Harvard Business School

One of the challenges inherent in teaching specialized courses — for example, in railroading — was finding people to teach them. One model that Dean Gay looked at was the Railroad Department at McGill University, which in 1908 was headed by an 1894 Harvard College graduate named Clarence Morgan, who had worked for the New York Central for several years after getting out of Harvard. In 1904, Morgan was hired on a three-year contract by McGill to set up its Railroad Department. By 1908, the Canadian Pacific and Grand Trunk railroads were paying $14,000 a year to support the new department — and also agreed to employ students graduating from the program.

To staff his own railroading course, Gay looked closer to home: to the Boston and Albany’s statistical department, where he found a young operations expert named William J. Cunningham.

Cunningham (who remained on the School’s faculty until 1946) didn’t hesitate to point out that he had “no academic antecedents whatever.” In fact, upon joining the HBS faculty, he became the only Harvard University professor without a bachelor’s degree.