1912–2002
Celebrating the Oldest Business School in the South
90 Years in Business

By Paul Karr and David Dodson

The seeds that would become the Terry College of Business were sown back in 1912, when the state authorized a School of Commerce to begin instruction at the University of Georgia.

Three decades earlier, the University of Pennsylvania had established the first undergraduate program in business. At the turn of the century, Dartmouth would start the first graduate business degree - a Master of Commercial Science. Seven students graduated from the Dartmouth program in 1902. Now, 100 years later, U.S. business schools annually confer 100,000 MBA degrees.

Today, there are more than 700 MBA programs in operation and more than 1,200 institutions granting bachelor’s degrees in business. Out of those 1,200 undergraduate programs, UGA’s business school can count itself among the first 1 percent to open their doors and, most assuredly, claim its title as an academic pioneer in the New South.

In the early days, School of Commerce majors (then known as “concentration groups”) included such topics as industrial relations, finance, and even secretarial sciences. Around mid-century, accounting coursework included such requirements as ‘Principles and Operation of the IBM Tabulating Equipment,’ and the business school’s dean expressed concern, in 1944, about the “total lack of a modern business machine laboratory and an adequate budget to staff and to employ and retain good accounting teachers.”

Robert Preston Brooks, the college’s first dean, went on to note that “the lack of adding machines and comptometers” — whatever those were — “has forced the accounting students to spend many unnecessary hours in manual addition, wasting valuable time which should have been employed in the mastering of the theory and principles of accounting.”

The college soon overcame this lack of comptometers, and began steadily growing in size after World War II. In June of 1947, it assumed responsibility for the Evening School of Commerce, a fast-growing night school in downtown Atlanta that was then without formal accreditation. With a single stroke of the pen, UGA instigated the tricky blending of a college-town business school with a big-city entity.

However, this bold experiment would only last eight years - doomed, in large part, by its own success. The Atlanta business college continued to grow so quickly in enrollment that the state’s Board of Regents decided to create a new and independent urban campus, the Georgia State College of Business Administration - known today as Georgia State University. UGA’s College of Business Administration once again became a distant satellite of Atlanta.

During the late ’60s and into the ’70s, Dean William Flewellen Jr. trained his focus on faculty development, actively recruiting talented faculty from outside the Southeast with broader publishing, teaching, and cultural exposure. Flewellen’s strong emphasis on research, in particular, would become his legacy. And with it, the college’s reputation for faculty excellence began to grow.

In 1977, the college created one of the first five Schools of Accounting in the nation. Five years later, it was endowed and named the J.M. Tull School of Accounting. In 1980, the college became the first in the nation to offer a graduate degree in marketing research. The master’s program, administered by the Coca-Cola Center for Marketing Studies, maintains its reputation as the foremost degree in marketing intelligence.

Georgia was changing, as well - and swiftly. Atlanta’s boom as a manufacturing, technology, transportation and hospitality center during the 1980s and 1990s spawned an influx of workers, capital, resources and economic growth. Suburban communities sprung up almost overnight - part of what would eventually become the world’s fastest urban sprawl - and the demand for undergraduate and graduate students in business surged dramatically.

The college was ready for the challenge. Dean Albert W. Niemi Jr. became the prime architect of a major capital campaign to increase the college’s endowment. It grew from $3.5 million when he became dean in 1983 to $32.5 million by the time he moved on to another institution in 1996. Today, the college’s endowment stands at more than $56 million. Niemi also created the Georgia Economic Outlook luncheon in Atlanta, an important harbinger that the college intended to become visible again in the capital of the South.

In October 1991, the College of Business Administration was renamed the C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry College of Business to honor two distinguished benefactors whose support made possible a series of endowed chairs, faculty fellowships and scholarships. This renaming also elevated the visibility of the College, while the increased endowment helped the college recruit and retain key faculty.

In 1995, a devastating fire seriously damaged Brooks Hall, the home of Terry College since 1928. The building was beautifully restored and reopened by the end of 1996. At the same time Brooks Hall was being renovated, alumni and the business community were privately funding a new high-tech classroom building to be named for University of Georgia graduate and former CEO of Bankers Trust, Charles S. Sanford Jr., and his wife, Mary McRitchie Sanford.

When Dean P. George Benson arrived from Rutgers University in 1998, he found the Terry College to be covering all the essentials for undergraduate and graduate students — “a very good meat and potatoes business school.” But the college offered little in the way of executive education for middle- and senior-level managers, and no degree programs were offered in off-campus locations.

That became the impetus for Terry’s second march on Atlanta, ending an absence of more than 40 years. The Terry Third Thursday executive speaker series was the first beachhead established by the college in March 2000. The monthly lecture series took advantage of the opening of the UGA Alumni Center in Buckhead’s Atlanta Financial Center.

Next came the college’s first off-campus degree program since spinning off the Atlanta Evening Division in the 1950s. The Terry Evening MBA program began enrolling working professionals at the University System Center in Gwinnett County in August 2000. A year later, the Terry College would move deeper into Atlanta with its Executive MBA program at the UGA Alumni Center. And just this fall, an undergraduate general business degree was introduced at the Gwinnett University Center. Today, the Terry College has over 250 students in degree programs in metro Atlanta.

Intermittent with its heightened visibility in Atlanta, the college also added customized MBA programs for PricewaterhouseCoopers and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site. PwC’s management consulting practice (now called IBM Business Consulting Services) began collaborating with the Terry College in 1998 on an MBA program that continues to bring consultants from across North America to campus five long weekends per year with about half of the two-year curriculum taught via distance learning.

Scanning the horizon, the college will be guided for many years to come by the strategic plan that was adopted by the faculty in December 1999. In it, the college embraced the need to build closer relations with the business community, globalize its programs, and develop a Terry College culture.

Most significantly, the faculty voted to develop three key areas of academic focus: Leadership, Enterprise Risk Management and Strategies for Emerging Technologies. As the focal points for those focus areas, the college has established and begun to endow the Institute for Leadership Advancement, the Center for Strategic Risk Management and the Center for Information Systems Leadership.

However, Benson says he believes the legacy of the strategic plan should be an enduring commitment to Terry’s adopted purpose, which is: To develop leaders for the world’s private enterprise system. “Specific goals and objectives will come and go through the years,” he says, “but the reason for our existence should never waver. It points the way to the future and explains our past.”

Other Notable 90th Anniversaries

• The R.M.S. Titanic sets sail from England on April 10, 1912, never to reach port again.
• Boston’s Fenway Park opens to a sellout crowd on April 20, 1912. The Red Sox Beat the New York Highlanders 7-6.
• Nobel Prize-winning economist Milston Friedman is born on July 31, 1912.
• Paramount Studios begins in 1912 in a rented horse barn near Sunset & Vine in Hollywood, California.