Tuck & Tucker: The Origin Of The Graduate Business School

A simple idea—giving broadly educated students the education needed for a career in business leadership—formed the origin of the MBA degree. The values Dartmouth President William Jewett Tucker and Mr. Edward Tuck articulated over one hundred years ago led to the creation of the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration in 1900 and remain at the heart of the school's efforts today. The needed education, then as now, must be an immersion in business thinking, where students learn from leading scholars and from each other; it must be broad-based; and it must have a global perspective, with inputs from diverse cultures. In its first hundred years, Tuck graduated 7,033 talented women and men who took up leadership positions in virtually every form of organization in all parts of the world. The Tuck School's noble experiment spawned today's massive graduate business education industry, with thousands of MBA programs, with millions of MBA degree holders, and with growing worldwide demand for its talented graduates. The MBA program of today transforms the student in terms of aspirations, career paths, and even lifelong friends. Wayne Broehl's book chronicles how, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mr. Tuck and President Tucker conceived of and launched a powerful educational movement. The Tuck School continues to lead that movement in the twenty-first century.