Photos courtesy of Baker Library Archives

Photos courtesy of Baker Library Archives

Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell appointed Wallace Brett Donham the Dean of Harvard Business School a century ago in October. The School’s longest-serving dean, Donham led HBS for 23 years, spanning the aftermath of World War I, the Great Depression, and the beginning of World War II. In this turbulent era, he developed a distinctive focus and pedagogy that helped define business as a profession and grew a pioneering Harvard venture into a respected graduate school with 1,000 students and a dedicated campus on the banks of the Charles.

“Dean Donham was an extraordinarily innovative and productive leader,” says Dean Nitin Nohria. “Many iconic HBS elements—including our mission, residential campus, case method teaching, the Harvard Business Review, and the Division of Research and the faculty’s connection to practice—were established during his tenure. He shaped the School in profound and long-lasting ways.”

The son of a traveling dentist, Donham (AB 1898, LLB 1901) majored in government at Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude in just three years. Lowell, then a professor of government, became his mentor and continued to support his studies through law school.

Donham specialized in corporate restructuring as a vice president at Boston’s Old Colony Trust Company and won wide praise from both labor and management as a court-appointed receiver in the 1917 reorganization of the troubled Bay Street Railway Company. Lowell, who had become Harvard’s president in 1909, saw Donham as a skilled manager and negotiator as well as a loyal Harvard alumnus and fundraiser. He believed his former student was exactly the kind of leader the fledgling business school needed as it entered its second decade.

Mission and Method

Donham (left) in 1944 with successor Donald K. David, who served as HBS’s third dean from 1942 to 1955.

Donham (left) in 1944 with successor Donald K. David, who served as HBS’s third dean from 1942 to 1955.

As the School’s second dean, Donham faced a daunting array of challenges: HBS courses were taught in classrooms scattered across Harvard Yard; faculty and student ranks had been severely depleted by the Great War; finances were precarious; and the curriculum—focused on industry-specific courses—lacked a clear focus.

During the HBS Centennial, in 2008, then–Harvard President Drew Faust said Donham’s leadership was guided by his resolve that Harvard “would educate manager-statesmen motivated not by profit alone, but by the improvement of society.” A prolific author, Donham wrote regularly on business as a profession, ethics, and responsibility.

Donham, Faust noted, wanted students to grasp “the relationship between their particular interests and broader social and economic structures.” He decided courses should be organized around functions—such as finance, marketing, and employment—that most businesses share. In a definitive 1920 memo to the faculty, he proposed a radical shift from lecture-style to case method instruction, which he knew well from his law school days.

“All business not of a routine nature presents itself in the form of problems,” Donham posited. “Cannot a systematic effort be made to enrich the problem content of the various courses by getting regularly from industry problems which are current and illustrative?” By 1923, two-thirds of the School’s courses were taught by the case method, supported by field-based research that had already begun to influence business scholarship and practice.

“Run on the Right Lines”

Donham addresses the faculty in 1941.

Donham addresses faculty in 1941.

J. P. Morgan once said it was Donham’s introduction of the case method that helped convince George F. Baker—whose astonishing $5 million gift in 1924 financed the building of the School’s campus in Soldiers Field—that “the Business School was being established on the right basis and being run on the right lines.” Baker’s endowment, and a remarkable collaboration between architects McKim, Mead & White and landscape design firm Olmsted Brothers, made possible the expedited construction of the first 12 buildings between 1925 and 1927.

“Donham’s innovations became anchor points for subsequent campus development,” says Executive Dean for Administration Angela Crispi (MBA 1990). “Our unique status as a residential business school has guided decisions about the function and human scale of our buildings, pedestrian access, and landscaping. Donham’s blueprint followed the arc of the river, which subsequent architects have maintained.”

Along with his imprint on the School’s campus and pedagogy, Donham’s personal influence can still be felt at HBS. After his 1942 retirement as dean, he stayed on as the George F. Baker Professor of Business Administration until 1948, pursuing his long-held scholarly interest in human relations in business and mentoring a new generation of faculty.

Linda A. Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration, recalls a conversation with her mentor, the late Paul R. Lawrence, a world-renowned scholar of organizational behavior and the previous incumbent of the Donham chair. “Paul knew and deeply respected Donham,” Hill says. “He credited him with creating an intellectual space where Paul and other scholars were free to do innovative thinking and problem-solving. It’s another aspect of Donham’s legacy that still inspires our community today.”

This article draws on information from A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908–1945, by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank.

Post a Comment