Haas School of Business

The Walter A. Haas School of Business (branded 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.

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.