Slichter Papers

Sumner H. Slichter first joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School in 1930 as Professor of Business Economics. He subsequently joined the faculties of the Department of Economics (1935) and the Graduate School of Public Administration at its inception in 1936. His courses on trade unionism, collective bargaining, and labor-management relations reflected his career-long research interest in labor-management relationships and their impact on the economy. He led the Littauer Seminar in Collective Bargaining at the School of Public Administration from 1938 until his death in 1959, and founded the Harvard Trade Union Fellowship Plan in 1942. In 1940, Professor Slichter was appointed the first Thomas W. Lamont University Professor. After his death, his colleagues described him as follows in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Memorial Minute, published in the Harvard Gazette on March 12, 1960: "All in all he was a towering figure in the world of scholarship as in the world of affairs."