American Magazine, July 2015

on campus
OVER THE LAST 60 YEARS,
AU’s business school has changed
names and traded spaces (McKinley
to Hamilton to Battelle to the
former Myers/Hutchins building,
perched off Massachusetts Avenue).
But its mission—to provide the
finest training possible for the
next generation of accountants,
analysts, marketers, managers,
and entrepreneurs—has been
unwavering.
The Kogod School of Business
(so named in 1999) celebrates
its diamond anniversary this year.
Washington’s oldest accredited
business school, Kogod is home to
more than 1,000 students and 75 fulltime
faculty, and was this year named
the 18th best college at which to earn
an undergraduate business degree
by Fortune magazine.
In celebration of the big 6–0, Kogod
unveiled a pair of exhibits in the
school’s terrace that trace the history
of AU’s B-school and the history of
business in DC. Created in partnership
with the Historical Society of
Washington, DC, the collection of
photographs, newspaper clippings,
and archival nuggets establishes the
city as a center for commerce and
industry—and Kogod as a pioneering
force for business education.
Business capital
In the late 1700s, George Washington
envisioned the nation’s new capital
as a full-fledged city of industry—not
just government. Though it was free
from the control of a single state,
the city on the Potomac still needed
funding from the states, which proved
problematic. Thus, during its infancy,
Washington was dominated by the
growing US government—though
commerce, culture, and industry
eventually began to blossom.
Long before Marriott, AOL, Fannie
Mae, and others became household
names, DC was home to flour mills,
paper manufacturers, power plants,
and brick plants (a booming business,
more than 100 strong in 1900).
Newspapers and breweries were also
big business in the late nineteenth
century—we’ll leave it to you to infer
any connection between the two.
Kogod’s exhibit chronicles the birth
of a variety of industries—media,
manufacturing, hospitality, health
care, banking, biotech—and features
fun firsts (the debut of Jim Henson’s
Muppets on WRC-TV Channel 4 in 1955
and the opening of DC’s inaugural
Giant supermarket on Georgia Avenue
in 1936). There’s also a bit of titillating
trivia about DC’s earliest bootleggers,
speakeasies, and gambling rings.
MILLER-GILLETTE WASHINGTON SEEN PHOTO COLLECTION, THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON, DC
8 AMERICAN MAGAZINE JULY 2015