Description
The collection covers Bach's professional career from his
graduate student days at the University of Chicago in the late 1930s to the dedication
of the George L. Bach Auditorium at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1993. Included are
primarily: publications, articles, papers, and speeches dealing with topics such as
inflation, government economic policies, economic education, and the future of corporate
growth; course materials, notes, and articles intended for use in Stanford University
undergraduate and Graduate School of Business courses; several folders dealing with
"inflation", a primary focus of Bach's career, and several working papers by noted
economists such as Milton Friedman, Robert J. Gordon, and Arthur Okun; correspondence,
covering Bach's pre-Stanford activities at Carnegie Institute of Technology, his
involvement with the Ford Foundation's Committee for Economic Development, and
communications with various publishers and corporations, including the NY Times, World
Book Encyclopedia, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard; drafts of testimony and correspondence
concerning appearances before governmental bodies; Stanford correspondence primarily
concentrated in the early to mid-1980s time period, chronicling the "Bach Chamber
Society's" concern with criticism of business school programs; and copies of legal
papers, newspaper articles, and handwritten notes concerning the dismissal case of
Professor Franklin. Included with the biographial material are class notes and papers
from Bach's graduate school days at the University of Chicago.
Background
George Leland Bach earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in
1940. He worked as a research economist for the Federal Reserve Board during World War
II. After the war, Bach became the founding dean of the Graduate School of Industrial
Adminstration at Carnegie-Mellon University. In 1959, Bach became the chairman of the
Ford Foundation's National Task Force and the Committee for Economic Development (CED).
Two years later, CED recommended the introduction of basic courses in economic theory at
the high school level. In 1962, Bach accepted a visiting scholar position at Stanford
University, and received a full appointment to the Graduate School of Business in 1966.
At Stanford, Bach was an advocate of rigorous standards for MBA candidates. As a member
of the Faculty Senate at Stanford, he sat on the hearing board in the 1971 Franklin
dismissal case. The author of several books and articles on inflation, monetary policy
and basic economic theory, Bach also worked for a variety of organizations and
corporations, and frequently gave testimony before Congress on economic policy.