Traditions Brochure - Johnson Graduate School of Management ...

The Gift that Transformed the School
The Johnson Family Legacy
Cornell University’s Graduate School of Business
and Public Administration, founded in 1946, defined
a new mission and sharper focus in 1983 when the
faculty voted to eliminate its health administration
and public administration programs in order to focus
exclusively on MBA education. Accordingly, they
changed the school’s name to the Graduate School
of Management. Implementing the new mission in
a competitive marketplace, they knew, would require
additional resources.
The following year, the Johnson family made a $20-
million endowment gift to the school, at the time the
largest such gift ever to a business school. The school
was rechristened the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate
School of Management.
The school’s namesake, Samuel Curtis Johnson
(1833-1919), began his career as a manufacturer
of wooden parquet floors in Racine, Wisconsin. In
1886, he decided to extend his company’s product
line into wax to care for the floors he produced. The
floor-care products soon outsold the flooring, and the
international consumer products firm, now known as
SC Johnson, was born.
16
Samuel C. Johnson ’50, led his family in making the
historic gift naming Cornell’s graduate business
school for his great-grandfather. In a 1988 volume on
the history of his family’s company, Sam wrote of his
progenitor: “He held the notion that business should
put back something into the communities in which they
are located. He also believed that a corporation should
give back something to the broader group of consumers
for which it has earned profits. Providing jobs in a
community, he stated, while certainly important, is
simply not enough.”