President Wessel Denies Fletcher's Bid for Autonomy

Tufts' President Nils Wessel said yesterday "it is a fiction that the Fletcher School has over had any sort of a special status involving autonomous rule."

He added that the Tufts trustees had no intention of changing the new Fletcher catalogue back to the original form. The new edition includes Fletcher for the first time in the Tufts' list of graduate schools.

Students at Fletcher, an internationally famous graduate school of Lawand Diplomacy, had previously accused Wessel of being the main figure behind a Tufts' plot to absorb their school into its new university.

"Fletcher has been an integral part of Tufts for 22 years," Wessel said. "I don't deny that the students there have a feeling of independence, but where they got it I don't know."

The university president denied reports that Tufts was planning to incorporate the School into its Arts and Sciences graduate program, He said such a plan would not prove advantageous to either side.

"There is also no truth in rumors that Tufts wants to increase the student enrollment at Fletcher to 400," Wessel said. "That would be four or five times too big for the School," he explained. The present enrollment at Fletcher is 78.