Business Humanist

The Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration today is a monument to 23 successful years' direction by Dean Wallace Brett Donham. It can count a faculty to match its impressive buildings, a business library second to none, an enrollment of over 1,000 U.S. businessmen-to-be. Most other business schools, including the famed London School of Economics, have patterned themselves on Dean Donham's model.

In his 23 years there, Dean Donham has seen and made many changes. In 1919 Harvard's Graduate School of Business consisted of 19 students (some under-graduate), a bookkeepers' curriculum, no classrooms of its own, no library, no prestige. It accurately reflected the low esteem accorded to business by U.S. educators generally. In that year, memorable for its epidemic of violent strikes, Harvard's President A. Lawrence Lowell handed over the Business School to a chubby, 41-year-old Yankee, Wallace Donham. Commented one professor on the decrepit state of the school: "We were a faculty of crocks teaching crocks and Chinese." Graduate of the Harvard Law School and vice president of Boston's Old Colony Trust Co., Dean Donham believed vigorously in a then-newfangled idea, namely, that U.S. business deserved a school commensurate with its strangely unstudied importance as a central dynamic of U.S. life.

Adapting to his needs the case method of law and medical schools, Dean Donham steadily shifted the emphasis of his school from applied business economics to practical business administration. By the middle '30s business' growing emphasis on enlightened management had amply demonstrated his prescience. War brought out another example of the Dean's foresight: having long trained a group of Army officers assigned each year to the School, Harvard Business professors were well prepared last fall to start the first U.S. school for Army quartermasters.

Meanwhile Dean Donham has never ceased hammering on the "human factor in business." His humanism went well beyond how-to-win-friends- & -influence-peo-ple; one of his well-heeded friends was Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

Now Dean Donham retires and an era comes to an end. He will carry on as George F. Baker Professor of Administration. (The late George F. Baker donated $5,000,000 to build the School.) Dean Donham's successor is Idaho-born, 46-year-old Donald Kirk David, a graduate of the School (1919) and an old Donham disciple. Donham's first assistant, after 1927 he became a power in retail foods, first with Royal Baking Powder, then as first president of Chase & Sanborn, finally as a director of Standard Brands. Last February he went back to the Business School as associate dean.

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