Harvard Business School

In the summer of 1943, looking forward to the postwar era, Professor Sumner H. Slichter wrote an impassioned plea to the Educational Policy Committee’s “Subcommittee on Objectives.” That memo read, in part:

“Something should happen to men who come to the Business School which could not happen to them anywhere else in the world, and which will leave its mark on them for the rest of their lives — even though the distinctive qualities that they get from two years at the Business School may not manifest themselves (and probably should not) for ten or twenty years after their graduation.”

To an outsider, such a call to action might have sounded inarticulate; but Slichter was sounding an evocative chord for his fellow profesors.

“The School should also aim,” he continued, “much more than in the past, to be a center of research and ideas — the sponsor and the supporter of the most significant research in the world on the subject of administration and on the problems of business, and the originator of the most significant appraisals of the new responsibilities of business and the kind of job that business is doing. This last means that the School should be a leader both in scientific investigations and in ethical thinking about business.”