Faculty of Business Studies

The first course in political economy, as part of extraordinary teaching and free classes, was given in 1821 at the Lausanne Academy's Faculty of Law by Professor Louis-Frédéric Berger. The law of 21 December 1837 replaced the old auditoriums with three faculties: Theology, Law and Arts and Sciences. Within the latter, the Chair of Political Economy and Social Sciences was created at the start of the 1838/1839 academic year, with lectures by Professors Antoine Cherbuliez and Luigi-Amedeo Melegari^[1]. Melegari, a Mazinian exile, quickly became a great success with the Académie and the intellectuals of the canton of Vaud, thanks to his new and complementary qualities. Thanks to his well-established reputation, he was awarded the chair of international law and philosophy of law in 1843. However, he was one of the victims of the academic coup of 1845. He was forced to leave the Vaud region^[2].

Some 40 years before the School of Business Studies was actually founded, a first draft was drawn up in 1871 by Lausanne politician Louis Ruchonnet. A federal councillor from 1881 to 1893, he was interested in business studies; in 1860, he met a young French economist, Léon Walras, whom he was considering bringing to Lausanne. Walras was appointed professor of political economy at the Faculté de droit in 1871, a post he held until 1893. His successor was an Italian marquis, Vilfredo Pareto, who was Professor Extraordinary and then Professor Ordinary from 1893 to 1917. Pareto was hired on appeal because of a reputation he was aware of. He took advantage of the situation to negotiate a salary of 7,000 francs directly with the Conseil d’Etat, almost twice as high as that of some of his colleagues.

Walras and Pareto, thanks to their work, contributed greatly to the progress of economic science. They were part of the new school of thought known as the Lausanne School, which was noclassical in origin.

The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of a desire to give commercial education a more scientific character. The chair of political economy alone is not enough to achieve this goal. The University of Lausanne followed in the footsteps of the Universities of Zurich (which set up an advanced commercial teaching programme), Berne (which established a chair in the history of commerce, economics and commercial policy) and Neuchâtel (which founded a department of advanced commercial studies). On 15 April 1911, the Conseil dÉtat created the Ecole des hautes études commerciales with the aim of providing a programme of higher education combining general culture with specialised instruction. The law of 15 May attached the Ecole des HEC to the Faculty of Law and amended articles 4 and 8 of the law of 10 May 1890 concerning the main subjects of teaching. Dorénavant la Faculté de droit donne des enseignements d’économie, de technique commerciale et de mathématiques financières.

The activity of the HEC School began with the appointment of two professors who were its pioneers: Léon Morf (1873-1954) and Georges Paillard (1884-1932), who started in the winter semester of1911-1912. Morf taught commercial engineering, public accounting and financial mathematics, and was the school's first president (1912-1925). Paillard taught commercial economics as an extraordinary professor (1911-1922) and then as an ordinary professor (1922-1932). He was director of the school from 1925 to 1927. Between 1919 and 1920, Georges Paillard was granted leave from the University of Lausanne. He then left for Greece, commissioned by the Greek government to organise an Institute of Advanced Commercial Studies in Athens. Adolphe Blaser, who succeeded him until 1936, had the distinction of having only a certificate of secondary education. When he left the school, Jules Chuard took over. He was an important figure at the school. Appointed professor in 1926 and then director from 1936 to 1961, he approached industry in the canton of Vaud to request support for the school's activities. This led to the creation of the Sociétédétudes économiques et sociales.

There were only two professors for 15 students at the Ecole des HEC in 1911, a number that doubled in 1915. The number of students continued to rise until 1931, when it reached 121. The following years saw a decline that lasted until 1941, when the school resumed its growth. Since then, the school has experienced a real boom, with 2,644 enrolments, 37% of which are women. The number of Swiss students remained constant for several years, while the number of foreign students rose from 24 in the winter semester of 1923-24 to 78 in the summer semester of 1930: today, 42% of the Faculty's students are foreign.

The School's first regulations, dated 28 August 1911, stipulated that studies would last 4 semesters and that 6 compulsory subjects^[3] and 3 optional subjects would be taught. Between 1911 and 1961, the regulations were amended 8 times: the duration was extended to 6 semesters; the division of the tests, initially into three sections, was reduced to four sections;The first was after 4 semesters and the second at the end of the third year. Students could register for either the bachelor's degree or the doctorate. If they obtained a doctorate, they received their degree after defending a thesis. Students with a bachelor's degree or a commercial bachelor's degree could enrol in the School; those without such qualifications had to pass an examination in order to enrol. The first regulations included bachelor's degrees or doctorates with 5 mentions (Commerce and Banking, General Administration, Transport, Customs, Insurance).

The first licentiate was Auguste Roulet, in March 1913, who had graduated from the Handelshochschule in Munich and went on to become a teacher at the Ecole de Commerce in La Chaux-de-Fonds. The first doctor was Léon Felde in 1917, who graduated in commercial sciences from the University of Lausanne with a thesis on Russian wheat. He became deputy director for Poland of the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali. In 1931, the University conferred the first honorary doctorate on ChristianMoser, professor at the University of Bern, and in 1932 on GottliebBachmann, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Swiss National Bank.

The HEC School remained attached to the Faculty of Law until 1978. The years that followed were marked by exponential growth, with the number of students doubling in 10 years and several new units being created. In 1979, the MBA (Master in Business Administration) was created, followed by the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in 1979;This was followed in 1982 by the opening of the Institute of Actuarial Sciences (ISA), then the Department of Economics and Political Economy (DEEP) in 1983 and the Institute of Information Technology and Organisation (INFORGE) in 1988. The CREA Institute of Applied Macroeconomics was founded in 1989.

In 1980, under the leadership of Charles Iffland, the HEC became a Faculty. The director became dean, but the name of the school was not abandoned.

The name of the school was changed to HEC.

The cohabitation between the Faculté de droit and the Ecole did not always run smoothly. In 1919, Professor Samuel Dumas[4] called for a split. The sceptical struggle lasted a long time: to begin with, the school's professors were not even invited to the meetings of the Faculty Council. On the Deans' Council, the HEC director, like his colleagues from SSP and pharmacy, had only a consultative vote. Even after the foundation, the academic world disagreed with the school's status as a university: it found it hard to see the business world, and therefore the money world, as entitled to a place in the university. The turning point came in the 1990s with the reign of Dean Olivier Blanc (1990-2000), who had a corporatist streak and used to say that he was going overseas when he visited the Rectorate. He demanded a high degree of autonomy for the school in relation to the university: At the time, the Faculty's objective was summed up in the saying "the University of Lausanne"; of Lausanne, what the Wharton School is to the University of Pennsylvania; the first step was to give the name «HEC Lausanne» to deacute the faculty of Lausanne;Secondly, HEC Lausanne needed to have direct links with the economic and political world, and to be able to collaborate with and represent students, graduates and professors from all over the world. This mission has finally paid off, and the School's reputation has spread far beyond its borders.

Andrea Vovola and Olivier Robert - UNIRIS 2014

[1] He taught until 1843 under the assumed name of Thomas Emery of Malta; cf. Giovanni Ferretti, Melegari à l’académie de Lausanne: suivi de documents de son enseignement, Lausanne:Librairie de l’Université de Lausanne, 1949, p. 17.

[2] Ibid, p. 20.

[3] These include commercial economics, commercial and business technology, public accounting, statistics, political economics, economic geography, introduction to legal studies, commercial foreign exchange law, debt collection and bankruptcy law, insurance law.

[4] 1881-1938, extraordinary professor of insurance technology from 1913 à 1938 and of financial mathematics from 1919 à 1938.