Public Business School

Harvard's late great President Charles William Eliot once had a plan for a Harvard School of Political Science & Administration. As was his custom, he threw the plan first into the Faculty for discussion, then into the Corporation for action. By the time those two bodies got through with it in 1908, Eliot's proposed training ground for public servants had been completely changed into a Graduate School of Business Administration. Most Harvardmen felt then that the nation's service offered too few opportunities for college-trained men, thought that they could better bend their efforts toward "making private business a profession." Under the deanship of rotund, bald, energetic Wallace Brett Donham, Harvard's Business School became in the 1920'$ big and proud and potent. Depression sobered the Business School. Depression, too, brought the New Deal and the New Deal created a host of new opportunities. Last week Harvard's President James Bryant Conant publicly picked up, where President Eliot had dropped it, the project for training government servants.

Dean Donham's Business School will henceforth be a "school of public and private business." Last week it enrolled its initial batch of public business students in a special session which begins at midyear. The first regular class enters next autumn. Public business students live, study, eat, go to many of their classes with future vice presidents of business houses. When they, get through they will be fitted for jobs with such governmental business ventures as the Tennessee Valley Authority, such financial agencies as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, such regulatory bodies as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Securities & Exchange Commission.

Dean Wallace Brett Donham is not only an administrator, a business economist, a fancier of Cape Cod houses and the works of Lewis Carroll, but also a banker, a director of half a dozen corporations, a close friend of many a tycoon. He established the case system of instruction, designed to ground students solidly in the practical, day-to-day problems of big corporations. Immensely proud is he of his school's high standing among corporate employers, its prowess in finding jobs for graduates in prosperity or depression.

If there remained any doubt of Dean Donham's wish to foster a sympathetic attitude between government and business, he dispelled it with his comment on the new course: "It is impossible to extemporize a first-class Civil Service. Twice in 18 years ... we have struggled with social catastrophes made more difficult by the shifting requirements of men perforce hastily gathered together, without training for the purpose, overwhelmed, overworked, and often made arrogant by the magnitude of jobs undertaken all at once. Too frequently these men are incompetent to handle the problems they face; yet their decisions constantly upset business."

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