Bentley University

Bentley University is a private university in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded in 1917 as a school of accounting and finance in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. Bentley has one undergraduate school which offers 17 business majors and 14 arts and sciences majors, as well as 39 minors. Its graduate school offers five master's degrees, an MBA with eight disciplines, and three PhD programs.

While Bentley's main campus hosts almost all of its services, the university also has another campus one mile north. The North Campus hosts four residential buildings.

Bentley University was founded in 1917 as the Bentley School of Accounting and Finance by Harry C. Bentley, after leaving his position as professor at the College of Business Administration at Boston University in late 1916. Thirty students attended Bentley's first class on February 26, 1917 in a room secured by Bentley at 30 Huntington Avenue. For the 1920-1921 school year, Bentley leased and had several floors of 921 Boylston Street, what now houses the admissions office of Berklee College, renovated to accommodate an expanding student population. The school operated out of other buildings around the city, but 921 Boylston became the heart of campus.

During the Great Depression, Bentley maintained a stable student population, with just a small dip during the middle of the 1930's. Between 1937 and 1941, as student population grew even more, the school rented and renovated space at 325 Newbury Street. During World War II, Bentley's student population went from an all-time high of 3,084 students in 1938-39, to a precarious 1,055 students in 1944-45. The school was kept afloat largely due to female enrollment, as the school started admitting women in 1942. Between 1942 and 1946, over 1,000 women would take classes at Bentley. Although not the first time the school became coeducational, as it did so to assist with dwindling number during World War I, this time, the school would remain coeducational permanently.

In 1948, the Bentley School of Accounting and Finance was incorporated as a non-profit organization, and Mr. Bentley donated his interests in the corporation of the school to the non-profit. To manage the new non-profit, a 27-member board of trustees was formed. All 27 original trustees, except Bentley, were Bentley alumni. In 1953, Harry Bentley stepped down as president of the Bentley School and took the role of president emeritus while Maurice Monroe Lindsay, an instructor at Bentley since the 1920s, became the second president of the school.

In 1961, the college was accredited to confer four-year Bachelor of Science degrees under president Thomas Lincoln Morison who moved the college from its Boylston Street address in Boston to its current-day location in Waltham, Massachusetts. Land for this move was purchased from the Lyman Estate in 1962 and construction to develop the campus then lasted from 1963 to 1968.

Gregory H. Adamian, a major driving force in the college's development, became the fourth president in 1970. Under his guidance, the college became accredited to confer four-year Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1971 and graduate degrees in 1973. During this time, the school also changed its name to Bentley College. In 2002, Bentley College opened up a campus in the Middle Eastern country of Bahrain in partnership with the Bahrain Institute of Banking and Finance. The college was accredited to confer its first doctoral degrees in the fields of business and accountancy in 2005. A main fixture of the campus, The Bentley Library, underwent a sweeping renovation in 2006 during which time the school's logo was changed to showcase the clock tower that sits atop the building. One year later, Gloria Cordes Larson, a former state and federal government official and Boston-based lawyer, became the first female president of Bentley College.

In 2008, under the leadership of provost Bob Galliers, the school changed its name to Bentley University after being authorized by the state board of higher education to do so. Alison Davis-Blake, former dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, became Bentley's eighth president in July 2018. She stepped down in June 2020 and was replaced by interim president Paul Condrin, the chair of the board of trustees. In March 2021, the board unanimously appointed E. LaBrent Chrite to serve as Bentley's ninth president.