An unfulfilled promise of startup funding a century ago could have doomed Cornell’s new hotel management program to end before it ever began. By bringing in industry leaders to take part in forming a new class of hospitality professionals for a burgeoning sector of the economy, the founding educator and administrator created a valuable and lasting allegiance that became a model of cooperation between academia and industry.
Invitation to Ithaca: A Coveted Credential
Every Hotelie remembers taking the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series. Handed down through the decades with the alliterative aliases of Brownies with Beck, Cookies with Clark, Donuts with Dittman, Bakery with Butler, and Java with Johnson (but now known only as DDLS, as Wine with Walsh didn’t sound like a good idea), the required course began life in 1928 as Lectures on Hotel Management. That original, too, had a nickname, if a merely expedient one: Course 155, so called for the time it met on Friday afternoons. “Prof Meek,” as the school’s founding dean was known, held a coffee hour after the lecture so that the upperclassmen could converse with the guest speakers. From that time, students in hotel administration have had their imaginations and aspirations expanded by the icons and up-and-comers who share their insights and life lessons in DDLS.
Whether Howard Bagnall “H.B.” Meek had an eye on posterity when he created Course 155 may be unknowable; what is certain is that he had his eye on the bottom line. He saw 155 as a way to give his students exposure to the hotel business without hiring faculty, which he could not afford to do.
Meek’s inspiration for Lectures on Hotel Management came from his success in 1924 in persuading Louis Toth of the prominent hotel accounting firm Horwath & Horwath to ride the train from New York City to Ithaca once a week to teach accounting. “This splendid man took no pay; he did it for ‘the honor of the thing’ (the words were undoubtedly Prof’s),” recalled hotel engineering professor Charles I. Sayles ’26, MEE ’37, in the July 1969 issue of the Bulletin of the Cornell Society of Hotelmen. “He did get an honorarium, which promptly came back as a scholarship.” Toth loved teaching the hotel administration students and did it for 34 years. Early on, he had his lectures transcribed and gathered into “what soon became the standard hotel accounting text,” Brad Edmondson wrote in his 1996 history of the school, Hospitality Leadership. After retiring from Horwath & Horwath as a senior partner, Toth moved to Ithaca to teach full time.
Edmondson continued, “Meek soon learned, to his delight, that Toth was not unique. Many hotel leaders were so flattered by an invitation from Cornell that they were willing to travel to Ithaca and give a lecture for free.” Only through the enthusiasm and generous natures of such people—and the notable courage and resourcefulness of Prof Meek—did the risky experiment called the “course in hotel management” survive its precarious inception.
An Inauspicious Start
Meek’s money problems began as soon as he reported for work in September 1922. The 29-year-old former Yale mathematics instructor arrived to find that the startup funding pledged by the American Hotel Association had not. The first two annual installments arrived after the program’s first two years had ended. Heatedly divided over whether to support a radical initiative to turn out college-educated hotelmen or use their resources to lobby for the repeal of Prohibition, which was driving an ax into industry profits, the AHA decided that it had never had the legal standing to enter into an agreement with Cornell in the first place. Proponents of the program had to raise the remainder of the funds owed to Cornell from voluntary contributions. The members settled their debt with the university in 1926 and continued to raise what money they could for Meek until the Depression overtook the effort.
For its part, Cornell had consented to the establishment of the hotel course only on the condition that the AHA would pay its direct expenses—the university’s trustees having declined to do so. The New York State Legislature similarly shook its collective head, even though the program was to be attached to the School of Home Economics, a department of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell. The agriculture dean, Albert Mann, began charging Meek’s students tuition in 1923 to recoup some of the program’s costs. Tuition was free for all other students of the college. The school would be on its own financially well into the modern era.
The inaugural hotel curriculum was agreed upon in consultation with the AHA education committee before Meek was hired. The bulk of the courses were standard Cornell requirements taught by faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences. Hotel program requirements consisted mostly of repurposed courses from the agriculture college, including culinary and nutrition classes taught by faculty in home ec; an animal husbandry course in meat cutting that required butchering livestock; and two accounting courses taught in the Department of Agricultural Economics. 1
Meek launched four new hotel-specific courses. He taught Hotel Accounts, Hotel Organization, and Hotel Operations. Frank Randolph, a 1917 Cornell Engineering graduate hired in 1921 to do a study of modern hotels, taught Hotel Engineering. He would teach a number of courses on the subject and retire from Cornell in 1960, one year before Meek.
Hard Times for ‘Hotelees’
Meek’s first office was a de-plumbed janitor’s closet on the fourth floor of the Home Economics building (later named Comstock Hall) on the Ag Quad. He had to scavenge for furnishings, teaching supplies and equipment, and spaces in which to hold classes. Those spaces included an empty barn whose demolition was delayed so Meek could use it for accounting classes and the basement of Bailey Hall, where the height of the ceiling corresponded to the slope of the auditorium floor above, dwindling to just one foot near the stage end. His students wired the lights and supplied all the construction labor to make the spaces habitable. “In such surroundings people like Lucius Boomer, manager of the Waldorf, were asked to lecture,” Sayles wrote in his 1988 history of the school, From a Closet under the Stairs.
There was no business school at Cornell in those days, and Meek and his students endured open scorn, particularly from the arts college, for the applied nature of the course in hotel administration. According to a story related to Sayles by another early alumnus, one accounting instructor asked the Hotelies in his class of 50 to stand; he then advised the five of them to drop the course, as they would fail it otherwise. This elicited cheers from the other students.
1. The Department of Home Economics, founded in 1911, was the progenitor of the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, a sister school of the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. Its name changed in 1919 to the School of Home Economics.
H.B. Meek’s faculty photo, likely taken in 1922.
H.B. Meek’s faculty photo, likely taken in 1922.
Professor John H. Sherry began teaching as an unpaid lecturer in the fall of 1935. For 40 years, he commuted once a week from New York City to teach The Law of Innkeeping and, later, also Business Law. He never missed a class. He authored the seminal textbook The Laws of Innkeeping. His son, John E.H. Sherry, succeeded him on the faculty.
Professor John H. Sherry began teaching as an unpaid lecturer in the fall of 1935. For 40 years, he commuted once a week from New York City.
The original matriculants in the Course in Hotel Management, fall 1922. Cornelius Betten and H. B. Meek are seated front and center.
The original matriculants in the Course in Hotel Management, fall 1922. Cornelius Betten and H. B. Meek are seated front and center.
Quantity cooking class in Comstock Hall, 1927.
Quantity cooking class in Comstock Hall, 1927.
“This negative attitude about the new program was pervasive enough that the hotel curriculum was often derided,” the alumnus recalled. “On the other hand, these same attitudes imbued hotel students with a strong sense of cohesiveness, purpose, and loyalty, and turned the school into a close-knit body of very loyal men and women.” That loyalty fueled the success of the program, then department, then school. 2
With the Help of Many Friends
With financial backing and donated expertise from the hospitality industry, Meek gradually constructed a full curriculum. In a report published in the Bulletin in July 1937, he listed 55 hospitality courses developed over 15 years and stated a faculty of 10 full-time and 18 part-time instructors. “Extensive use is made on a part-time basis of active hotel people as instructors,” he noted.
Industry people took part in the program in other vitally important ways. Meek required his students to work hotel jobs every summer and come back in the fall with detailed reports and favorable evaluations from their supervisors. Finding situations for every student depended on the goodwill of hoteliers—of whom an increasing number were alumni. Even during the Depression, the industry found jobs for 99 percent of the graduates.
With the indulgence of the industry, Meek also took groups of students to the National Hotel Exposition in New York City every fall beginning in 1925 and arranged other elaborate field trips, such as to the Palmer House in Chicago and the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. In New York City, Meek’s students were given the opportunity each November to operate a prominent hotel for a day.
A summary of the 1936 New York trip in the Bulletin reveals the generosity of the welcome always extended to Cornell: “We stayed at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, and Bob Snyder ’37 was selected to work as manager. ... Carl Letsch of the St. George gave us the run of the house. … Luncheons at the Hotel Pennsylvania, Biltmore, and Astor, a formal dinner at the St. George, the Cornell Smoker, inspection trips of the New Yorker and Waldorf-Astoria, and the inspection of the exhibits at the Grand Central took up most of the students’ time”—all for a delegation of 40 people.
A century on, extraordinary industry participation and support—much of it from alumni—remains woven into the educational model of the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. Industry members from all parts of the world share their knowledge in classrooms, at the annual Hotel Ezra Cornell (HEC) student-run business conference, in panel discussions, in webinars, and at roundtables and conferences. They teach as visiting and regular faculty and lecture for DDLS. They serve on advisory boards and as competition judges, mentors, consultants, and entrepreneurs in residence. They provide business cases and data sets and collaborate on faculty research. They donate food and beverages for tasting classes and HEC. They host students and faculty on treks, cruises, and immersion trips, providing lodging, venues, receptions, and meals in addition to giving tours and presentations. They staff job fairs and recruit and hire students for internships and career positions. They sponsor events and fund scholarships, programs, professorships, and facilities. In the years before the pandemic, approximately 250 alumni and other industry members visited the school every year.
Giving Back
In addition to delivering experienced, educated graduates who were versed in the latest trends and technologies and best management practices, Meek wanted to repay the industry’s investment by producing useful research. His faculty (or “staff,” as he called them in the early decades) began teaching summer courses for industry workers and managers in 1928, and they published various technical books and reports, but there was little if any budget to support original research. Most of his faculty lacked formal research training—or graduate or professional degrees at all. Meek himself came to Cornell with only a master’s degree in mathematics; he completed his doctoral dissertation—“an early work in the theory of pricing,” according to Edmondson—in economics at Yale during a 1929 sabbatical. That credential set him apart from the majority of the faculty for the whole of his career.
By mid-century, Meek started to add a few PhDs to the faculty, including future dean Robert Beck ’42. It was at Meek’s urging that Beck pursued the degree—in education—which he earned at Cornell in 1954. Meek, newly promoted to dean, then made him an assistant professor. Over succeeding decades, the school would gradually gain the critical mass of doctoral faculty needed to produce a body of research that could benefit the industry.
Meek achieved a milestone, one year before he retired, with the launch in 1960 of The Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, a journal of applied research and other information intended to be of interest to industry practitioners. It sold out so consistently that the school had to make several appeals in the Bulletin for the return of back issues that could be supplied to libraries.
Now known as the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly and still overseen by an in-house academic editor, the journal is still recognized as the authoritative source for industry-relevant scholarly research.
2. The term “hotelie,” originally spelled “hotelee,” was intended to be derogatory. By the early 1950s, perhaps because the opening of Statler Hall finally gave them pride of place, some hotel students began to appropriate the label, while others shrugged it off. It has long since been embraced—and capitalized—as a mark of belonging.
Students study machinery in an engineering lab, probably in the basement of Roberts Hall.
Students study machinery in an engineering lab, probably in the basement of Roberts Hall.
A New Model for Serving the Industry
The founding of the Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) in 1992 formalized the school’s goal of advancing the hospitality industry by creating and sharing new knowledge. In that time before the internet changed the world, the school’s research committee anticipated that major shifts lay ahead for the hospitality industry and saw the need to meet the coming moment. David Dittman, dean of the school from 1990 to 2000, supported the CHR’s creation as part of his push to raise the school’s research profile with the industry.
Alex Susskind, the Nolan Hotel School’s senior director of programs, credits Dittman with accelerating the development of the school’s modern research faculty, an effort begun under Dittman’s predecessor, Jack Clark.“What David Dittman did that redefined who we are as a school was hire academics who are passionate about the industry. He brought in research-trained, discipline-based scholars who had made a commitment to serve the hospitality industry through teaching, research, and engagement.”
Cathy Enz, the Lewis G. Schaeneman Jr. Professor of Innovation and Dynamic Management (now emerita) and a former associate dean for academic affairs at the school, became the CHR’s third director in 2000 as Dittman’s deanship was ending. “We had the quality scholarship that would contribute to industry practices; we had the model in place of translating research into practice; and we finally had a distribution mechanism, thanks to the internet. Giving everything away for free was a powerful model,” Enz recalled in Hotelie in 2012, referring to the series of web-based CHR research reports she had launched.
David Sherwyn, the John and Melissa Ceriale Professor of Hospitality Human Resources, helped introduce industry roundtables in 2001, five years before he became the CHR’s fifth director. He now holds regular roundtables as the academic director of the Center for Innovative Hospitality Labor and Employment Relations, or CIHLER. He also co-directs the Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship with Linda Canina, the Georges C. and Marian St. Laurent Professor in Applied Business Management. Canina is the current academic director of the CHR.
Toward the Future
In the same way that the CHR helped the industry adapt to advances in computer technology and the growth of the internet, the faculty and leadership of the school now see new opportunities to support the industry’s transformation in such areas as diversity, equity, and inclusion; sustainability; fintech; data analytics; and the labor economy. To reinforce the school’s capacity to provide cutting-edge resources and ideas for the industry, Canina has been developing plans to expand the center’s research footprint.
A professor of finance with research interests in asset valuation, corporate finance, and strategic management, Canina wants to help companies think more holistically about their value propositions. As one example, the hotel industry is looking at new approaches to measuring and benchmarking performance. “There is a whole body of industry leaders who are integrating decisions across departments more,” she said. “We’re having roundtables and discussions about how to move the industry toward profit management and alternative ways to more efficiently analyze data for decision-making.” On another front, Canina is working on projects to understand what is driving differences in productivity across similar hotel properties as well as the impact of wage differentials and pay-level strategies on property-level performance.
The CHR’s current focus is on engaging more faculty—at Cornell and abroad. “Right now, CHR thought leadership is drawn primarily from research authored by Nolan Hotel School faculty. We want to expand our thought-leadership network to include academics from all disciplines around the world who are doing hospitality-relevant research,” Canina said, “and bring the network together at conferences and roundtables to collaborate, share new knowledge, and shape current and future research that benefits the industry. In support of this goal, the CHR has started funding faculty research projects across the college on hospitality-relevant topics, providing faculty with resources, access to data, or context if they need it.”
Canina said the CHR will continue publishing and disseminating research through articles, cases, webinars, roundtables, and conferences.
Outreach in the Time of COVID-19
As reports began to reach the leadership at the school in the spring of 2020 about the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic was having on the hospitality industry, the faculty organized nearly 70 webinars with guidance for the industry. Now online, the CHR-curated collection can be accessed from any of the landing pages for the school’s centers and institutes.
“To watch these videos from the beginning, you can see how the framing of the conversation shifted,” said Kate Walsh, dean of the Cornell Nolan Hotel School. “The first few months were about survival, like, ‘How do we make sense of what’s happening in the moment? What do our staff need, and how do we take care of our employees?’ And then about six months in, it started to move to, ‘How long is this lasting? What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like, and how do we start to restart?’ Nine to twelve months in, the conversation changed to, ‘How do we make the most of this opportunity, and how do we leverage what the industry could become?’ This was before travel kicked back in. People were saying, ‘We’re back,’ or, ‘We’re going to be back,’ and, ‘Here’s how we’re going to charge forth and reinvent ourselves.’ That was really fun—and so exciting.”
As of April 2022, the webinars had been viewed 200,000 times. “We were grateful to have a way to help the industry, to help people understand how to make sense of what was happening in the moment,” said Walsh. “I overuse this expression, but it was truly a labor of love for our faculty. Faculty in all domains—even brand-new faculty—stepped up to host webinars. I think they viewed it as a privilege to be able to have these conversations and help the industry. We were in partnership with the industry, creating our future.”
As always.
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Looking Ahead to the Next Century of Innovation
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