History
The Johnson School traces its beginnings to the university's founding in 1865. University co-founder Ezra Cornell proposed a Department of Trade and Commerce for the new university, which was "a radical departure from the day's conventional notions about higher education," as this proposal was made "sixteen years before Joseph Wharton endowed the nation's first collegiate business school at the University of Pennsylvania." At a university faculty meeting on 2 October 1868, Cornell co-founder and first president Andrew Dickson White, suggested the creation of a professorship in bookkeeping in the context of a larger proposal: the creation of a "commercial college." In the meantime, the Agriculture College continued to have a Department of Agricultural Economics and the Arts College continued to have a Department of Economics.
Formal movements towards a business school began in 1914, when faculty in the College of Agriculture (which today offers an undergraduate business major) convened the first meeting of the "Committee on a Commercial College." Led by economics professor Allyn Young, the committee recommended the creation of a "two-year graduate course leading to the Master's degree" in both business and public administration. Young had been trained at Harvard University, and the influence on the committee's discussion of its business school's creation only six year prior was apparent, as the committee's recommendations included instruction for graduate students only, selectivity in admissions, and integration into the larger university community.
The idea of a business school took a backseat to World War I and its effects on the Cornell population. Following the Armistice of 1918, second university president Jacob Gould Schurman called for the establishment of such a school, which he estimated would require $1 million to establish. However, financial difficulties surrounding the Great Depression would further delay its creation.
In 1941, the university faculty recommended the creation of a School of Business and Public Administration, and it was unanimously approved on 10 December 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor. Cornell courted Paul M. O'Leary, who earned his doctorate at Cornell and was a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "brain trust," to be dean of the new school. O'Leary leveraged an offer to be dean of the business school at the University of Minnesota in negotiations for the Cornell position, ultimately signing for a salary of $9,000.
In 1946, Cornell University opened the School of Business and Public Administration, holding classes in McGraw Hall and charging $200 for tuition for the first year. The school awarded two degrees—MBA and MPA—and its primary national recruiters included the Guaranty Trust Company of New York, Eastman Kodak, DuPont, General Electric, AT&T, and IBM. In 1950 it gained acceptance of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. O'Leary stepped down as dean of the business school in 1951 to become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Melvin G. deChazeau was appointed acting dean until 1954, when Edward H. Litchfield became dean. Under Lichfield's tenure, a Ph.D. program was established, the academic journal Administrative Science Quarterly was created, a joint JD/MBA program with the Law School was organized, and the school was renamed the Graduate School of Business and Public Administration. Litchfield left three years later for the chancellorship at the University of Pittsburgh and was replaced by C. Stewart Sheppard in 1957, followed by William D. Carmichael in 1962. In 1964, the school was relocated to Malott Hall, which was specifically designed to house it.
During this period faculty divisions began to emerge, with three distinct groups vying for resources: business management, public administration, and healthcare administration (the Sloan Program). In 1983, the faculty voted to end instruction in the latter two fields and to change the school's name to the Graduate School of Management. That same year, the school began offering a dual-degree MBA/MA in Asian Studies with Cornell's FALCON (Full-year Asian Language CONcentration) program, with the aim of producing American MBAs with some knowledge of Japanese language and culture gained through coursework in Ithaca and a required summer internship in Japan. The school also created an MBA/MEng, originally called the Program in Manufacturing Management (PIMM). At the same time, Curtis W. Tarr was appointed dean of the school.
In 1984, Samuel Curtis Johnson, Jr. and his family donated $20 million to the school, which was renamed the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management in honor of Johnson's grandfather, Samuel Curtis Johnson, Sr., the founder of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. The endowment gift to the university was, at the time, the largest gift to any business school in the world. In 1989, Alan G. Merten was appointed dean of the Johnson School. The year 1995 saw the creation of the Johnson School's first website, as well as the launch of its first 12-month option class. Merten left in 1996 to be President of George Mason University.
In 1998, the school was relocated to the newly renovated Sage Hall, the school started the student-managed Cayuga MBA Fund, and the Parker Center for Investment Research was established. In 1999, the JGSM began offering an Executive MBA. In 2004, the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise was established. L. Joseph Thomas was appointed interim dean in 2007 and eventually the official dean in 2008. In Fall 2010, the school was rebranded in logo and in name: the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, or simply Johnson at Cornell University or Johnson.
In 2011, Johnson hosted Facebook-sponsored 3-Day Startup (3DS), an event where participants worked to start a technology company over the course of three days. Later that year, a Johnson team consisting of student portfolio managers in the school's $10 million Cayuga MBA Fund won second place in CNBC's "MBA Face-Off" edition of its Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge, a nine-week, real-time fantasy stock and currency trading competition.
On July 1, 2012, Soumitra Dutta became dean of the school.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School Of Management
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)