Harvard Business School

If the School agreed to offer specialized courses, how far would specialization go? Where would the faculty draw the line?

“I suppose,” as Chicago-based publisher and HBS supporter Arch Shaw wrote to Dean Edwin Gay in 1914, “in a hundred years from now when the work of the School is more specialized, we will have a professor of egg marketing, cabbage marketing, etc.”

In fact, only banking and transportation—the two fields that had the great benefit of endowed professorships—survived much beyond World War I.