Pearson Hunt papers

Pearson Hunt was born in 1908 and raised on Staten Island, New York. Hunt graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University in 1930, completed the first year at Columbia Law School, and then studied economics for a term at King's College, Cambridge University. He graduated from Harvard Business School with high distinction in 1933. Hunt was employed by HBS as a Research Assistant in 1934 while working toward his Doctorate of Commercial Science which he earned in 1939.

During World War II, Hunt served as an instructor for the Army Air Forces Statistical School on the HBS campus and later assisted U.S. Army officials in drafting inventory and contract policies at M.I.T.'s Radiation Laboratory. Concurrently, Hunt was made an Associate Professor at HBS in 1940. He was also editor of the HBS Alumni Bulletin from 1942 to 1946. Hunt became Professor of Business Administration in 1950, headed the first year MBA course for many years, and became head of the Corporate Financial Management Area as well. Among Hunt's contributions to the field of business finance was his coining of the acronym "EBIT" or Earnings Before Interest and Taxes. Hunt led the way to the "inside looking out" approach to finance; putting the emphasis on the decision-maker within a firm instead of on the investor or intermediary "looking in".

Traveling to Europe and the Middle East as an Eisenhower Exchange Fellow, Hunt studied the potential for management development programs abroad. He later assisted in developing MBA programs in Chile, Guyana, and Italy. Hunt was named the Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Finance and Banking by HBS in 1967. He attained emeritus status when he retired from HBS in 1975. He later received the Distinguished Service Award in 1983. He went on to teach at Babson College and the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Pearson Hunt died in 2002 at the age of 93.