The Dedication

“It must be remembered always that the standards of excellence must be maintained, not simply on the outside of the buildings, but in the work and training on the inside.”

George F. Baker, Dedication Address, June 4, 1927

The celebration of the new HBS campus on June 4, 1927 began with an academic procession in the morning and dedication addresses in the afternoon. A reported four thousand people, including business leaders, senators, representatives, and university presidents, attended the festivities held on the steps and lawn of Baker Library. The eighty-seven-year-old George F. Baker presented Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell with the keys to the School—officially named the “Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, George F. Baker Foundation”—and was moved to tears at the crowd’s sustained applause. Dedication speakers included Bishop William Lawrence, Deans Edwin Gay and Wallace B. Donham, President A. Lawrence Lowell, and Owen Young, the noted industrialist and chairman of General Electric.

Referring to the desire of Harvard’s founders to educate its graduates, many of whom entered the ministry, Young explained that now the “Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration will do its utmost to guard against an illiterate ministry of business.”¹⁷ The dedication speakers heralded the new campus as the physical embodiment of the School’s institutional mission and its place within the University. “The guarantee for . . . [the School’s] maintenance of a vital relationship with the society it should serve, lies not only in its material pledge here proudly displayed and in its inner determination, but in the fact that it is an integral part in Harvard University,” Gay noted. “A great university is longer-lived than any other human institution. For generation after generation, it renews the springs of high purpose.”¹⁸ Gay’s words reflected as well the ideals of former Harvard President Charles Eliot (Eliot had died only a year earlier), who saw the university, as HBS professor Rakesh Khurana notes, “as nothing less than society’s best hope for a human and progressive social order in a modern world.”¹⁹

The 1924 competition guidelines for the HBS campus stipulated that all proposed plans conserve as much land as possible for future growth.²⁰ Over the past eighty years new buildings and facilities have extended from McKim, Mead & White’s original site plan, mostly in keeping with the founding principles of fostering the community and intellectual exchange that President A. Lawrence Lowell, Dean Wallace B. Donham, and benefactor George F. Baker envisioned. “The buildings . . . were developed in accordance with the definite idea that business men are to take a large share in that leadership in the community,” The Architectural Forum noted, “that buildings and grounds could and should help in this education.”²¹ Today, these thoughtfully conceived structures serve as a reminder of the vision of the School’s founders, who championed business administration as service for the public good—and they stand, in Dean Gay’s words, as a “concrete symbol of what American business is prepared to give—and be.”²²

17

Owen D. Young, “Dedication Address,” Dedication Addresses. Boston: Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, June 4, 1927, p. 12. HBS Archives (AC1927.17.1), Baker Library Historical Collections.←

18

Edwin Gay, “The Founding of Harvard Business School,” Dedication Addresses, p. 18. ←

19

Rakesh Khurana, see note 2, p. 367.←

20

Program for Architectural Competition, see note 13, p. 10. ←

21

“Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration,” The Architectural Forum vol. XLVII, no. 4 (October 1927): 305. ←

22

Edwin Gay, see note 18, pp. 15-16. ←