User:Vantelimus/Sandboox

The University of California charter, adopted in 1868, included among its goals the study of commerce. University Regents Arthur Rodgers, A.S. Hallidie and George T. Marye Jr. later proposed the establishment of a College of Commerce, which was established on September 13, 1898, when Cora Jane Flood, daughter of industrialist and University of California Regent James C. Flood, donated land to the University specifically to support the study of commerce.

The college’s first faculty members included some American pioneers in the field of business. Simon Litman taught the first course in marketing between 1902 and 1908. Adolph Miller, who was the Flood Professor of the Political Economy and Commerce from 1903 to 1915, later served on the first Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Wesley Clair Mitchell, who taught at Berkeley from 1905 to 1913, is known as the father of the business cycle analysis. Charles Staehling taught accounting at the college from 1921–51, was known for adding a theoretical framework to the praxis-oriented teaching of accounting principles. Henry Mowbray, who taught from 1910 to 1948, wrote the first college textbook on insurance.

The College of Commerce was founded in the liberal arts tradition, drawing on faculty from other disciplines on campus. Carl C. Plehn was appointed the first dean of the new college in 1898. Plehn, a finance professor educated in Germany, drafted the college's first curriculum for a Bachelor of Science degree. The initial course offerings covered legal studies, political studies, political economy, and historical studies, including The History of the Institution of Private Property, History and Principles of Commercial Ethics, and the History of Commerce in All Country and at Every Age. Plehn proposed changes to curriculum in 1915 to give it a more professional focus. The proposal, adopted after World War I, established a program that included two years of liberal arts education followed by junior and senior year commerce study, a pattern still used for the undergraduate program today.

Henry Rand Hatfield, a pioneer in accounting and an early entrant in the Accounting Hall of Fame, became the second dean of the college in 1916. Hatfield had been hired by the University of California in 1904 as the first full-time accounting professor in the country. Among his personal achievements, Hatfield played a leading role in the founding of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and the national honor society, Beta Gamma Sigma. He also published the first paper in the United States on accounting theory. As dean, Hatfield sought to increase the reputation of the College of Commerce by bringing scholars from the East Coast to teach during summer sessions.

After World War I, college enrollment experienced a boom as from veterans and continued to grow even through the Great Depression, increasing from its initial class size of three in 1898 to 1,540 students in 1938. In 1925, the college's third dean, Stuart Daggett, instituted a two-year Master of Science degree. The school's fourth dean, Henry Francis Grady, was appointed in 1928. Grady went on leave from 1934 to 1936 to become an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for whom he worked on reciprocal trade agreements (see Reciprocal Tariff Act). The fifth dean, Robert Calkins, succeeded Grady, but left within a few years to become the dean of the Columbia Business School.

E.T. Grether was appointed the sixth dean of the College of Commerce in 1941. Grether's twenty-year tenure as dean was a time of great change. The college was renamed the Department of Business Administration in 1942 and began offer the two-year upper division curriculum leading to the B.S. in Business Administration. In 1943, the school began offering a one-year graduate program. Grether opened several research centers in the school, including The Institute for Business and Economics Research (1941), The Institute for Industrial Relations (IIR) (1945, now called the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment), and the Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics (1950). Grether tapped Clark Kerr to be the first director of the IIR. Kerr's success in this position led to his becoming the first Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

The Graduate School of Business Administration was opened in 1955. A year later the Ph.D. in Business Administration and executive education programs were founded.