Haas School of Business

The Walter A. Haas School of Business, also known as Berkeley Haas, is the business school of the University of California, Berkeley, a public research university in Berkeley, California. It was the first business school at a public university in the United States and is ranked among the best business schools in the world by The Economist, Financial Times, QS World University Rankings, U.S. News & World Report, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Named after Walter A. Haas, the school is housed in four buildings surrounding a central courtyard on the southeastern corner of the Berkeley campus, where both undergraduate and graduate students attend classes. Its resident startup incubator, Berkeley SkyDeck, is located west of campus in Downtown Berkeley. Notable faculty include former Chairs of the Federal Reserve and the Council of Economic Advisors, Nobel laureates in economics, the Secretary of the Treasury, the chief economist of Google, and more. History The Haas School of Business was first established as the College of Commerce of the University of California in 1898. As enacted on March 23, 1868, the university's Organic Act listed among its goals the provision of "special courses of instruction" for many kinds of "professions," including "commerce." University Regents Arthur Rodgers, A.S. Hallidie and George T. Marye Jr. later proposed the establishment of a College of Commerce. The new college was founded on September 13, 1898, when Cora Jane Flood, daughter of industrialist and University of California Regent James C. Flood, donated land (worth one million dollars at the time) to the university specifically to support the study of commerce. The school was one of the first business schools in the United States and the first at a public university. The college's first faculty members included some American pioneers in the field of business. Simon Litman taught the first course in marketing between 1902 and 1908. Adolph Miller, who was the Flood Professor of the Political Economy and Commerce from 1903 to 1915, later served on the first Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Wesley Clair Mitchell, who taught at Berkeley from 1905 to 1913, is known as the father of the business cycle analysis. Charles Staehling taught accounting at the college from 1921 to 1951 and was known for adding a theoretical framework to the praxis-oriented teaching of accounting principles.