Autumn 2023 Buffalo Business 9
little old fashioned for the Air Force, so I was assigned to
teach, of all things, celestial navigation."
The turning tide
When the hosts of GIs began to return from war in
1945, the school faced different challenges. "In 1946, we had
1,364 students, six times as many as we had in 1942. The big
problem was where to find teachers and where to find a place
to put the students," McGarry recalled. "When the GIs le,
we eventually dropped back to about 500, about double our
pre-war enrollment."
In 1949, the school honored Melvin H. Baker, president and
founder of National Gypsum, with the inaugural Executive of the
Year award, an annual tradition that continues to this day.
The school also established a doctoral program with a special-
ization in business that year and admitted its first two doctoral
candidates in 1950. C. Perry Bliss, professor emeritus of marketing,
received the school's first PhD degree in 1953.
Other indicators of the school's growth were the 1955 endow-
ment of the Melvin H. Baker Professorship in American Enterprise
and the 1956 endowment of the M&T Professorship in Finance.
Times they are a-changin'
The 1960s brought more change to the school and the university. In
1962, the University of Buffalo became the State University of New York
at Buffalo, when UB was incorporated into the State University of New
York (SUNY) system. The acquisition was championed by then-governor
Nelson Rockefeller, with the intent of making UB one of four major univer-
sity centers in the state. UB has since earned recognition as SUNY's flagship
university.
A full-time MBA program was initiated in 1963 and, on January 1, 1969,
the School of Business Administration was officially renamed the School of
Management. Richard Brandenburg, who served as dean from 1968 to 1976,
explained the name change in a letter to alumni: "It has become increasingly
clear that management concepts and tools first used in the business context also
Autumn 2023 Buffalo Business 9
