When Harvard University established its graduate business school in 1908, one college alumnus registered his disapproval in the form of a cheeky little poem:
Fair Harvard! I hear that you’ve been such a fool
As to start a ridiculous business school
Where ‘Grocery 2’ and ‘Butchery 4’
Take the place of the classics of yore.
Harvard Business School (HBS) was an early specimen of its kind: an academic training ground for those who would manage the American capitalist economy in its age of conquest. An MBA graduate is more likely to work at the limited liability company that owns the supermarket that controls the butcher’s wages than to personally dissect any meat, but that was hardly the complainer’s point. The stink of a butcher’s shop, once the model of sordid prosperity among the medieval artisan class, served as a convenient, if quaintly classist, metaphor for the…
