ABSTRACT
On September 17, 1908, at the age of twenty-four, George Burton Hotchkiss went to the eighth floor of the New York University building in Washington Square for a job interview with Joseph French Johnson, Dean of the School of Commerce. He was ushered into a large classroom, one with seating available for about three hundred students. As Hotchkiss later recalled,
I was instructed to take the platform and deliver a lecture while they stood at the extreme rear and listened. This is another of the pictures I shall never forget–Dean Stoddard, a tiny man cocking his head sidewise to look up at Dean Johnson, a six-footer, while I attempted to deliver an impromptu speech. As always, the speech I thought of afterwards was better than the one I gave which was merely some platitudes beginning with “I'm glad to see so many of you here.” They would have been as amazed as I if I had begun, “You have the privilege of listening to the first lecture by a man who will still be lecturing here forty-three years from now, when Commerce will occupy a whole building and New York University will occupy the whole East side of the Square and much more.” I did not have that foresight nor did anyone else. Fortunately my speech was brief. They said my voice carried well, and that was that. (Hotchkiss n.d., Chapter 6: 2)
