Ford Fund Gives $2 Million To Business School Project

The Business School will expand its teacher training program, increase business research, and establish two new research professorships, Dean Donald K. David announced yesterday.

The five-year program will be financed by a $2,000,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. It includes these plans:

The doctoral program for the advanced training of teachers and researchers in business administration will be expanded.

With college enrollments expected to double or triple in the next ten years, and with proportionally as many students applying to business schools, there is an increasing need for instructors.

"We can't double or triple the size of our school," Bertrand Fox, Director of Research at the Business School, said yesterday, "but we can train additional teachers and researchers."

Foreign Assistance

The Business School will also offer increased assistance to overseas centers for training in business administration. In the past year, over 30 foreign schools in countries ranging from Norway to the Philippines requested academic aid from the Business School.

This program of assistance is connected with the encouragement of the case method of instruction used at the Business School. "It is the policy of the School to make our cases and instruction material available to other institutions," Thomas A. Graves, Jr., assistant dean of the Business School, pointed out.

In addition, the Business School will use part of the Ford Foundation grant to collect business cases from other institutions.

The grant also calls for basic and exploratory research in business cases in Cambridge. "We've always been given funds for specific projects, but we've wanted funds for basic investigations and broader experimentation," Fox commented.

Part of the $2,000,000 will also go towards the development of the behavioral sciences--especially sociology, psychology, and anthropology--in relation to the teaching and research of business administration.