Harvard Business School

When Harvard launched its new "Graduate School of Business Administration" in 1908, it did so with a minimal capital investment. After all: The new school was a stepchild of the Department of Economics, with a five-year lease on life. The University saw no reason to invest in the School until it had proved itself.

As a result, the Business School lived in borrowed quarters for more than a decade. Dean Gay's office was in University Hall, which gave him ready access to President Lowell, but separated him from his faculty, whose offices were tucked into various buildings controlled by the Economics faculty. Lawrence Hall was the home of a Business School "reading room," which combined a quiet study area with a rudimentary business library. Perkins Hall offered dormitory space to a limited number of Business School students. When Widener Library opened in 1915, the Business School was allocated space in the new library's top floor.

Only two classrooms were available for the exclusive use of the Business School: basement rooms in Lawrence Hall and the Harvard Union. The School shared nine additional classrooms with other departments, but stood to lose the use of any of them on relatively short notice. It was a guest in what one College official called a "crowded family," and not always a welcome one.

As early as 1909—a year after the School's founding—Dean Gay began contemplating a $100,000 fund drive to pay for a self-contained Business School building. President Lowell, normally supportive of the School, was discouraging. "Money does not come as easily as is often supposed," he wrote to former President Eliot, in describing Gay's ambitious plans for the School. Not until the second half of the 1920s did the School realize its longtime dream of a freestanding campus, across the Charles River on University-owned land in Allston.