Big government cut across all the business disciplines, challenging the old verities. In his 1935 report to the Chancellor, Dean Raper stressed his faculty’s interest “interest in current affairs” and their views on the “new” economics. “I think that no member of the staff has been convinced that the old economics has been disproved,” he wrote. “Their minds are open to new economic ideas, they do not accept an idea merely because it is new; neither did they reject an idea because it is old.”

The faculty warmly embraced at least one new idea - Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. Here at last, was an opening for trade in the Western hemisphere and a development to their internationalism. In 1939, in cooperation with the Department of Romance Languages, the College introduced a four-year Latin-American trade sequence for “the purpose of training graduates for a career in Latin-American commerce”.