Emergency Session

Sitting at his mammoth oval desk (the old Harvard faculty table), Dean Wallace Brett Donham of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration recently pondered three letters. They were from Jesse Isidor Straus, president of R. H. Macy, Walter Sherman Gifford of A. T. & T. and Morgan-Partner George Whitney. Each of these men is an enthusiastic supporter of Harvard's Business School. Each has had a chance to see its graduates at work. And each of them has been much pestered of late by friends and friends of friends seeking employment. The kernel of their thoughts was contained in Mr. Gifford's letter, written one Sunday from "Thimble Farm," his Greenwich, Conn., estate. Said he: "During the present emergency when a great many college graduates are having difficulty in finding jobs, the Business School . . . has an opportunity and hence an obligation to be of help. Nothing can be more demoralizing to a young man than to want employment but to be obliged to sit around waiting for a job."

The dean was in a receptive mood. His "plant" has been lagging this year with an enrolment of only 960 students against 1,102 last year. Last week he did what the merchant, the utilityman and the banker had suggested. The Business School announced a "special emergency session." It will start Jan. 30, 1933, last through Aug. 16. College graduates and men with an executive background can enter it. They will receive the same instruction as the first-year class which started this autumn. The tuition is the same, $600, but room & board will be $400 against $515 for the present class. Students who pass their examinations in August can join the regular second-year class next autumn.

At Harvard's Business School students are nourished not only on theories. They study case histories, current corporate problems, live statistics. And pipe-puffing Dean Donham always adds philosophical flavoring. His attitude: business management fails unless it includes the right amount of co-operation with competitors and frequent sacrifice of short-time profits for long-time security. Widely read were his two recent books, Business Adrift and Business Look's at the Unforeseen.

A fact that potential students at Dean Donham's "emergency session" will ponder: over 80% of last June's class of 395 are employed and only 10% are on the School's list as seeking jobs.

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