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recognized as national authorities on higher education policy and administration. Carmichael returned to Alabama in the early 1950s to become president of the University of Alabama until 1956. He subsequently served as an educational consultant and wrote widely on educational philosophy and policy. “Moveo et proficio” - Who Was Ordway Tead? Ordway Tead was born in Massachusetts in 1891. His father was a congregational minister, and his mother was a pioneer in religious education for children. He was raised in a very literate household that nourished his substantial intellectual proclivities. Tead graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College in 1912 and was appointed an Amherst Fellow at Boston’s South End House, the first settlement house founded in the city by social pioneer Robert Archey Woods. Tead’s work with Woods was a seminal experience in his life as he came to know the misery and exploitation of recently arrived immigrants from Europe who worked in the factories and businesses in the city. This social service apprenticeship led to his appointment to the Massachusetts Unemployment Insurance Committee, chaired by Robert G. Valentine, the next seminal influence on his life. Valentine was a prominent former federal official, social reformer, and prolific author who created the concept of a “Labor Relations Counselor” (consultant) to employers. Valentine was an early critic of the abuses of scientific management and an advocate for human relations practices in industry that promoted fair treatment of workers through adoption of progressive personnel administration practices by companies. Valentine worked to install personnel departments in many companies through his consulting work. Tead joined Valentine’s consulting practice and continued it after Valentine’s untimely death in 1916. Tead began teaching one of the first college courses in personnel administration at Columbia University during World War I as part of the war effort and continued teaching this subject on a part-time basis for most of the next 40 years. In 1920, Tead and a colleague, Henry Metcalf, published Personnel Administration: Its Principles and Practices, the first such college text in the country based on materials from his college course. This was actually Tead’s
third book of more than two dozen books and scores of scholarly and professional articles he would write over the next fifty years. Also in 1920, Tead entered the publishing industry and helped create the business publishing market before retiring in the early 1960s as a vice president and board member of Harper Brothers. Throughout his long career Tead was a tireless advocate of progressive personnel practices, labor-management cooperation, empowerment of workers, and higher education. In a 1973 eulogy, a friend noted that the driving quest of Tead’s life and work was to build a society where every person would have an opportunity to realize his or her full potential. The body of work reflected in his papers affirms Tead’s motto: “Moveo et proficio – I move and I get things done.” Why was Tead Important? Ordway Tead was one of the early leaders of the human relations movement in the U.S. He was profoundly influenced by his work with recent immigrants at South End House with R.A. Woods, where he saw the devastating human consequences of industrialization and realized that these were not sustainable in a democratic society. But it was R.G. Valentine who showed Tead how to proactively improve workers’ lives and company performance simultaneously through installing progressive personnel practices that treated workers as human beings and not as mere cogs in an industrial machine. Tead took this experience and outlook into the classroom as a teacher, broadcast it widely as a prolific author and highly sought-after speaker, and as a publisher creating a new market for business publications. Much of what we know in human resources management today can be traced back to Tead’s progressive ideas. Studying Tead’s work is important to the evolution of human resources management as we move into a post-industrial economy dominated by knowledgeable workers where many of our current practices no longer work well. By studying how Tead and his contemporaries created our current HR practices in the industrial era, perhaps we can learn lessons from history that will help us adapt to the challenges of our post-industrial world.