A SHORT HISTORY OF THE SCHOOL

     The College of Business Administration at UCLA was founded in 1935. It weathered World War II and in 1948 had 13 regular faculty in the Professorial ranks and 8 Lecturers and Associates. The College offered a total of 8 Lower Division, 40 Upper Division, and 17 graduate courses during 1948-49. Half of the graduate courses were in accounting and finance. It awarded a B.S. degree in the concentrations of accounting, finance, marketing, industrial management, office management and general business by offering two years of upper division study following completion of two years of required lower division courses. The strongest program was in accounting with faculty well known for their textbooks and their teaching skills. Howard Noble,Wilbur Karrenbrock, Harry Simons and Wendell Buttrey come to mind

     The MBA degree was awarded through the UCLA Graduate Division.

     1948, Dr. Neil H. Jacoby joined the Faculty and became Dean of the College. He came from the University of Chicago where he had been Vice President in charge of Development and Professor of Finance in the School of Business. (He served as Dean until 1968, or 20 years.)

     Jacoby immediately started to expand the College and enlarge its offerings. In 1950, the name was changed to the School of Business Administration on the grounds that sometime in the future the curriculum areas would become full fledged Departments within the School. This did not happen, although it was placed on the agenda for faculty discussion many times over the twenty years of Jacoby's tenure as Dean. The main reason for keeping to a one-department School was that the faculty could never decide which curriculum areas would join together to become a department. Some areas were large enough to sustain themselves, but other smaller areas had to combine and we could not agree on who would combine with whom. So, today it is still a one department school, somewhat of a rarity in the UC system.

     The School was housed in the first post WWII building built on the UCLA campus together with the faculty of the Department of Economics. The building came to be known as the BAE building. Today it is Dodd Hall.

     In 1952, the School instituted a doctoral program that led to the Ph.D. degree. The first students were admitted in 1953 and the first degrees actually granted in 1958 to Joseph Schabacker, Erling Brecken, and Sister Martin Byrne. Since then, the School has granted 759 Ph. D. degrees (as of the year 2002).

     In 1960, the School changed its name again to the Graduate School of Management (GSM) when it stopped offering an undergraduate degree and became a graduate school along with Stanford, Chicago and Harvard. (UC Berkely continues to offer undergraduate education.)

     In 1961, GSM moved into a new six story, yellow brick building just north of the BAE building and remained there for over 30 years.

     In 1987, John E. Anderson made a substantial gift to UCLA to begin planning and funding a new building complex. The name changed officially to the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. It became known locally as just the Anderson School and more widely as the Anderson School at UCLA. In 2004, the name was changed again, this time to the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

     The new Anderson School buidings were completed in 1995 and comprise a complex of seven named and lettered structures:

     The building design called for a computer network such that every faculty office and staff office desktop computer is connected the network. Every classroom seat and podium, library work table, and study room connects to the network so that student laptops can be plugged into the network in any of these locations for access to the network resources which are maintained by Anderson Academic Information Systems (ACIS).

     Only the early years from 1950 to 1980 are the subject of this history. The years 1981 to date are left to someone else to document.

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