Biography|John Chambers — The Tenth and Fee Lane School That Granted the 1975 M.B.A.

West Virginia gave him business and law.

Indiana gave him the finance degree the sales job required.

The Indiana University honors register lists John T. Chambers as an M.B.A. in finance and management from the Kelley School of Business, class of 1975.

Bloomberg's timeline uses the same year. A later encyclopedia sketch that prints 1976 is the outlier; the school's own honoree page is the primary record used here.

The business school had already broken ground in 1964 at Tenth Street and Fee Lane. By the mid-1970s the graduate program sat in that block, the building later rebuilt and renamed Hodge Hall after a 2014 renovation.

The pin is Hodge Hall at 1309 East Tenth Street. The brick a visitor sees now is not the 1975 classroom envelope. The intersection is the same.

He was twenty-five when the degree posted. The next year, 1976, he joined IBM in technology sales. Six years later he moved to Wang Laboratories.

The Cisco years make the M.B.A. look like a footnote. Without it the IBM door in 1976 does not open on the same terms.

Kelley later elected him to its Academy of Alumni Fellows in 1996 and gave him an honorary Doctor of Science on the Bloomington campus in 2007.

Those honors belong to later pins. This one is the year the transcript closed.

A visitor can stand at Tenth and Fee and see the current undergraduate center. The graduate offices now spill across the walkway into the Godfrey Center. The 1975 class did its work on this corner.

Photo: World Economic Forum / Remy Steinegger, John T. Chambers at Davos, 23 January 2013, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons