Leadership & Recognition
The Johnson Family Legacy
The Gift that Transformed a School
In 1982, the then Graduate School of Business and Public Administration defined a new mission and sharper focus. The faculty voted to eliminate all academic programs outside of business, but implementing the new mission in a competitive marketplace would require additional resources.
Two years later, the Johnson family made a $20-million endowment gift to the school, at the time the largest such gift ever to a business school. The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management was established.
The Johnson School is named for Samuel Curtis Johnson (1833-1919), who began his career as a manufacturer of wooden parquet floors in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1886, he decided to extend his company's product line into wax to care for the floors he produced. The floor-care products soon outsold the flooring, and the international consumer products form of S.C. Johnson and Son was born.
Samuel C. Johnson, AB '50, led his family in making the historic gift naming Cornell's graduate business school for his great grandfather. In a 1988 volume on the history of his family's company, Sam wrote of his progenitor: "He held the notion that business should put back something into the communities in which they are located. He also believed that a corporation should give back something to the broader group of consumers for which it has earned profits. Providing jobs in a community, he stated, while certainly important, is simply not enough."
