Harvard Business School

The School’s first dean, Edwin F. Gay, was hired by Harvard President Charles Eliot in 1901 as a member of the Department of Economics. Eight years later, after a rapid rise through the ranks of his department, he was tapped by Eliot to help shape and lead the new Business School.

Like Eliot, Gay was the product of a distinguished old Massachusetts family. But that’s where the similarities stopped. Gay had been born in Detroit and raised in Au Sable, Wisconsin, where his father was part owner of a sawmill. Aaron Gay’ success in the lumber business enabled him to send his children, including Edwin, to Europe for their early education. Edwin returned to the U.S. to attend high school, and then enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he settled upon history as his major field of interest.

Following his graduation in 1890, he spent thirteen years in Germany and England pursuing a doctorate in European economic history. During that time, his thinking changed dramatically. As a college student, he had lamented the impact of the Industrial Revolution, arguing that men should “return to the spirit of such workers as old Nuremberg sent forth, artist workmen with honest pride in their work, whether they tanned hides or carved statues.” But eventually he developed a dynamic vision of economic history — one in which periods dominated by social controls alternated with periods dominated by the actions of aggressive individuals. These latter periods, Gay concluded, were crucial to economic development. The Industrial Revolution, for all its faults, had made possible new levels of productivity and prosperity. The role of the economic historian, as Gay saw it, was to study and comprehend these cycles, and suggest ways of restraining their excesses.

Gay served as the School’s dean until the later months of 1917, when the demands of his wartime service in Washington led him to step down. He next moved to New York, where he became editor of the Evening Post, served as the first secretary -treasurer of the Council on Foreign Relations, and helped launch the quarterly Foreign Affairs.

Returning to the Harvard Department of Economics in 1924, Gay stayed on the faculty in his retirement in 1936. Toward the end of his life, Gay concluded that taking the job as HBS dean had been a serious mistake — the first in a series of distractions that had limited his productivity as a scholar, and kept him from finishing even a single book. But he remained proud of his work on behalf of the School. “Whatever may be said about the inadequacies of the early years of the School,” he wrote in 1944, “I don’t think it can be…said that [we] failed in laying the foundations well and truly…The School made a fundamental departure in business education by emphasizing the two fundamental functions of industrial management and commercial organization, or marketing, with chief emphasis upon the latter.”

Certainly, Gay was proud of his deanship while he was living it. “No gardener,” he wrote in 1910, “ever tended a fragile plant more carefully than I did, to keep an eye on all the details of our infant School.”