, founder of the Tuck School
Founding , the namesake of the Tuck School, was a founder of the
Republican Party. At the turn of the 20th century, Dartmouth College president
William Jewett Tucker decided to explore the possibility of establishing a school of business to educate the growing number of Dartmouth alumni entering the commercial world. Additionally, Tucker was concerned about business leadership in a broad social sense, or, as he put it, "training commensurate with the larger meaning of business", and so began soliciting interest among Dartmouth alumni. Enthusiastically agreeing to help, on September 8, 1899, Edward Tuck donated an initial grant of $300,000 — in the form of 1,700 shares of
preferred stock in the
Great Northern Railway Company of Minnesota — to found and endow the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, which was named in memory of Tuck's father and Dartmouth alumnus,
Amos Tuck. In January 1900, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees passed a vote to formally establish the school.
The Tuck Pattern The new school's tuition fee cost $100 for the few students who enrolled in the first year; graduates of the two-year program received a Master of Commercial Science degree (MCS). followed by
Harlow Person, Tuck's first dean, from 1904 through 1919. Afterward, the school was led by a Tuck alumnus, William R. Gray, from 1919 through 1937. During this period of growth, Dartmouth president
Ernest Martin Hopkins wrote often to
Edward Tuck reflecting on the school's flourishing alumni and faculty. In the late 1920s, Hopkins sought to unify the Tuck School by establishing a central campus, uniting the school's academic and residential facilities. In order to do so, however, Hopkins had to receive permission to do so from Edward Tuck, as the documents of incorporation stipulated that the original Tuck Hall be used exclusively for a business school. Hopkins wrote to Tuck in July 1928, then 85 years old and living in France, outlining his reasons for the proposed move and asking permission to release Dartmouth from the stipulation regarding the use of the original Tuck Hall. Edward Tuck, going above merely granting his permission, wrote back in August 1928, "The success and growth of the school have gone far beyond our original expectations, and we have every reason to be proud of it. It would be a satisfaction to me to do it [that is, donate the funds] if I could, rather than have outside capital contribute to a work which thus far I have taken care of financially myself." Tuck donated 600 shares of
Chase National Bank, which was sold for $567,766 a couple months before the
Black Tuesday crash at the start of the
Great Depression. On the west side of the campus, Edward Tuck Hall was completed in 1930 and was flanked by two dormitories, Chase Hall and Woodbury Hall — named for two Dartmouth alumni,
Salmon P. Chase and
Levi Woodbury, respectively. Stell Hall, the dining facility adjacent to Chase Hall, was named after Tuck's wife, Julia Stell. With the completion of the project, Tuck students now lived together and took classes together.
Post-World War II changes In 1937, Herluf V. Olsen succeeded Gray as the dean of Tuck and led the school until 1951. During his tenure, Olsen created the joint Tuck-
Thayer program between the business school and engineering school. In 1942, the school's name changed to the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, and under Dean Arthur P. Upgren's leadership, who ran Tuck from 1952 to 1957, the degree program changed from the MCS to the modern
Master of Business Administration (MBA) in 1953. Until the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Tuck School catered primarily to Dartmouth students, accepting undergraduates during their third year. Such students made up 90 percent of each class at Tuck.
John Hennessey, who succeeded Hill as dean in 1968, continued to revamp the curriculum and recruit new faculty members. The
Ford Foundation's Gorden-Howell report and
Carnegie Corporation's Pierson report both singled out the Tuck School as having a serious academic curriculum, including newly emerging disciplines in quantitative and behavioral sciences, as well as organizational behavior and business policy. Perhaps Hennessey's most significant changes were his efforts to recruit minority students for the Tuck program. He served as the founding chairman of the Council for Opportunity in Graduate Management Education and visited dozens of schools to recruit minority students to Tuck. In 1964, Tuck admitted its first minority student and, in 1968, its first woman student. Under Deans Richard West, who served from 1976 to 1983, and Colin Blaydon (1983–1990), the school's curriculum and faculty expanded extensively, and applications increased by one-third. Since the late 1980s, Tuck has continued to expand in student body and faculty size, and has seen the establishment of two new campus buildings as well as several research centers and non-degree business programs. == Academics ==