Harvard Business School

“This is a school of business administration,” Dean Wallace B. Donham wrote in a confidential memo to his faculty in October 1934. “It should remain that, and nothing more.”

But Donham then went on to propose a significantly expanded mandate for HBS—and a broader definition of “administration.” The government was hiring large numbers of bright young people into its mushrooming network of agencies. “The time has come,” Donham wrote, “when the country cannot carry on its programs unless it gives competent men careers. Careers in public service must develop.”

Donham won approval for a sequence of seven courses—either new or reoriented—with a focus on public policy. The dean then began selling his plan vigorously: a campaign that included a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which Donham claimed that the School’s transformation into a school of public and private business was necessary “if we are to avoid social revolution.”

But Donham’s plan was “not well received on the Cambridge side of the Charles River,” as Harvard President James Conant later recalled in his autobiography. And very soon, it suffered a fatal blow: Lucius M. Littauer, a member of the Harvard College Class of 1878 and a successful glove manufacturer and Congressman from New York State, gave Harvard $2 million to build and endow a School of Public Administration in 1935.

For the rest of the decade, as the Littauer School became a center of Keynesian economic thinking, HBS regrouped, and refocused on a more literal definition of “business.”