Cunningham Tells Busy School History To Joint Faculty-Student Audience

"Crass commercialism" was the general candid opinion of the Business School in its embrionic stages back in 1908 when William L. Cunningham, James P. Hill Professor of Transportation, was one of 30 original members of its teaching staff.

Professor Cunningham told an informal gathering of all the Busy School faculty and students Saturday night in Baker Hall that he and his so-called "crass commercialist" had thought enough of their brain-child in the "good old days" to submit to being crowded into cellars and housed in cabby holes for the first few years of its unprogressive development.

With 30 regular students and 47 special students in 1908, the 30 faculty members held classes for the most part in basements of buildings around the Yard. One of the favorite subterranean locations was in the bottom of Lawrence Hall, which was made accessible by the installation of a modification of an old immense heating plant.

Housed With Theologians

A terrible and humiliating experience for many of the Business students was in being housed in dormitories of the theological pupils, who were as little interested in business as they were in theology.

This was soon ruled out, however, by the University when a Busy School pursuitee, who had been a war veteran, became intolerably infuriated by a loud discussion in a room above his own concerning a religious problem and fired his revolver into the celling five times.

School Crew

Getting off to a paralyzing start did not deter the period of expansion which get under full steam around 1910. Three years later, in 1913, Professor Cunningham told how the University finally fully realized that the little cellar institution was not only a mushroom, but a good one.

The school was recognized in a recognizable way, and the faculty, expanded somewhat by that time, was shifted to full-time employment on the Business School operations. Previously they had spent part of the time in the instructions of the arts and sciences and part of the time playing around with their real interest.

The tremendous development recorded from then on was a number of successive loops; expansion rose from the original 77 members to 232 to 1913, and almost 1000 by 1931. Professor Cunningham has been associated with 10,000 men.