Ralph E. Heilman, a Northwestern graduate with a doctorate from Harvard, is appointed the school’s third dean.

A full-time undergraduate day program leading to the Bachelor of Science in Commerce is instituted on the Evanston campus.

The school establishes the Bureau of Business Research, the nation’s second business research center. With a goal of encouraging substantive faculty contributions to research and publishing, the bureau grows rapidly through the 1920s and dramatically increases the school’s appeal among the business community.

Fred E. Clark, a graduate of the economics program at the University of Illinois, joins the school’s Marketing Department. Clark would produce influential work, including Principles of Marketing (1922), that significantly advanced the discipline by breaking marketing down into its constituent parts, such as assembling, grading, storing, transporting, financing and selling.

The school launches a graduate program leading to the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree, drawing nearly 400 students in its first two years.

Walter Dill Scott, a member of the Department of Psychology, does pioneering work in modern advertising, marketing, and personnel management theory. Serving as a consultant to leading Chicago businesses such as Marshall Field and Co. and Hart, Schaffner and Marx, he helps to improve and develop their promotional and personnel policies. Scott exemplifies how Northwestern, long associated with its classical, liberal arts program on the Evanston Campus, can serve Chicago’s commercial establishment and fulfill the “service and utility” functions of its Chicago campus.

With the support of the Chicago Tribune, Northwestern establishes the Medill School of Journalism. The school operates as a department within the School of Commerce until 1938, when it was reorganized as a separate institution.

Professor Paul Ivey joins the school’s burgeoning Marketing Department. An influential scholar, Ivey published his Principles of Marketing in 1921 and also would contribute many insights and techniques to the field of salesmanship, including through his “Paul Ivey Salesmanship Institute.”

The Evanston-based program moved into Memorial Hall, which comes to be known as “the Little Red Schoolhouse.” It will serve as the program’s home until 1970.

Northwestern establishes the Department of Public Utilities and Transportation.

Richard T. Ely, a nationally recognized economist at Wisconsin, moves his Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities to the School of Commerce.

The School of Commerce establishes a doctoral program. Enrollment is sparse with about 10 students per year until the end of World War II. The program’s first graduate, in 1927, is Paul L. Morrison, who would prove to be an important member of the school’s Finance Department.

The School of Commerce builds a new home for its Chicago-based program, opening Wieboldt Hall in June and marking the occasion with a two-day conference on business. During the event, Dean Heilman noted that business schools no longer represented a luxury for the affluent, but were now instrumental for training people for leadership positions “in every important field of human activity and endeavor.”