Our History

Professor Richard Lyons succeeded Tom Campbell as the school’s fourteenth dean. As dean, Lyons developed the school’s strategic plan and codified the Haas Defining Leadership Principles. He oversaw an expansion of the school’s faculty to its largest size to date, and enhancement of student services, curriculum improvements, a stronger endowment, and a new state-of-the-art building, Connie & Kevin Chou Hall.

Lyons also served as acting dean from 2004-2005.

During the search for a successor to Tyson, Benjamin E. Hermalin, associate dean for academic affairs and chair of the faculty since 1999, filled in as interim dean.

Groundbreaking economist Laura D’Andrea Tyson was appointed as the first woman to serve as dean of the Haas School in 1998. A professor at UC Berkeley since 1978, Tyson became the first woman chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (1993-1995) and the first woman director of the White House National Economic Council (1995-1996).

Later, Tyson filled in as interim dean during the search for a successor to Dean Rich Lyons in 2018.

William A. Hasler, previously vice chairman of consulting for the firm KPMG Peat Marwick, became the school’s eleventh dean in 1991. Hasler was the first Haas dean to come directly from the corporate world, bringing with him a sense of professionalism that helped guide the school’s programs and services in meeting the needs of management practitioners. Hasler faced two major challenges in 1991. The first was to make the long-awaited new home for the Haas School a reality. This mission necessitated raising over $30 million and was accomplished over the next three years with support from the entire Haas School community. Construction of the Haas School complex began in 1992.

Hasler’s second challenge was to further enhance academic, instructional, and outreach programs. With input from alumni, students, and business friends, Hasler worked with the faculty to develop a strategic plan, Vision 2000, to maintain the school’s academic and research excellence while strengthening professional programs, teaching, and outreach. The goal was to ensure that, by the year 2000, the school would be recognized as a preeminent, professional school of business.

Hasler’s ability to implement this vision was threatened by a California recession and resulting decline of state support for the university. Through a combination of increased program fees, entrepreneurial initiatives such as expanded executive education offerings, and enlarged annual fund and endowment development programs, the school was able to replace reduced state funds while also funding most of the planned initiatives and improvements.

In January 1995, the Haas community finally moved into its new home. For the first time, the school had a facility specifically designed for management education that brought together under one roof activities previously scattered over several campus locations. The new facility was financed entirely by private donations – in all by more than 2,000 alumni and friends of the Haas School. “The new building is a central element of our strategy,” said Hasler. “It allows us to do things that were difficult or even impossible before. It also gives the school an identity and a visible presence that helps to link the university and the business community.”

When Raymond Miles was selected as the school’s tenth dean in 1983, he saw major tasks before him. Miles increased outreach to alumni, and, in 1990, he hired the school’s first full-time alumni relations director. At the same time, Miles increased the size of the advisory board from 25 to 40 members. He recruited business executives from across the nation, including individuals who had no prior ties to the university.

As the campus prepared for its first major capital campaign, the long-dreamed-of possibility of a new building for the business school gained momentum. Miles and the advisory board successfully pressed the need for including the school’s building in the campaign.

While the building efforts were under way, Miles concentrated on expanding the size and the quality of the school’s faculty. He successfully secured several endowed chairs for the school’s senior faculty and simultaneously recruited outstanding faculty from other schools, including Oliver Williamson, future Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences.

In order to strengthen the school’s offerings in operations management, Miles initiated discussions with the College of Engineering about a joint curriculum. These discussions eventually led to the establishment of Berkeley’s joint program in the Management of Technology in 1988.

Earl F. Cheit served as the school’s ninth dean. Cheit’s goals as dean were to strengthen the school’s identity as a professional school in a research university, to move the school toward more aggressive placement of its graduates, to promote outstanding teaching and undergraduate education, and to build better relations with alumni and the professional community.

To give the business school a more cohesive identity as a professional school, a new building was essential. The business school was the only professional school on campus without its own building. In 1976, Cheit met with Walter Haas Sr. and his two sons, Peter and Walter Jr., to discuss the idea of a new building. Haas supported the idea, but recognized that planning and fundraising for this project would take years of effort. In the meantime, he offered a gift in support of two of Cheit’s other goals: an increase in the number of endowed professorships and the opening of a new career planning and placement center for business school graduates.

In 1990, the school began a dean’s search for a successor to Raymond Miles. Earl F. Cheit served as acting dean and dedicated himself to continued fundraising for the new building—the culmination of a 20-year dream.

Cheit also served as acting dean from 1976-1982.

In 1966, Richard Holton became the school’s eighth dean and served until 1976. During his tenure, Holton established new links to the business community and expanded his international, educational, and professional outreach programs, starting with the joint business and law degree (JD/MBA) in 1968.

In 1972, after extensive study by the faculty, the school initiated an evening MBA program to meet the needs of working adults who were unable to put their careers on hold to attend daytime classes on campus. From the beginning, the program differentiated itself from other part-time or evening programs in the country in that its students had to have passed the same stringent admissions criteria required for the daytime MBA program and were taught by the same faculty. The school also adjusted its faculty’s teaching load to incorporate evening courses, which resulted in the same professional dedication for both programs. Evening courses were held in downtown San Francisco until the school’s move into the new Haas building on the Berkeley campus in 1995.

John W. Cowee served as the school’s seventh dean from 1961–66. Under Cowee’s leadership, business education at Berkeley continued to move in the direction recommended in the 1959 Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation reports: greater integration of the social sciences into the business curriculum. In 1965, Dean Cowee asked Richard Holton to lead in the design of an international business curriculum. The strong presence of international students in the classroom further enriched the experience for students.

E.T. Grether’s 20-year tenure as the sixth dean began in 1941. His goal was to transform the College of Commerce into a modern business school. World War II was accelerating California’s industrialization, and Grether was determined to create a business school that would help meet this demand. In 1946, Grether recruited business executives to form an advisory council, known today as the Haas School Advisory Board. The council members included corporation presidents, top executives, and supreme court judge Roger Traynor. Today’s Haas School is named in honor of the first chair of Dean Grether’s advisory council—Walter A. Haas, Sr.

Early in his administration, Dean Grether moved to reshape the college. In 1942 the College of Commerce was transformed into the Department of Business Administration. The following year, the department was renamed the School of Business Administration, finally offering the two-year upper division program leading to the BS in Business Administration the school had sought for many years.

In addition to curricular changes, Grether created several research units. In 1941, he established what we know today as the Institute of Business and Economics Research (IBER). In 1945, he created the Institute of Industrial Relations. In 1950, Grether opened the Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics (CREUE). The school continued to expand, inaugurating the long-awaited Graduate School of Business Administration in 1955, followed by the PhD in business administration and executive education programs in 1956. With the three degree programs established and several research centers in place, the school was now prepared for the expansion of management education that was to come.

Grether also filled in as acting dean from 1934-1936.

After Grady’s resignation, Robert Calkins, chairman of the economics department, became the college’s fifth dean and recruited several high-profile faculty from other universities. Calkins left Berkeley a few years later to become the dean of Columbia University’s School of Business.

1928 brought the college its fourth dean, Henry Francis Grady. Under Grady’s leadership, discussions about reorganizing the college continued. During 1934–36 Grady went on leave to Washington DC to become an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, where he helped develop the program of reciprocal trade agreements.

The college’s third dean, Stuart Daggett, a scholar in railroad economics, created plans for reorganization and curricular change. In 1925, the college started to offer a two-year Master of Science degree. The number of students in this program always was relatively small, and course offerings were limited.

Henry Rand Hatfield became the second dean of the college in 1916. Hatfield was a pioneer in accounting. Hired by Berkeley in 1904 as the first full-time accounting professor in the country, he played a leading role in the founding of the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the national honor society, Beta Gamma Sigma. He published the first paper in the United States on accounting theory, presented at the American Economic Association meeting in 1903. As dean, Hatfield used Berkeley’s Summer Sessions to attract outstanding scholars from the East Coast to teach at the College of Commerce, and so gained increased recognition for the new college.

Carl Copping Plehn was appointed the College of Commerce’s first dean in 1898. A finance professor educated in Germany—as many of his colleagues in higher education were at the time—he was an important figure locally and nationwide. Plehn was the first Westerner to be elected president of the American Economic Association. He was a member and secretary of the Commission on Revision of the Revenue Laws of California, and served as chief statistician with the Philippine Commission. He wrote several textbooks in public finance and taxation. As dean he drafted the college’s first four-year curriculum leading to a Bachelor of Science degree.