The Business School: Serving Mammon or the University

Two events at a distance of nearly half a century illustrate the relationship between business schools and context. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union announced, and governments around the world confirmed, that it had succeeded in putting an artificial satellite into low Earth orbit. The United States was so shocked that then president Eisenhower formalized this surprise and its possible consequences as the Sputnik Crisis. Within the year, the US Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, providing funding to US education at all levels, in response to a prevailing sense that US science, engineering, and mathematics were at risk of falling behind in the all-encompassing contest with the Soviet Union. Galvanizing business schools was part of this broader package.