Faculty & Leadership Blog / Research and Practice

Roger Babson’s Founding Principles: Key to Sustaining into a Second Century

This Founder’s Day, with just three years to go before Babson College’s Centennial, it is appropriate to consider Roger Babson’s convictions and motivations for founding our school, as summarized in a profile published in a 1930 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

Short version: (1) the Seer of Wellesley Hills likely would have endorsed our current undergraduate learning goals and graduate learning goals, (2) his founding motivation – his belief in the dire need for infusing business leaders with a sense of ethics and societal responsibility – resonates now, as does (3) his observation that measurement and reporting data can play a role in saving the world. The whole 3-page article is worth a read. Here are quotes and gleanings to prove our points:

Babson College was “his greatest enthusiasm” – on par, the author suggests, to having a son.

Adam Sulkowski

Professor Adam Sulkowski

Why did he found our school? “What America needed, he decided… was men trained for the responsibility of wealth, and so he founded a school like no other in the country.” His father Nathaniel had judged Harvard, Amherst, and Williams to have been “breeding-places for idleness” (Roger had been allowed to attend that other Boston area school with a beaver for a mascot, MIT).

What were the roots of his values, and what were they? “He comes of New England stock, and is a sternly religious person who makes a clear distinction between investment and speculation. His forebears, knowing that the Lord would frown if profits came too quickly, found satisfaction in toiling for a living. Mr. Babson feels the same way. This leads him to make rigid distinctions between speculation and investment, and to exhort his clients against purchases on margin.”

Given these strong religious feelings (he said “there is an excess of everything except religion” in the United States, and several of his authored books concerned religion or morality), it is especially interesting that Roger Babson founded an educational institution for scions of “Captains of Industry, of millionaires. They will control the destinies of thousands of employees.”

What was his vision for the world? “Roger Babson has often dreamed of a world in which there would be no war, no bitter contrast between affluence and poverty, no labor disputes.” He also had a theory as to whom to blame for disputes with employees. “He felt that labor disputes were the result of bad management on the part of capital, and he pondered several solutions. One was to prevent the ownership of great industries from passing by inheritance to sons utterly unqualified to run them. He went so far as to question all inheritances.”

The author of the profile, Henry F. Pringle, allows himself to editorialize at one point, writing that “Roger Babson has often been strangely radical in his utterances on capital and labor,” and (presumably) Pringle imagines that “[t]here was a sulphurous odor of socialism in the air” when Babson testified before a federal industrial commission. “He said bluntly that too many industries were controlled by bankers indifferent to the needs of the wage-earner. They were interested only in dividends. Finally, one nervous commissioner asked him whether this was not sheer socialism.”

Babson’s answer to the question of whether his concerns for societal and employee well-being smacked of socialism are worth remembering: “‘When a man is asked for a definition of a gentleman,’ Mr. Babson replied, ‘he gives one that will include himself. When asked for a definition of socialism he gives one that will exclude himself.’”

Roger Babson felt sympathy for investors; he “pride[d] himself that he represents the buyer of securities, while the vast machinery of Wall Street is organized for the benefit of those who sell.” He also warned that “bank mergers may be carried too far and subject America to new perils.”

Especially interesting for those of us who are fans of data, birds, and conservation, Roger Babson was convinced that “statistics could prevent international complications” (indeed, he started earning his fortune by providing statistical services to investors) and was an ornithologist in later years who created two bird sanctuaries.

Professor J.B. Kassarjian

Professor J.B. Kassarjian

A final two quotes about Roger Babson seem worthy of highlighting. First, “[u]tility, rather than form, interests him,” and, finally, “in his late twenties, he became a salesman, and traces of the art still linger. Thus he is never at a loss for words. Thus he is not unwilling to look back across the years and relate the story of his achievements.”

May we, as we look past the finish line of 100 years and plan for sustaining Babson’s legacy into a second century, likewise celebrate our successes in living up to our founder’s aspirations for “his greatest enthusiasm.”

By Professor Adam Sulkowski, with the encouragement and endorsement of Professor JB Kassarjian

The author wishes to thank our colleagues in the Economics Division for leaving a photocopy of the quoted profile pinned on a bulletin board in their cozy retreat in the woods. The full article may be found on pages 23-25 of the February 15, 1930 issue of The New Yorker magazine.