SEPTEMBER 23,1955, REPORT FROM THE SCHOOL
In the September 12 meeting, Dean Jacoby reported that he had already appointed a School of Business Administration Committee to study the proposal's implications and report to the Faculty of the School. This committee's report went to the Chancellor's office on September 30.
I was priviliged to be the Chairman of this Committee that included Paul Kircher (Accounting), James Jackson (Operations Reseach), Cyril O'Donnell (Management), Irving Pfeffer (Insurance) and Alan Rowe (Production Management).
The report's main thrust is to emphasize that the School was already involved in activities that would be enhanced by an electronic computing facility. The School had already recognized the impact that scientific analysis was having on management and had established courses in the area of Quantitative Methods - statistics (Sprowls) and operations analysis (Jackson). The use of computers in accounting was already a part of Accounting 210 (Kircher). Statistics 218 was devoted entirely to computing (Sprowls). Staff of the Management Sciences Research Project had been using computers for some time. In other words, we were not asking for computing support to start something new; we were already actively involved in established programs.
The Report argued for installing the Center in the BAE building, that the nucleus staff be kept small, and that the budget include a large amount to support graduate students and faculty in learning to program and operate the machine. The entire Report.