The First Librarian

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Elizabeth (Betty) Breid, MBA ’31, the third woman to graduate from Stanford GSB, served as its librarian from 1934 until 1936. Appointed by Stanford University President Ray Lyman Wilbur, her starting annual salary was $1440. Just weeks later, citing “an unusual emergency in the university’s finances,” Wilbur notified all university academic employees that salaries would be cut 10 percent for anyone earning over $1,000 a year.

Breid and the facility, then known as the Business School Industrial Relations Library, located in the school’s first home in Jordan Quad, survived the economic squeeze.