Harvard Business School

For almost all of the first two decades of its existence, the Business School operated out of borrowed quarters in Harvard Square. The School's post-World War I enrollment boom revived plans to create new and dedicated facilities for business students. In his 1922 dean's report, Wallace Donham lamented the fact that only about two in nine HBS students could be accommodated in Harvard dormitories—a deficit that he saw as much more serious than inadequate classroom, library, or office space—and argued that the School should be "lifted bodily" out of the Square.

President Emeritus Charles Eliot expressed his surprise that Donham placed such a high priority on dormitories. Donham had a ready response: "Without this, particularly with our lack of centralized administrative and teaching space, the faculty feel the great difficulty of developing the professional spirit without which we are hardly justified in having such a school. I am sure you recognize how much harder it is to build up a professional attitude toward business than it is to build up a knowledge of the ethics and practices of law or medicine. Dormitories would help us immensely in accomplishing this result."

And Donham had a second, more practical end in mind: Perhaps the rental income from dormitories could be used to pay for his new—and very expensive—case research program. Accordingly, Donham paid to have preliminary plans for a new Business School campus drawn up, and in the early months of February 1922, those plans were shown to New York banker George F. Baker, in hopes that he might volunteer to underwrite one or more dormitories. Baker was generally supportive of the concept, especially if the dormitories could be built on a "business basis," but would go no further.

Donham's ambitious plans to create a new campus soon ran into a new obstacle: the University's determination to meet the pressing needs of the Chemistry and Fine Arts departments before any other construction take place. Undeterred, Donham proposed a joint campaign for all three departments. Harvard agreed, and the campaign was launched on March 20th, 1924: Charles Eliot's 90th birthday. The fund drive was headed by Donham and William Lawrence, an Episcopal bishop, cousin of President Lowell, and an accomplished fundraiser.

To gain support for the Business School, Lawrence soon focused on a key prospect: George F. Baker, and—by extension—Baker's son George, Jr., who was a Harvard College classmate of Donham's. Between January and April of 1924, Baker continued to be noncommital toward the Business School and the larger campaign. Then, on April 21, Baker arranged to meet Lawrence in New York City. At that meeting, he announced that he was not interested in giving the $1 million that Lawrence had asked for. Instead, he said, he wanted to give $5 million and thereby build the entire Business School campus. Not surprisingly, Harvard agreed to Baker's condition.

Over the summer, Donham and Harvard architecture professor Charles W. Killam prepared specifications for an architectural competition. (Donham, as Killam later recalled, was determined that the School's buildings reflect "the definite ambition of the faculty to help the students to be something more than moneymakers.")

The winning design—blind-selected on January 19, 1925—turned out to be the work of the New York firm of McKim, Mead & White. Initial designs were drawn up in a hurry, and the formal groundbreaking was held on June 2. Speed was the watchword: Harvard wanted the School's dormitories ready for occupancy in the fall of 1926—which would not only increase the odds that the elderly George F. Baker would live to see the buildings completed, but also provide an estimated $100,000 in rental income.

Throughout the construction process, despite growing budget constraints, Harvard's leaders continued to set high standards for the new campus. "I wonder if the Business School cannot set the precedent of doing away with that horrible word 'dormitory,'" Bishop Lawrence wrote to Dean Donham in February 1925, "which sounds as if students did nothing but sleep there; and smacks of a hotel annex—why not West Hall? East Hall?" Donham agreed, and strongly encouraged McKim, Mead & White to design residence halls in a community setting. Rather than a single large central dining facility, for example, Donham insisted on including serving kitchens and dining halls in each of the six halls, to be connected to a central kitchen by an extensive tunnel system.

In October 1926, 521 Business School students (and 275 students from other Harvard departments) moved into the newly completed HBS dormitories. Classes were first held on campus on March 7, 1927—in the newly completed Baker Library, because the proposed classroom building had been cut out of the plans for lack of funds—and the campus was formally dedicated on June 27, with George F. Baker in attendance.

In fact, much of the campus was still incomplete, including the Dean's House, the top floor of Morgan Hall, the rear extensions on the library, and the four "instructor's houses" designed to sit amid the student dorm complexes. The Dean's House posed a peculiar challenge to Dean Donham and his team. The house was a low priority from an educational standpoint, but because George F. Baker was insistent on its inclusion—on the theory that having the dean in residence would reinforce the sense of a residential community—the building had to be constructed. "He [is] very anxious," George Baker Jr. wrote to Donham of his father, "to see you settled right there with the School." The residence was completed in 1929, and Donham and his family moved in shortly thereafter.

Almost immediately, the Soldiers Field campus developed a strong sense of community. One contributing factor was its relative isolation: For the most part, the "rest" of Harvard only ventured to the Boston side of the Charles River to attend football games in the University's mammoth cast-concrete stadium, across North Harvard Street from the Business School. But the normative design of the School's buildings—and the spaces within them—also played a major role. Gradually, the smaller houses were completed, and young faculty and their families joined the MBA students and the dean in residence on campus, and the sense of community was further reinforced.

One reason why Harvard went along with Donham's plan for a separate campus in the first place was that President Lowell and others believed strongly that the University's graduate and professional schools ought to be open to all qualified applicants. In the three years following the completion of the campus, this was more or less true for the Business School: No one was turned away for lack of dormitory space. But by 1930, HBS was again oversubscribed. In April 1931, a faculty committee on enrollment reported that despite the deepening economic depression, the demand for case-oriented business instruction was intensifying, applications to the School were soaring, and HBS could expect little help from other schools of business. Expanding the size or number of HBS sections seemed unrealistic.

But the committee noted one final alternative: to create "another unit of instruction of approximately the same size as the present School." In fact, the idea originated with Donham, who had strong opinions about the appropriate size of a faculty and campus. He wanted all members of his faculty to know each other and learn from each other, and he wanted Soldiers Field to remain a cohesive community. As he explained to his associates on more than one occasion, he would rather see a second school built—presumably adjacent to the recently completed campus—than allow the existing school to become too large. The plan was never seriously considered, in part due to its $10 million price tag, and also because applications plunged as the Depression intensified. But at the crucial junctures, decisions were driven by a shared commitment to build a community that could embody and convey values.

This commitment only intensified the frustrations that arose from the budget-driven failure to complete the original campus, including the lack of a gym and chapel, which undercut the sense of community on campus. In 1938, Donham called for the construction of the "missing" buildings, starting with a gym and a chapel, and moving on to the planned expansion of Morgan and Baker. In particular, Donham felt the lack of squash courts and other athletic facilities—to which the rest of Harvard had ready access, and which Donham believed contributed significantly to a complete educational experience. But financial pressures prohibited any such campus improvements—and would for several decades to come—and Donham had to settle for tennis courts behind Morgan Hall.

Sometimes the vision of a coherent and normative campus gave way to the pressures of a larger reality. In 1942, for example, six of Donham's 20 tennis courts behind Morgan Hall were paved over to make room for a temporary mess hall for the Supply Corps.

The wartime suspension of the MBA program, as well as the move to a centralized dining facility (even in a temporary structure), brought to an end the separate dining rooms and serving kitches in the six dormitory complexes. In his 1945 report to Harvard's president, pointing toward a postwar enrollment boom, Dean Donald David called for the construction of a separate classroom building and a central dining hall. Dormitory renovations begun in 1948 presumed the creation of a permanent, centralized eating facility—a vision that was realized in 1953 with the completion of Kresge Hall, a $2.3 million campus center.

The decade of the 1960s saw the addition of several small buildings, and one large one, to the campus. Burden Auditorium, behind the Dean's House, was a notable departure from the McKim, Mead & White campus plan. Until the completion of Burden, it was impossible for the entire HBS community to assemble in one place. Although Burden addressed that problem, it was a notably unsuccessful piece of architecture. (Hidden behind the Dean's House, next to the parking lot, Burden's shortcomings were not conspicuous.) Dean George P. Baker did make one important gesture toward the campus's neo-Georgian look. When the initial design for Cotting House—a small building, planned for a highly visible location next to North Harvard Street, and intended to house the doctoral programs—landed on his desk, depicting a "Brutalist" cast-concrete building, Baker rejected the design outright, and commissioned a second architect to design a building more in keeping with the rest of the campus.

During the 1970s, several community-oriented buildings were completed. The opening of Baker Hall (1970), for example, extended the notion of a coherent, community-based educational experience to the School's executive programs—and for the first time, included private baths for its residents. The completion of Cumnock finally provided space for on-campus indoor athletic facilities—several squash courts—and an expanded health center. Teele Hall provided space for the Coop, barbershop, and other student services (as well as a new home for the Harvard Business Review). But like Burden, these new buildings departed significantly from the McKim, Mead & White design esthetic from the 1920s—departures that eventually came to be seen as a mistake.

On the other hand, Dean Fouraker's administration began a major beautification project, with more than 2,000 trees being planted on campus between 1971 and 1979. An informal tie between HBS and the Arnold Arboretum led to the planting at HBS of a number of exotic species at Soldiers Field, most of which are still flourishing today. Meanwhile, the School continued to maintain a rare stand of American elms, elsewhere devastated by the Dutch elm disease. The canopy of these trees—all planted at once in the mid 1920s, and a half-century later tall and stately—lent a distinctive quality to the campus.

By the same token, however, the campus was aging. Dean Fouraker had begun a significant program of dormitory renovation, but much more was needed. (In 1981, HBS administrators identified some $70 million in deferred campus maintenance.) The renovated Chase Hall (1982) and Morris Hall (1983) dormitories represented a significant step away from the architecture of the 1920s through the creation of single rooms with private baths: the end of the so-called "can group" in the MBA program. (A main lounge, constructed on several levels, was added to each group of six to eight bedrooms to foster small-group meetings and discussions.) Since that time, the School has tried a number of techniques for reinforcing the study group: a difficult challenge, when larger numbers of the HBS "community" live off campus.

Dean McArthur intensified his predecessor's campus-beautification program, planting literally thousands of trees and bushes. In 1983, he also began closing down roads on campus, "reclaiming" the roadways for pedestrians (and preventing commuters from using the campus as a cut-through). McArthur cited an early research visit to the Johnson & Johnson research facility in New Brunswick, New Jersey, as the inspiration for his determined effort to make the campus quieter and more beautiful—in effect, more professional.

This trend was reinforced in 1986, when Moshe Safdie's campus master plan was adopted. This called for the reorientation of the campus (from facing toward the Charles River to facing away from it) in response to the realities of the commuting culture, but also called for "recapturing" and reinforcing the power of the original McKim, Mead & White campus plan.

Safdie's guidelines were drawn upon in a spate of major new construction that began in the late 1980s, and continued for the next two decades. It included Shad Hall (the long-overdue fitness center, 1989) and the rebuilding and expansion of Morgan Hall (in 1992, bringing most of the faculty together for the first time since before World War II). McArthur's tenure, which ended in 1996, included the renovation of 500,000 square feet of existing space and the construction of 300,000 square feet of new space, at a total cost of approximately $200 million. Of special interest to McArthur was the Class of 1959 Chapel. The chapel was the last building that was included in the original campus plan to be completed, and McArthur felt strongly that the campus—still very much a community—needed an ecumenical gathering place in which small groups could gather for contemplation and worship. The chapel has since emerged as a favored venue for small weddings involving members of the extended community.

Dean Kim Clark honored McArthur's contributions to the community by naming a new executive education facility (1999) in his honor. Clark also continued the trend—initiated during McArthur's tenure—of moving activities not directly related to the School's teaching mission off the original campus. A purchased office building at 230 Western Avenue, about a quarter of a mile west of the campus, served first as the home of HBS Publishing, and (beginning in 1999) as the home of various alumni relations and executive education support activities. (HBS Publishing moved to rented space in Watertown.) By this time, it was clear that Harvard University would be moving large parts of its Cambridge operation to the Boston side of the river, and HBS would increasingly be at a newly relocated "center of the University."

Clark used these changes, and other developments unfolding at the time, to refocus the School on broader definitions of "community." How do values shape a community, and vice versa? What responsibilities do community members have to each other?

Meanwhile, the physical transformation of the main campus, still guided by the Safdie master plan, continued. In 2001, the 121,050-square-foot Spangler Center, constructed behind Aldrich, was dedicated. This new facility brought together a host of support services that previously had been scattered across the campus, and immediately became the center of campus life for most MBA students.

The last building that remained largely untouched since the completion of the campus in the late 1920s was Baker Library. After years of investigation and planning, work began in 2003 on the reconstruction of Baker. Completed in 2005, the library reopened as an "information center," incorporating new technologies and resources—but also including amenities aimed at making Baker yet another welcoming community resource. And—completing the campus/community cycle—a campus planning exercise under Dean Jay Light recently confirmed the School's commitment to representing "community" in architecture.

The occasion of the School's centennial in 2008 created new opportunities for reflection on the importance of "community," in every sense of the word. The Institutional Memory project, sponsored by Baker Knowledge and Library Services, bought together historical reflections and contemporary observations from a wide range of constituencies, including alumni, faculty, staff, and students.