A 100-year health check for Harvard

Last week the world's stock markets continued their frenzied orgy of value creation and destruction. World leaders huddled in Paris and Washington, desperate to construct a new financial order out of the chaos. The future of capitalism itself seemed in doubt.

But just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a golden Sunday evening, a trio of young classical musicians filled the air with sweet melodies as alumni of Harvard Business School sipped champagne and chatted fondly about old times. A photograph of the scene in HBS's handsome Baker library that evening would have had to be labelled: "Crisis, what crisis?"

Harvard students, young and not quite so young, had come together to celebrate 100 years of HBS. Founded in 1908 as a "delicate experiment" - academic talk for "it's sure to fail", according to HBS's current dean Jay Light - the school has outlasted most of its critics. But no Harvard graduate, however gifted, would have been able to predict that their centennial "global business summit" would coincide with the most dramatic financial earthquake for several generations.

You would have to have a heart of stone not to be amused by this piquant accident of timing. Here, at the spiritual home of the Masters of the Universe, distinguished graduates could only look on as that same universe threatened to implode.

The turbulence seemed wholly out of place in HBS's orderly and tranquil environs. The site, developed on marshland in the 1920s on the wrong side of Boston's Charles river (the school had initially been a temporary resident in Harvard University's economics faculty), stretches over 40 acres and comprises 33 buildings. For decades many of the world's sharpest young graduates have been coming to HBS to acquire that vital passport to a career at the very top: the Harvard MBA.