existing professions have been carved out of the general occupations of men. It seemed to me that it might be possible to treat railroads as the subject of a special profession, and train men specially for the work, giving them a sufficient general knowledge of Engineering and Political Economy, with a more detailed knowledge of Transportation. The plan found no favor, and very likely did not deserve any.”

Lowell’s letter did not deter Taussig, or steer him toward commercial training. Taussig and two colleagues prepared a plan for a new school that would draw upon existing or planned courses in the Departments of History, Law, Government, and Economics. When Taussig shared the plan with Lowell, Lowell (in January 1907) criticized it sharply: “The diplomatic service is not a career. The colonial service, also, does not exist, and there is no great reason for supposing that it will.

“In the business side of the plan I take a great deal more interest. Although, as I think I told you, I do not believe much in the value of any special training for general business, I should very much like to see training for particular branches of business which could be developed into professions. In that direction I should like to see Harvard a pioneer; and by the way, I have very little sympathy with the argument that we hear too often, that we ought to have a school of such and such at Harvard, because someone else has it. On the contrary, I think that we had better do things that nobody does; but that we had better do them under the conditions that will be most likely to ensure success.

“Now, a school for any branch of business is likely to be a pretty large one if successful. Therefore, if it is worthwhile to try the experiment at all, it is worthwhile to try it under the best conditions for permanent success; and the more I think of it, the more I am convinced that to do that we must have, not a department of the Graduate School [of Arts and Sciences] or the College, but a separate professional school, with a separate faculty, whose object would be to train men for their career, as the Law and Medical schools do. I think we could learn a great deal from the most successful of our professional schools; that is, the Law School. Its success is, I think, due very largely to the fact that it takes men without any previous requirements, save a liberal education in any field, and then teaches them law; not jurisprudence; and it was been coming across my mind that if we are to have a successful school of business, we must do the same thing. We must take men without regard to what they have studied in college, and we must teach them business, not political economy.”

The Law School, continued Lowell, had “jealously kept itself free from contact with academic students and professors. Could we create a school which could teach certain branches of business—let us say railroading and banking—on such a basis? If we could, I think we might make a great success, and mark an era for education in business.”