Celebrating MIT Sloan’s 100th Anniversary in Hong Kong

Oct. 20th, 2013, Sunday

A delegate from MIT Sloan School of Management recently invited alumni and friends in Hong Kong to attend a reception for celebrating the 100th anniversary of founding of management education at MIT. In 1914, an engineering administration program (coded Course XV) was created at MIT with a focus on training “men to be competent managers of businesses that have much to do with engineering problems.” In 1930, Course XV was renamed the Department of Business and Engineering Administration and later became the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management.

The celebration was kicked off with a video featuring the new flagship building known as E62, followed by a thought-provoking speech delivered by David Schmittlein, Dean of MIT Sloan since 2007. In his speech, Dean Schmittlein walked over several important historic milestones of Sloan and paid special tribute to a handful of legendary faculty members whose ideas and work have defined modern management science.

Among the faculty members showcased were Robert Merton, a 1997 Nobel laureate in economics who recently returned to MIT from Harvard Business School, and Edward Roberts, a frontier in entrepreneurship education. Other Sloan faculty members mentioned were Andrew Lo, an expert in financial engineering and Yasheng Huang (who was in the audience), an expert in Chinese economy. Dean Schmittlein concluded his speech by reiterating Sloan’s commitment in being an innovator of management education.