The Nolan School of Hotel Administration (SHA, more commonly known as the Hotel School) at Cornell University is a specialized business school in the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, a private Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1922, it was the world's first four-year intercollegiate school devoted to hospitality management. The undergraduate business curriculum at SHA is one of only three such Ivy League programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Students in the Hotel School are referred to as Hotelies. Participants come from all over the world to take classes at such locations as Ithaca, New York; Brussels, Belgium; Singapore; and site visits in Las Vegas and New York City. History The nature of SHA was in large part the creation of professor Howard B. Meek. He was supported in his efforts by New York City hotel men, a number of whom testified in Albany, urging the legislature to appropriate $11,000 per year for the school. Edward M. Tierney of the Ansonia Hotel stated "There is a dearth of competent hotel , and such a course at Cornell would have the endorsement and co-operation of the hotel men generally throughout the country... The war brought a great change in the hotel worker, and the old-time attitude of servility has been replaced by efficient service giving and courtesy. Young men now enter the hotel business just as they would banking, railroad, or commercial life, to find a future in it, and the hotel man must offer the same attractions of commensurate pay and advancement." In 1927, at the 2nd Annual Hotel Ezra Cornell, Meek convinced a skeptical Ellsworth Milton Statler of the value of the concept; Statler declared "I'm converted. Meek can have any damn thing he wants." Statler and his wife became major benefactors of the school, eventually donating a total of more than $10 million. In 1950, the school was transformed from being a part of, Cornell's School of Home Economics (now the School of Human Ecology), a statutory college, into becoming a separate, endowed unit of Cornell. In 1948, the Statler Foundation funded the construction of a 50-room Statler Inn and the adjoining class-room building called Statler Hall. The building also housed Cornell's faculty club. The 750-seat Alice Statler Auditorium was added to the southern end in 1956. In 1986, the original Statler Inn was