Harvard Business School

The School's explicitly practical orientation—and in time,  its distinctive case-method pedagogy—called for teachers with an unusual set of talents,  which included both classroom skills and a knack for the kinds of field-based research that helped feed the classroom experience.  The history of recruitment and development of faculty at HBS can be considered in three periods:

• the founding era,  in which a combination of traditional academics and real-world practitioners sought to create an effective middle ground—one that would draw on their respective skill sets;
• the homegrown era,  which extended roughly from the 1920s through the 1950s,  in which a growing percentage of new faculty recruits came directly through the HBS MBA and DCS or DBA programs; and
• the modern era,  during which the preponderance of new faculty members have come into the School from other institutions,  and from a range of traditional and untraditional academic disciplines.

The transitions from one era to the next were either the result of external pressures or the result of the School's deliberate policy shifts. In both cases,  they were shaped by,  and helped shape,  the faculty's determination to provide a transformational educational experience.

In the founding era,  which lasted from 1908 to the early 1920s,  the core faculty was built around Harvard academics—mainly from the Department of Economics—and individuals with deep practical expertise in specific industries.  Most academics were understandably reluctant to sign on with a school that was initially set up as a five-year experiment;  nevertheless,  some, such as accounting expert William Morse Cole,  left the Economics faculty in favor of the Business School.  To offset some of the risks of signing on with the experimental school—and also to integrate his faculty into a larger Harvard context that was skeptical,  at best, about the experiment—Dean Edwin Gay arranged for all full-time members of his faculty to have appointments in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Meanwhile,  Gay also looked outside the confines of the university to find appropriate instructors,  particularly to teach the industry-specific courses that were a mainstay of the curriculum in those early days.  To teach Railroad Operations,  for example,  Gay hired William J. Cunningham,  then working in the Boston & Albany Railroad's statistical department.  Cunningham didn't hesitate to point out that he had "no academic precedents whatever."  In fact,  upon joining the Business School faculty,  he became the only Harvard University professor without a bachelor's degree,  and so became the first in a long string of unconventional individuals to join the HBS faculty (who later included such luminaries as Robert Schlaifer and Ken Andrews).  Some members of the larger Harvard faculty actively displayed their disapproval of these unconventional new arrivals—and the school they worked for—but others offered help and guidance.

Cunningham (who remained on the faculty until 1946) was a rare breed:  an industry expert who also turned out to be a skilled teacher.  In the absence of enough of this kind of talent,  Dean Gay experimented with other pedagogies,  including the composite lecture course,  which drew on a sequence of outside lecturers to deliver specialized course content.  But Gay was effectively trapped by his curriculum,  which combined economics theory with industry-specific courses (e.g., printing) and "tool"  courses (such as accounting).  Building a permanent faculty around this curricular concept proved almost impossible.

It fell to Gay's successor,  Wallace Donham,  to come up with a curriculum and a pedagogy around which he could build a faculty.  He began his deanship in 1919 with nearly a clean slate.  All but five of the pre-World War I faculty had left for war service,  and few of those who had left were planning (or would be invited) to return.  Donham quickly embraced both a functionally oriented curriculum and his modified "case method,"  and began creating a faculty that could deliver this new kind of education.

In this effort,  he was greatly aided by how the School attracted and retained large numbers of qualified students.  In the prewar era,  only about a quarter of the students who enrolled in the MBA program ever received a degree.  (The second-year curriculum was undistinguished,  and to many students,  didn't seem to warrant the extra financial investment.)  Now,  with huge numbers of students enrolling in the wake of World War I,  and many more staying to finish their degrees,  the School had a new resource:  homegrown talent to staff its research,  teaching,  and administrative ranks.

Starting in the early 1920s,  one or two of the brightest members of the graduating class were recruited to stay on at the School,  often starting in the Dean's office as assistant deans,  and then making their way onto the faculty.  Among those who were recruited in this way were future manufacturing instructor Georges Doriot,  future banking instructor George Bates,  and future Dean Donald David. The post-HBS career success of other assistant deans—including John C. Baker,  Everett N. Case,  and Dean W. Malott,  all of whom became university presidents—underscored the high quality of this talent pool.

The larger HBS faculty and administrative ranks were a pool in which,  to Dean Donham's distress,  many institutions soon learned to fish.  In one year early in Donham's tenure,  for example,  the School lost four faculty members to private industry and another to Stanford University's newly established school of business.

Concerned about these kinds of losses,  in the early 1920s Dean Donham began advocating for a "homegrown" doctoral degree.  Harvard reserved the Ph.D. degree to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (and still does today).  And while would-be teachers could enroll in the "Doctor of Business Economics" program,  co-sponsored by the FAS's Department of Economics and HBS,  Donham saw the need for a separate doctoral degree that would better meet the School's needs,  and also respond to the growing demand for business professors from other schools that were adopting the HBS case method.  (In 1921 alone,  HBS received requests for instructors from 55 colleges and universities.)  In 1922,  therefore,  Harvard authorized HBS to grant the "Doctor of Commercial Science" (DCS) degree.

At least in its early decades,  the DCS degree turned out to be a relatively unproductive pipeline. Only 49 individuals—including two of Donham's sons—earned the degree before 1950,  in part because the School's doctoral candidates tended to carry a heavy teaching and administrative load.  The slack was picked up,  in large part,  by practitioners.  But Donham understood that in the future,  business educators would need Ph.D.-level degrees.  He also understood that the School's influence in business education would in large part depend upon its ability to turn out large numbers of qualified teachers for export,  as well as for internal consumption.

The Depression set back these ambitious plans.  In 1933,  with strong encouragement from Donham,  a faculty Committee on Instruction bravely called for the addition of a third year to the MBA program—at the end of which graduating students would receive both an MBA and a DCS.  (The plan was quietly shelved.)  In the following year,  Donham ruefully reported to President Conant that the cuts he was being forced to make in the junior faculty ranks for economy reasons would constrain the supply of future academic leaders.  This was a recurring theme throughout the decade.  Due to budget cuts,  as Donham elaborated in his 1938 report to Conant,  HBS was "doing badly" at training future HBS professors,  and certainly couldn't help other schools meet their faculty needs.

In fact,  through an ambitious Industrial Research program,  Donham was quietly building a new core in his faculty—a group of brilliant researchers who were scholars first and teachers second.  And although the leaders of this research effort,  including Elton Mayo and his Human Relations colleagues,  had little or no impact in the classroom,  their work achieved international renown,  and this attracted other young scholars to HBS (including a recent MBA graduate, Paul Lawrence) in the early postwar years.  Others were attracted to—or won over by— the field-based research that lay behind the case method of teaching.

Just as in the wake of World War I,  the flood of returning veterans created an enormous demand for HBS programs.  In retrospect,  this was the heyday of the homegrown era.  Charlie Williams, a favorite teacher for many subsequent generations of students,  was one of many young HBS graduates returning from the war who were more or less drafted onto the faculty to help meet this demand.  Abraham Zaleznik,  too, was caught up in this dragnet.  The trend continued through the late 1950s,  as the School scooped up a number of the brightest graduating MBAs and pressed them into service as young case writers and instructors.  A generation of future leaders at the School,  including John McArthur and Colyer Crum,  were persuaded to stay and try their hands at academia.  (Harvard's higher starting salaries than Wall Street's went a long way toward making this recruiting effort successful.)   Given their prior exposure to the MBA program,  these homegrown recruits were expected to sink or swim in the classroom—figuring out their own teaching style without much help from their senior colleagues.

But the transition to the modern era had already begun.  Perhaps the beginning of this new era can be dated back to 1953.  In the fast-moving years that followed World War II,  HBS felt a "definite obligation" (according to Dean Donald K. David) to help other business schools develop "a professional approach toward business administration."  This meant loaning out faculty members on short-term assignments (and sometimes losing them altogether),  which in turn called for more internal development.  Successes in the field led to more demand from the field,  forcing the faculty to cap the number of people who could be out at any one point in time.

But it was clear that supply also had to be increased,  so,  in 1953—with a large and critical infusion of money from the Ford Foundation—the faculty,  with Harvard's permission,  voted to create a more flexible degree—the Doctor in Business Administration,  or DBA—and to expand the School's doctoral programs significantly.  In 1960,  24 people received doctoral degrees from HBS:  the highest total ever,  up to that point.

The Ford Foundation,  meanwhile,  was also mounting a broader,  two-decades-long effort to remake the U.S. business school landscape,  including HBS.  In 1955—with the recently retired HBS Dean Donald David at its helm—the Foundation funded research professorships at HBS (and elsewhere),  which began bringing new discipline-based people to the HBS faculty.  In 1958, the Foundation funded a second and more massive expansion of the HBS doctoral programs to increase the supply of professors.  By 1967,  as a result of this second infusion of resources,  the total of newly-minted doctoral degree recipients had soared to 46 (including the first three women ever to receive doctoral degrees from HBS).

At the same time, the arrival of the Ford and Carnegie Foundations' reports on business education,  published in 1959,  accelerated the infusion of new disciplines into HBS and other business schools.  Howard Raiffa,  a mathematician,  was only one of a large number of "exotics" who joined the HBS faculty in this period—and they often did not know exactly what they were getting into.  This dynamic continues to the present day,  with larger numbers of more traditional academics joining the HBS faculty.  This, in turn, requires the School to pay more attention to successful faculty acculturation to the HBS model—and also to fight against narrow definitions of "acceptable" faculty hires.

Meanwhile, the world—and the international economy—changed,  requiring new kinds of skills from the faculty.  Recognizing the need to give faculty members a broader international perspective,  for example,  the School in 1973 established its first overseas executive program Vevey,  Switzerland).  In this and subsequent efforts,  the School sent young and talented people to a variety of posts around the world for global seasoning.

In this same period,  HBS faculty members once again began to be more explicit about the art and craft of case-method teaching.  In 1973,  Chris Christensen—long admired as one of the School's best teachers—inaugurated a teaching seminar for HBS doctoral students;   this was subsequently complemented by a second seminar aimed at instructors from other Harvard departments and from other universities.   In 1984, Christensen was named a University Professor by Harvard President Derek Bok,  recognizing his impact on student-centered learning across the University and in schools around the world.  In that same year,  Christensen,  David Garvin,  and Jim Heskett hosted a three-day colloquium on case-method teaching that was attended by some 80 professional-school-level teachers from around the world.  The event led to the publication of a collection of essays,  Education for Judgment,  which focused on the artistry of discussion leadership.   Co-author Christensen was named the first recipient of the Academy of Management's "Outstanding Educator" award in 1987.

One slowly mounting challenge to the School's faculty-development efforts was financial.  As noted earlier,  in the middle of the 20th century,  a graduating MBA student could make more money (at least in the short term) by getting on the HBS faculty track than he could by heading for Wall Street.  Those economics changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s.  Starting salaries in business soared for Harvard MBAs,  and sticking around involved major financial sacrifice (compounded,  in many cases,  by increasingly large debt loads).  In 1981, therefore,  Dean John McArthur established the "Dean's Doctoral Fellowship" program,  aimed at helping qualified graduating students (as well as recent HBS graduates) prepare for academic careers,  and thereby helping to maintain a balance of skill sets within the faculty.

In the 1990s,  HBS took steps to bring additional seasoned practitioners to the faculty,  in part to deepen the faculty's real-world experience base.  These efforts culminated (during Kim Clark's deanship) in the creation of the "Professor of Management Practice" track,  which invites successful,  experienced practitioners with an interest in teaching and research to join the faculty on a contract basis.

For most of the School's history,  the process of developing skilled teachers was left largely to informal,  ad hoc,  and implicit mechanisms.  But by the early 21st century,  this approach seemed increasingly inadequate.  In 2004,  therefore,  the School established the C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning to promote excellence in teaching and participant-centered learning.  Although new faculty hires are certainly a key target population,  the Center also serves longtime faculty members who feel the need for a teaching tune-up.

Putting these kinds of mechanisms in place helps the School carry forward its longstanding teaching traditions.  At the same time,  it helps acculturate and retain the kinds of eclectic outsiders and restless minds that will be needed to take the School—and its classrooms—in new directions.