A quarter of a century passed before the Harvard Business School opened in 1908. It followed an endowment to promote an “applied science,” initially assumed to be engineering. Eventually the university opted for business, raising at once the tension between what many supposed to be vocational training and the university’s true purpose of disinterested scholarship. As the first dean, Edwin Gay, searched for a way to resolve this tension he came across the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor himself was skeptical, to say the least, about the value of a university education. He declined to
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