584 MEN TRAIN FOR WAR WORK AT BUSINESS SCHOOL

Two hundred and eighteen students enrolled in ROTC have signed up in the 18-month intensified course in Business Administration; 350 men in the Army Quartermaster Corps and Naval Supply are participating in the 12-month Industrial Administration course; and 16 men, most of whom are in low draft categories for reasons of physical condition, have signed up for the regular program for the Master of Business Administration degree.

Almost the entire entering class, exclusive of men already trained in ROTC, was examined Friday by officials from the Navy Ordnance and Navy Bureau of Supply and Accountings for tentative commissions, to be approved at the time of successful completion of the Business School course.

The Business School has been able to alter its curriculum for war purposes largely because of an extensive research project carried on for many months prior to the outbreak of war and costing many thousands of dollars. Some idea of the School's aims and programs for the duration can be gained from the following excerpts from a talk given by Dean Donham to the first war-time class, which entered in January:

"I think it is of interest to you to know why, in a far more difficult war, this School is not in the same position and to some extent isn't taking the same attitudes that were taken twenty-five years ago. Three years ago last March some of us at the School made up our minds that war was inevitable, and that the chance of this country's being involved was very great, and we started preliminary conversations with the planning division of the United States Army to see what the function of the School ought to be in war time . . ."

"The reason we did that has a long history. The School has been training regular Army and Navy officers continuously for approximately twenty years. We started training regular Army and Navy officers at the suggestion of Secretary Weeks and Secretary Davis when they were in the War Department, because Secretary Weeks told us that the one clear lesson of the last war was that the Army and Navy had to know how to deal with business. The great weakness in the last war, he felt, was that the Army and Navy didn't know how to deal with business and get the most out of it. . . ."

"We have been collecting material for instruction in war problems for approximately two years-actively. The year before last, the Mobilization and Defense courses given in the second half year attracted approximately two-thirds of the eligible students. Early last spring, as a result of six months' further study of the war-time functions of this School and cumulative evidence that the Army and Navy wanted us to continue to perform a function for them as well as for industry, we started reconstructing the curriculum throughout. As a result, the School went on a war basis at the opening of last fall's term. . ."

"Pearl Harbor meant to us not the addition of new courses but only the omission of half-a-dozen peace-time courses which offered little of current interest to our students. Besides reconstructing our courses in that way, the Faculty did two things last March and April. They set up the 12-months IA (Industrial Administration) course, to accelerate our training for the war industries job, and voted unanimously to go on a 12-months basis without increased compensation for the duration of the war.

"Our curriculum as it stands today is a curriculum not nearly so attractive to the man who wants to get peace-time training as it was before this change. We faced that fact and decided that if this country was to be worth living in, the first step must be to win the war. We felt that we could play some small part in that effort in three different directions.

"We deliberately became, for the duration and starting last September a military training school for three branches of the service-Army, Navy, and War Industry. This war, very much more than the last war, is a total war in which the things that happen behind the lines and along the lines of communication have an importance comparable with the things that happen at the Army and Navy battle-fronts. It is no longer, as we look at it a question at personal safety or comfort. It is a question whether this nation can survive as the kind of place we want to live in.

"And so we are not very much interested-in fact, we are not at all interested-in men who come here with any other purpose then the single-minded idea of making themselves as useful as possible in this war emergency."

"From the standpoint of you men, if you went a complete training for business it will be necessary to come back after the war. Certainly most men in the IA course will want to supplement their training here or get it somewhere else, either by experience or by going to some other School. We do not represent the training we are giving now as our ideal of business training for peace-time