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Hazards to academic precedent
Son of a Rockland, Massachusetts dentist, Wallace Brett Donham finished Harvard College in three years, mainly to save money. His energy and talents greatly impressed Department of Government Professor A. Lawrence Lowell, who made Donham an interest-free loan to attend Harvard Law School.
Donham began his legal career in the legal department of Boston’s Old Colony Trust Company. He gradually drifted into corporate reorganizations, in 1909 becoming a vice president at the bank. Over the next decade, Donham became increasingly involved in consolidations in the electric street railway industry, which culminated in the 1917 bankruptcy of the Bay State Street Railway Company: a sprawling concern with more than 1,000 miles of track in Eastern Massachusetts. Donham served as the court-appointed receiver to the BSSRC, adroitly balancing the competing needs of shareholders and workers, and earning the admiration of both.
In 1919, A. Lawrence Lowell — now president of Harvard — asked Donham to succeed Edwin F. Gay as the dean of HBS. Donham accepted eagerly, in part because he saw the post as a way for him to further qualify himself as an authority in labor relations.
In a 1924 letter to a Boston banker, Dartmouth’s President Ernest Hopkins confessed that he was “intrigued by the fact that Harvard University should be willing to accept the hazards to academic precedent and scholastic conventions of introducing into one of their schools a man as direct in his thinking and as forceful in his personality as Donham is.”
