Harvard Business school Decides To Hold Special Summer Session

The Harvard Business School has decided to hold a special session this summer for the benefit of first-year students who will become eligible for the draft in June.

The summer session--which was approved last Friday--will make it possible for students to complete their second-year courses during the fall term and receive their MBA degrees by mid-January, 1969.

"The new program is in no way designed to help Business School students avoid the draft," Thomas A. Graves Jr., associate dean of the Business School Faculty, said yesterday. "But we hope it will allow students to complete their graduate education before the military grabs them."

Graves and George F. F. Lombard '33, senior associate dean of the Business School Faculty, made the decision to go ahead with the summer session after 80 first-year students agreed to attend. Earlier, Graves had said that 120 students would have to participate in the summer program for it to be worthwhile.

"But it became clear to us," Graves said yesterday, "that the 80 who signed up were very interested indeed. We felt we should respond to their need and their interest, even though fewer people than we had hoped agreed to attend."

Ten More

Since Friday's decisions, ten more first-year students have said they will attend the summer session.

Faculty members who have not already committed themselves to summers away from Harvard will run the special session, Graves said. "There will probably be about six professors here," he said. "Several of them were planning to stay in Cambridge and do research, but now they have agreed to teach."

Because of the small staff, Graves added, "one disadvantage will be that we can offer only a small number of electives." There will probably be five electives, he said, of which each student will have to choose four. "But we have tried to select those courses which will give the students a good choice."