Harvard professors A. Lawrence Lowell and William Taussig shouldered the burden of raising $25,000 a year for five years to support the University's new Business School.

Given the deep recession then underway, this was no easy task. Fortunately, the General Education Board of New York agreed in January 1908 to give $12,500 per year—half of the needed funds—for the five-year experimental period. Taussig raised the bulk of the remaining funds, but stalled at $11,600: $900 short. At that point, Boston financier Henry Lee Higginson told Taussig that he would personally make up any HBS financial shortfalls—at which point, the Harvard Corporation authorized the creation of the School.

Higginson insisted on anonymity. "People get so sick of my meddling with matters that they don't like to hear my name," Higginson wrote to Taussig in that summer of 1908, "and [President Eliot] is one of them. I am a kind of nurse, and nobody likes nurses unless they are young and pretty."