Tag: Centennial

Washington University signed an agreement with the US government, launching a six-year collaboration with Korea University and Yonsei University to repair and modernize business education programs in South Korea that were gutted by war, languishing from a stagnant economy, and stalled in old-fashioned teaching practices.

From 1958 to 1964, the Korea Project sent Olin faculty on extended tours of duty in Seoul to counsel educators overseas, demonstrate new teaching styles, write new curricula, and rebuild business libraries at the two schools.

Meanwhile, dozens of South Korean business professors observed, studied, and earned business degrees in Washington University classrooms in St. Louis.

“The Korea Project is one of the great chapters in Olin’s history and one of the important ones in Washington University’s history,” said Bob Virgil, Olin Dean Emeritus, who served as a graduate student aid to the program’s leadership and still counts many of the Korean exchange students as longtime personal friends.

Bob Virgil talks about the Korea Project and its impact in video above.

Goals of the project

Washu professors teaching in Seoul classroom.

Nobody credits the Korea Project for South Korea’s economic rise, but many agree on both sides of the Pacific that the intense concentration of academic resources helped push the nation’s business community in the right direction.

“It was a great contribution that Washington University made in Korea,” said Ja Song, who came to St. Louis to earn his MBA as part of the Korea Project’s effort to train overseas colleagues.

After graduating in 1961, Song served a mandatory 16-month tour in the Korean army, and returned to earn his doctorate in accounting. He taught for 10 years at the University of Connecticut, then returned to teach in Korea until 1992 when he began a four-year term as president of Yonsei University—the college that had recommended him for the Korea Project in the first place.

Link to the entire story on the Korea Project by Kurt Greenbaum on the Olin100 website.

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John E. Simon, for whom Simon Hall is named, was a St. Louis investor and philanthropist. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1896, Mr. Simon attended Smith Academy in St. Louis. After serving during World War I and graduating from Harvard University in 1918, Mr. Simon joined the firm of I.M. Simon & Company in St. Louis in 1919. Founded in 1874 by his great uncle, the firm is believed to have been the third oldest New York Stock Exchange member firm and the oldest continuous member firm west of the Mississippi River.

Mr. Simon became a partner in 1925 and guided the firm through the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Depression, and World War II. The firm helped form and finance many national and local companies, including Delta Airlines, Litton Industries, and McDonnell Douglas Corp.

Simon directed the firm as General Partner for nearly 50 years and remained active in the firm as a Limited Partner for many years after that. Simon & Co. merged with R. Rowland & Co. in 1988, and the firm was acquired by Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in 1989.

Click on image above to watch the video of Dean Emeritus Bob Virgil talking about his friend John Simon.

John Simon with business school students in newly opened Simon Hall, 1987.

In April 1984, a reception in honor of Mr. and Mrs. John E. Simon was held to announce the naming of the new business school building under construction. It would be named John E. Simon Hall thanks to their generous gift to support the school.

Link to complete profile of John E. Simon on the Olin100 website.

When Simon Hall was dedicated in April 1987, it was one of the largest academic buildings on the Danforth Campus with 80,000 square feet of usable floor space.

On Friday, April 21 Olin Business School will recognize the 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award Honorees followed by a very special gala to commemorate our Centennial. The evening begins in a spectacular tent on Mudd Field, and the Gala will include various entertainment, festive food stations and cocktails, a fun photo booth, and an interactive digital exhibit showcasing Olin’s rich history.

We will not be hosting a traditional sit-down dinner, but there will be ample gourmet food to enjoy and a variety of seating on every level of the building. The evening will conclude with a celebratory fireworks display as we embark on Olin’s second century of excellence. The exciting and commemorative event promises to be a night to remember.

Distinguished Alumni Awards & Centennial Gala

• Bill Broderick, MBA 1976
  Partner (Retired), Edward Jones
• Lee Fixel, BSBA 2002
  Partner, Tiger Global Management
• Nina Leigh Krueger, MBA 1994
  President, Nestle Purina U.S.
• Dave Moellenhoff, EN 1992, EN 1992, MBA 1994
  Co-Founder & Former Chief Technology Officer, Salesforce.com, Inc.
• Rick L. Ryan, PhD, MBA 1994
  CEO, Apertus Pharmaceuticals, LLC; General Partner, Cultivation Capital Life Sciences

Dean’s Medalists

Mahendra R. Gupta, PhD and Sunita Garg
Former Dean and Geraldine J. and Robert L. Virgil Professor of Accounting and Management

Emerging Leaders Celebration

• Arvan S. Chan, MBA 2009, MHA 2009
  Vice President, International Markets, Centene Corporation
• Chuck K. Cohn, BSBA 2008
  Founder and CEO, Varsity Tutors
• James A. Mourey, BSBA 2005
  Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, DePaul University
• JD Ross, BSBA 2012
  Co-founder, Opendoor
• Meghan O’Meara Winegrad, MBA 2006
  Senior Director, Product Management, Express Scripts

For more information or to register for these events, visit the
Olin Celebration Weekend website

Questions? Contact Anne Peterson at annepeterson@wustl.edu or 314-935-5872

Mark your calendar:  All events are complimentary! Consider making a gift in honor of Olin’s 100 years of excellence!

Our business school had a leader named Trump who became dean in 1954. Ross M. Trump came to WashU in 1949 from Tulane University, where he taught marketing. Trump was a native of Ohio and earned undergraduate, masters, and doctorate degrees from Ohio State University.

According to Washington University historian Ralph E. Morrow, Trump “was endowed with bulldog determination, canny judgment, and knew where he wanted to take his school”—which, as it turned out, was abroad.

We may take traveling abroad for granted in the 21st century, but in 1958, “international collaboration” was a new concept for the business school and the University. With financial help from the International Cooperation Agency (ICA), the predecessor to the Agency for International Development, the business school launched a cooperative program with Yonsei and Korea Universities in South Korea to re-establish and update management training in the aftermath of the Korean War.

Business school classroom in South Korea

A contingent of WashU business professors moved their families to Korea during the project while Korean students and professors came to St. Louis to study. In 1960, another project funded by the ICA brought approximately 50 students from Tunisia to St. Louis for two years of study in business.

In addition to international collaboration, Dean Trump worked diligently to cultivate relations with the St. Louis business community, inviting leaders to teach and serve as guest speakers on campus.

Curriculum was also a top priority—both undergraduate and graduate. During Dean Trump’s tenure, the school’s two-year undergraduate curriculum was revamped while eliminating degrees in retailing and public administration. A national trend toward graduate degrees inspired Dean Trump to implement a graduate program in 1958 that offered an MBA and a curriculum leading to a doctoral degree. However, during the first six years of Dean Trump’s tenure, the business school saw the number of graduate students grow almost 80 percent, while undergraduate enrollment dropped by almost 12 percent.

In an effort to reverse the decline of undergraduate student enrollment, Dean Trump proposed the introduction of a four-year undergraduate curriculum in 1958 and again in 1960. Both times he failed to win support. In fact, the policy of admitting freshmen to a four-year undergraduate program at WashU did not become a reality until 1973.

Trump resigned in 1967 to return to teaching and research. In an obituary published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch in August of 1994, Trump was praised by a former star student, Bob Virgil, who later became a dean of the business school. The article stated,

“Robert L. Virgil, another colleague and friend, said Mr. Trump was ‘ahead of his time’ in terms of international education, both in Korea and Tunisia. ‘He was one of the leaders of business education in this country, and made a significant contribution to its development nationally and internationally.’”

Read more about Olin’s first century on the Olin100 website.

Photos courtesy of WUSTL Archives. Top photo: WashU business school professors arrive in Seoul, S.Korea.

As part of our Centennial series, we turn the clock back to the 1960s when the business school outgrew its first building and moved to a remodeled dormitory.

This is the text of an actual memo found in the Olin archives. It’s from 1961 and typed on a typewriter with carbon paper to create multiple copies:

“Memo to all Business School Faculty

From: Dr. Arthur Mason Jr., Acting Dean

Subject: Dedication and open house of Prince Hall on May 5 and 7, 1961

In the evening of Friday, May 5, you, the faculty, will be host to Mr. Prince at a stag dinner in Prince Hall. The schedule of events for this affair are as follows: 5:30-6:30 p.m., refreshments at Chancellor Shepley’s house; 6:30 p.m., dinner and dedication at Prince Hall. This affair will be a small, informal one at Mr. Prince’s request.

After dinner, Mr. Prince will be given a personal tour of the building, so I hope that all of us will have our offices available for display.”

Frank J. Prince was coming to the WashU campus to see a project that he helped fund. Namely, the transformation of a former dormitory into an academic building that would be called Prince Hall—the home of the business school from 1961 to 1987.

On the day Prince Hall held its open house, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that “Prince Hall…has three times the number of seminar rooms and a third more classrooms than the business school’s former headquarters, Duncker Hall. It has a machine room and statistics laboratory, and library space for 15,000 volumes.” The May 7, 1961 edition of the newspaper also reported that the remodeling of Liggett Hall from a dorm to the new home of the business school “cost about $325,000.”

Frank J. Prince, on right, looks on as the building formerly known as Liggett Hall is dedicated as Prince Hall.

Prince was a Director and former President of Universal Match Corporation, a company founded in St. Louis in 1925, and described by The New York Times as “the world’s largest manufacturer of matchbooks.”

Ironically, the matchbook magnate’s name would replace an even more famous name—Liggett—that had graced the dormitory since its construction in 1902. Elizabeth J. Liggett, widow of St. Louis tobacco merchant and partner in the firm Liggett and Myers, was among the small group of donors Robert Brookings had assembled to fund the first buildings on WashU’s new hilltop campus west of Forest Park.

The Liggett dormitory for men was constructed to the west of the “first quadrangle,” known today as the Brookings Quad, and was located on the current site of the Danforth University Center (DUC).

Gary Hochberg, who served as dean of the undergraduate program for 25 years before developing the Specialized Masters Programs until his retirement in 2014, remembers what he called the ‘Prince Hall two-step.’  “Some of the hallways were so narrow in Prince that when two people crossed paths,” Hochberg recalls with a smile, “they had to turn sideways to pass each other. It was like doing a little dance just to get down the hall.”

A 2006 Student Life article says Vice Chancellor Emeritus Frederic Volkmann cited Prince Hall’s “troubling features such as numerous load-bearing walls, poorly constructed rooms and difficulties with making the building accessible as per the Americans with Disabilities Act” as reasons for its demolition later that year. The Danforth University Center (DUC) has replaced the historical building.

For more stories about Olin’s first century in business, please visit Olin100.wustl.edu

Photos courtesy of WashU Archives.

WashU’s School of Commerce and Finance was founded in 1917 as the First World War was heading into its final year. In 1920, as the country and economy began to recover from the war, Student Life reported University increases in tuition, salaries, and room rents:

“The increase in tuition applies only to students entering Washington for the first time…The tuition in the College, the School of Commerce and Finance, the School of Architecture, and the School of Engineering will be raised from $150 to $200 per year.”

Faculty salaries were set to increase by 50% over the 1916-1917 rates for professors making $4,000 or less. The increase was contingent on reaching a campaign goal for a salary endowment fund.

In 1925, Isador Loeb was named the third dean of the business school. He had been acting president of the University of Missouri, was a well-known constitutional lawyer, a skilled political scientist, and an expert on tax laws and Missouri history. The new dean had a keen interest in public service and was responsible for a new focus and the new name: the School of Business and Public Administration.

Loeb introduced bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in public administration to the curriculum at WashU, which had previously offered only BS and MS degrees in business administration.

By 1929, the business school had 200 students enrolled and 100 candidates for degrees. It had changed its name to include Public Administration a few years earlier and was clearly gaining in stature as suggested in this essay from The Hatchett yearbook:

“The man with a business college education is receiving recognition of a new character. He is succeeding where the so-called ‘practical’ man is failing. After considering this situation and the fact that there are more openings for business men than for any other line of workers, the wonderful scope and possibilities of this school in the future will be seen.”

Dean Loeb retired in 1940 after serving longer than the previous two deans. He did not retire from public service. Archival documents describe Loeb’s post-deanship career this way, “He accepted the grueling job of the Office of Price Administration (OPA) price administrator for the St. Louis area, served as a special investigator for the National War Labor Board, and became involved in the drive for a new state constitutional convention. He died in 1954 at age 85.”

1923 illustration from The Hatchet yearbook for a student group called The Quad-Wrangles.

Read more on the Centennial website, Olin100.wustl.edu

Sources: “Fifty Years in Business,” by George Monaghan, Washington Magazine, 1967; Washington University in St. Louis, A History, Ralph E. Morrow, 1996; The Hatchett, Washington University yearbook, 1923, 1929; WUSTL Archives