A matter of science: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the transformation of American management education, 1950-1964

In 1950, General Motors chairman Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. approached MIT’s leaders about establishing a business school. The result was the School of Industrial Management (SIM), founded in 1952 and renamed in 1964 the MIT Sloan School of Management. During these early years the SIM’s leaders and faculty sought to create something extraordinary: a business school housed, grounded, and inspired by an institute of engi-neering and technology. They strived to apply new scientific techniques to the nascent field of industrial management and to American industrial firms that increasingly demanded rational, analytical, rigorously trained executives. They struggled to integrate the physical and social sciences into their education and research, helping to blaze a trail that long-established peers would not follow until the 1960s. And they strained to balance relevance with independence, colliding repeatedly with Sloan and other external advisors over a proper understanding of academic research, institutions, and cooperation with industry. By 1964 these efforts had developed a school at the forefront of business education’s “new look.” But as the extensive archival records demonstrate, it was never inevitable that they would succeed. Only by ongoing experimentation and agile diplomacy did the School become (in the words of the 1951 Deed of Gift) “a great center of research and education in the field of industrial management.” And although they helped transform management education through integrated, scientifically based study and teaching, the SIM’s deans, faculty, and leaders never found complete consensus on the extent to which industrial management was, in Alfred Sloan’s words, “a matter of science.”2018-06-22T00:00:00