Tuck School of Business
The Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College is the graduate business school of Dartmouth College, a private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. It was founded in 1900 as the first institution in the world to offer a master's degree in business administration and is the second oldest Ivy League business school. The school continues to award only the Master of Business Administration degree, through a full-time, residential program.
History
Founding
At the turn of the 20th century, Dartmouth College president William Jewett Tucker decided to explore the possibility of establishing a school of business to educate the growing number of Dartmouth alumni entering the commercial world. Additionally, Tucker was concerned about business leadership in a broad social sense, or, as he put it, "training commensurate with the larger meaning of business", and so began soliciting interest among Dartmouth alumni.Through a renewed friendship, Tucker enlisted the support of his former roommate from his undergraduate years at Dartmouth, Edward Tuck, who had since become a wealthy banker and philanthropist. Enthusiastically agreeing to help, on September 8, 1899, Edward Tuck donated an initial grant of $300,000 — in the form of 1,700 shares of preferred stock in the Great Northern Railway Company of Minnesota — to found and endow the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, which was named in memory of Tuck's father and Dartmouth alumnus, Amos Tuck. In January 1900, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees passed a vote to formally establish the school.
The Tuck Pattern
The new school's tuition fee cost $100 for the few students who enrolled in the first year; graduates of the two-year program received a Master of Commercial Science degree. The curriculum involved both traditional liberal arts fields as well as economic and finance education. Specifically, the first-years were required to take Modern History, Economics, Political Science, Sociology, Foreign Language, and English Composition and Speaking; second-year courses included Modern History and Diplomacy, Finance, Transportation, Insurance, Law, Municipal Administration, Demography and Social Institutions, Language, and Practice Organizations.Undergraduate Dartmouth professors taught most of the first-year courses at Tuck, while outside guest instructors and business-people, such as an export merchant, an attorney, an insurance company president, and an accountant, educated the second-year students. Edward Tuck, pleased with the breadth of experience found in the school's instructors, wrote to Dartmouth president Tucker in February 1902, "I am glad that it will be the aim of the school to bring students in touch with practical businessmen."
While other business programs tended to offer specialized technical courses linked neither to the liberal arts tradition nor to the broader purposes of business, Tuck maintained itself as a school of general management in the broadest liberal sense, to which a study by the Carnegie Corporation observed, "The Tuck School probably went further than any other institution in the pre-war period in putting its work on a demanding intellectual level." Thus, the Tuck School's emphasis on a broad education in general management was adopted by many other emerging business schools, and was dubbed the "Tuck Pattern."
Succession of leadership and expansion
Students of the first class held their studies in the Hubbard House, located on North Main Street across the College Green. A year later, in 1901, Tuck donated an additional $100,000 to build the original Tuck Hall. The school grew and prospered under the leadership of Frank H. Dixon, who served as the school's first secretary and later left to join the Dartmouth economics department full-time in 1904, followed by Harlow Person, Tuck's first dean, from 1904 through 1919. Person, in 1911, invited 300 leaders of industry, including Frederick Winslow Taylor — who later became a professor at Tuck — and Lillian Gilbreth, to a major conference on scientific management, which business historians consider the kick-off for what later became the worldwide scientific management movement.Afterward, the school was led by a Tuck alumnus, William R. Gray, from 1919 through 1937. During this period of growth, Dartmouth president Ernest Martin Hopkins wrote often to Edward Tuck reflecting on the school's flourishing alumni and faculty. In the late 1920s, Hopkins sought to unify the Tuck School by establishing a central campus, uniting the school's academic and residential facilities. In order to do so, however, Hopkins had to receive permission to do so from Edward Tuck, as the documents of incorporation stipulated that the original Tuck Hall be used exclusively for a business school. Hopkins wrote to Tuck in July 1928, then 85 years old and living in France, outlining his reasons for the proposed move and asking permission to release Dartmouth from the stipulation regarding the use of the original Tuck Hall.
Edward Tuck, going above merely granting his permission, wrote back in August 1928, "The success and growth of the school have gone far beyond our original expectations, and we have every reason to be proud of it. It would be a satisfaction to me to do it if I could, rather than have outside capital contribute to a work which thus far I have taken care of financially myself."
Tuck donated 600 shares of Chase National Bank, which was sold for $567,766 a couple months before the Black Tuesday crash at the start of the Great Depression. On the west side of the campus, Edward Tuck Hall was completed in 1930 and was flanked by two dormitories, Chase Hall and Woodbury Hall — named for two Dartmouth alumni, Salmon P. Chase and Levi Woodbury, respectively. Stell Hall, the dining facility adjacent to Chase Hall, was named after Tuck's wife, Julia Stell. With the completion of the project, Tuck students now lived together and took classes together.
Post-World War II changes
In 1937, Herluf V. Olsen succeeded Gray as the dean of Tuck and led the school until 1951. During his tenure, Olsen created the joint Tuck-Thayer program between the business school and engineering school. In 1942, the school's name changed to the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, and under Dean Arthur P. Upgren's leadership, who ran Tuck from 1952 to 1957, the degree program changed from the MCS to the modern Master of Business Administration in 1953.Until the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Tuck School catered primarily to Dartmouth students, accepting undergraduates during their third year. Such students made up 90 percent of each class at Tuck. Under Dean Karl Hill, who led the school from 1957 to 1968, Tuck shifted its focus to soliciting a national student body to create a more diverse student body. In addition, Hill created the Tuck Associates program in 1964 to foster relationships between Tuck and the business community. By securing grants from the Sloan Foundation, Hill also brought in additional faculty to the school by setting up funding for summer research.
The expansion under Hill culminated in the creation of the school's board of overseers as well as a full-time admissions office in the early 1960s. The resulting expansion in the late 1960s saw additional growth of the campus with the construction of a new dormitory and, through a generous donation made by Thomas G. Murdough, founder of Little Tikes, the Murdough Center, which contains the Feldberg Business and Engineering Library.
John Hennessey, who succeeded Hill as dean in 1968, continued to revamp the curriculum and recruit new faculty members. The Ford Foundation's Gorden-Howell report and Carnegie Corporation's Pierson report both singled out the Tuck School as having a serious academic curriculum, including newly emerging disciplines in quantitative and behavioral sciences, as well as organizational behavior and business policy.
Perhaps Hennessey's most significant changes were his efforts to recruit minority students for the Tuck program. He served as the founding chairman of the Council for Opportunity in Graduate Management Education and visited dozens of schools to recruit minority students to Tuck. In 1964, Tuck admitted its first minority student and, in 1968, its first woman student.
1970s to present day
In 1971, Hennessey established the Tuck Annual Giving program, which, in its first year, drew $71,000 from the 27 percent of alumni who donated. In the same year, Tuck Today, the school's alumni magazine was founded. By 1972, Tuck alumni clubs were established in major cities across the country, which helped establish Tuck's role in Dartmouth's first capital campaign. Hennessey also oversaw the founding of the Tuck Executive Program in 1974 alongside professor Kenneth Davis.Under Deans Richard West, who served from 1976 to 1983, and Colin Blaydon, the school's curriculum and faculty expanded extensively, and applications increased by one-third. Since the late 1980s, Tuck has continued to expand in student body and faculty size, and has seen the establishment of two new campus buildings as well as several research centers and non-degree business programs.
Academics
MBA Program
The Tuck School offers a single degree: the two-year, full-time Master of Business Administration. Students may specialize within the MBA in fields such as finance or marketing, but a specialization is not required for graduation. First-year MBA students at Tuck undertake a 32-week core curriculum in general management and a specialized First Year Project. During their second year, students take 12 elective courses and design their own focused field of study. The school stresses a collaborative and teamwork-based approach to learning, which it touts as one of its assets for "building the interpersonal skills required for business leadership." However, this emphasis on cooperative group learning has been criticized as too "touchy-feely" for students entering the competitive business world, and the emphasis on consensus-building as detrimental to students' ability to make quick, independent decisions.In the past, The MBA program has held a top-10 ranking in multiple publications, including U.S. News & World Report, Bloomberg, The Economist, Forbes, Business Insider, and Vault.