Northwestern President Edmund Janes James initiates a proposal for establishing a “college of Finance and Commerce” at the university. “The average business man is ignorant and inefficient and cowardly,” James declares. “He is uneducated and untrained in his own business. He is helpless at a crisis.” The proposed college’s curriculum includes courses on finance, insurances, banking, railroad management, and the stock market, with frequent lectures from the Chicago business community.

The Northwestern economics department recruits Willard E. Hotchkiss, a vocal supporter of establishing a coherent program in business education modeled after the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he had been a political science instructor the previous year. Hotchkiss had completed his doctorate at Cornell University in 1905, writing on the administrative practices of the Ministries of Finance in Paris and Berlin. An avid reformer, Hotchkiss had previously worked as the business manager and assistant superintendent of the George Junior Republic School, in Freeville, N.Y., from 1897 to 1900. He also served as business manager of the University Settlement House in New York City from 1900 to 1901. In Chicago, Hotchkiss continued to pursue his progressive interests as chair of a citizen’s committee to investigate the Juvenile Court in Cook County in 1911, as author of the committee’s “Report on the Juvenile Court and Care of Children in Illinois,” and as a regular contributor to the Northwestern University Settlement.

Abram W. Harris becomes president of Northwestern University. Like his recent predecessors, Harris works to strengthen the university’s ties with the business community, recognizing the critical role that business support will play in increasing the university’s graduate and research programs.

The university hires Earl Dean Howard, an economist from Wharton, as professor of economics. Howard was enthusiastically recommended for the post by Ward W. Pierson, a member of Wharton’s faculty, who emphasized Howard’s proven record of generating support among businessmen for part-time evening coursework. “You have a rare combination when you find a man who can hold the attention of the ordinary evening school student and also is able to hold the attention of his college classes and vice versa,” wrote Pierson. Upon Howard’s arrival at Northwestern, small groups of influential Chicago businessmen, including System magazine publisher and editor Arch W. Shaw, begin discussions of finance and banking. Howard expresses support for the department’s ambition to establish a business school in Chicago’s Loop.

Earl Dean Howard organizes the first formal course in finance on the Chicago campus, introducing 58 employees of banks and brokerages to the principles of “Money, Credit, Banking and Corporate Finance.” Although the course is offered under the auspices of the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Banking, Howard opens it to all persons in the banking trade and to anyone interested in “practical finance,” which encompassed banking, brokerage, securities, and accounting.

Howard and Seymour Walton, president of the Illinois Society of Certified Public Accountants and partner of a prosperous LaSalle Street firm, introduce a formal course in accounting for experienced bookkeepers. With tuition at $30 per course, Howard announces that both the accounting and finance courses would count as credit toward the university’s proposed School of Commerce. According to Howard, the students in these pioneering courses would constitute “a group of representative men who shall form the nucleus of the Evening School to be established in 1908.”

University leaders convince Joseph Schaffner, a Chicago businessman who co-founded men’s clothier Hart, Schaffner & Marx, that a general, university-level business training is the best means of creating a professional business leadership class. With Schaffner’s promise of substantial financial commitment, the university’s three H’s—Abram W. Harris, Willard E. Hotchkiss,and Earl Dean Howard—joined the executive committee of Northwestern’s Board of Trustees in recommending that “an evening institution for higher business education” be established near the Loop.

The School of Commerce forms a Board of Guarantors with representatives from various segments of the Chicago business community, including members of the Illinois Society of Certified Public Accountants, the Chicago Association of Commerce, and the Industrial Club of Chicago. The board oversees operations for the school, assuming financial responsibility to the extent of $5,000 for its solvency during the first three years. As Willard Hotchkiss notes, the board’s greatest value is its “moral support,” which proves “a large influence in bringing students to the school.” Guarantor firms also provide resource materials for school faculty.

The School of Commerce appoints Hotchkiss as its first dean and hires faculty for the first year. In October, an inaugural ceremony is held at Tremont House in downtown Chicago. In his keynote address, New York University Dean Joseph F. Johnson proclaims that the “laws of business are as relentless as the laws of nature,” and defines the role and obligation of collegiate commerce schools to place the professional status of business on the same level as medicine and the law: a “science of business and administration.” Johnson also speaks of the benefits of increased economic and occupational mobility such an education would bestow, recalling the experience of one of his own students who, after the completion of the course, supposedly “not only increased his earning capacity from $15 a week to $3,000 a year, but also had won a pretty girl with more money.”

The school expands its curriculum far beyond technical training. Innovative courses such as the “Psychology of Business, Advertising, and Sales” introduce students to human behavior and marketing, among other topics. Dean Hotchkiss teaches courses in business ethics that ask students to examine issues such as the “business man as citizen” and the “civic functions of commercial bodies such as associations of commerce, commercial clubs, and boards of trade.”

Hotchkiss expresses support for a full-time undergraduate day program in commerce at Northwestern, arguing that the school’s reputation would suffer if its mission was confined to meeting the needs of employed clerks and bookkeepers enrolled in evening classes and not a broader clientele such as the Evanston day students.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Walter Dill Scott, a member of the Department of Psychology who also teaches in the School of Commerce, does pioneering work in modern advertising, marketing and personal management theory. He also produces several seminal textbooks on these subjects and later consults for leading Chicago businesses, such as Marshall Field and Co. and Hart, Schaffner & Marx, helping improve their personnel policies. He would do the same for the U.S. Army when World War I erupted, ultimately earning the Distinguished Service Medal in 1919 for his method of identifying potential military officers from among all recruits.

With the expiration of the school’s original agreement with its Board of Guarantors, businessman Joseph Schaffner proposes a subscription system in which he would contribute $5,000 annually for five years if an additional $20,000 could be raised each year from other subscribers. The school’s small but continual deficit was reduced by contributions from Schaffner between 1914 and 1919. To the school Schaffner contributed more than $13,000, and his estate after his death in 1918. Schaffner’s widow supported the school’s first substantial library.

Along with Harvard University, Northwestern pioneers the “case method,” or “case system,” of instruction. A marked departure from the traditional system, which focused on descriptive materials and lectures, the new method improves decision-making ability in executive training. It also supports Northwestern’s mission of going beyond technical training to emphasize analysis.

The faculty and Board of Trustees approve a degree program leading to the Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.), to coordinate courses in commerce and economics on the Evanston campus. The new program serves as a crucial intermediate step toward establishing a separate, full-time undergraduate and graduate day program at Northwestern.

Professor Arthur Swanson teaches what is credited as the school’s first “marketing” course, using what he termed a detailed “problems method” that drew upon his real-world consulting and research.

David Himmelblau receives the school’s first B.B.A. and is soon promoted to assistant professor of commerce. Himmelblau, who had been awarded the Illinois Certified Accountants’ Prize and a Commerce Diploma in 1911, had taught accounting in the school’s evening program.

Northwestern’s Willard Hotchkiss and Walter Dill Scott are among a small number of academics who in June create the National Association of Teachers of Advertising (NATA), which would eventually develop into the American Marketing Association.

The Evanston-based program is housed in Harris Hall. At the start of World War I, women students account for about 6 percent of the School of Commerce student body. As the war continues, female enrollment grows, staying close to 12 percent throughout the 1920s. During this time, at least 20 percent of commerce students are foreign born, and the average age of the evening division students is 25.

To strengthen further the relationship between the school and the Chicago business community, the school sponsors a lecture series directed toward potential employers of students. Businessmen from Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, Western Electric, and Hart, Schaffner & Marx attend these lectures on business administration.
Photo © Chicago History Museum (DN-0056060)

Total annual enrollment exceeds 1,000. In the school’s first decade, the university awarded 90 diplomas in Commerce.

Dean Hotchkiss resigns to enter business. The school appoints Arthur E. Swanson dean. Swanson’s deanship was short lived, however, as he would be called away to New York to serve on the War Shipping Board. Nevertheless, Swanson demonstrates a desire to merge theory and practice, including by introducing a series of public lectures on business organization. In addition, the groundwork for the school’s Evanston-based Bachelor of Science in Commerce program is laid, although World War I delays the curriculum’s implementation until 1919. Swanson also serves as a founding member of the American Association of Collegiate Business Schools (AASCB).