In Depth
What makes a profession?
» A core body of knowledge
Not a trade school
In 1910, Boston’s Society of Printers offered HBS $7,000 to offer a course in printing techniques — an offer that the School (then still on a very shaky financial footing) gratefully accepted.
Not everyone associated with the infant Business School approved. “It would be unwise to adopt the methods of trade schools or technical schools,” observed J. P. Morgan, Jr., at a November 1910 meeting of the School’s Visiting Committee (a group charged by the University with reporting on the progress of the School). Dean Gay responded that the faculty didn’t intend to offer technical instruction; for that, he said, they would seek a closer relationship with Harvard’s Graduate School of Applied Sciences.
Nonetheless, Gay and the faculty did feel an obligation to provide students with strong technical background, in addition to the elusive principles of general administration. “We are not, of course, a trade school,” Gay wrote in 1911 to L. C. Marshall, a friend who would soon inaugurate a business school at the University of Chicago, “and we find it necessary in training men for various lines of business that they shall have some notion of the technical side, and this experiment which we are trying with printing, if successful, will be followed by some other courses of general character for other leading lines of industry.”
