Harvard Business School

Addressing the Harvard Club of Connecticut at the New Haven House, President Eliot explained that a two-year graduate school of business fit into his vision of a Harvard that would “serve to a high degree all the learned and scientific professions.”

Why? “The future in our country is for those professions, gentlemen. They are to be the leaders of the people, the controllers of our industries, the directors of our finances and our commerce, the managers of the great public services. The professional men are to have a great future in our country. So all the American universities that look forward desire to serve all the professions, divinity, law and medicine, but also the new ones: engineering in its various specialties, architecture, landscape architecture, forestry, and business administration.”

Then Eliot made the first public announcement of what would become the Harvard Business School: “Our newest effort in Cambridge is to establish a graduate school of business administration, a graduate school requiring for admission a preliminary degree,—that is, open only to persons that hold the A.B. or the S.B.” This was new: while other business schools (including Wharton and Dartmouth’s Tuck) had begun offering Master’s degrees, they did not require a college degree for admission.

Eliot pointed out that of the Harvard College graduating class of 1907, more than half went directly into business: “The explanation of that new phenomenon is that business in its upper walks has become a highly intellectual calling, requiring knowledge of languages, economics, industrial organization, and commercial law, and wide reading concerning the resources and habits of different nations. In all these directions we propose to give professional graduate instruction.”