MANAGEMENT: Harvard in Europe

The nation’s No. 1 seedbed for future corporation presidents has long been Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration. Last week European leaders gathered at Fontainebleau Palace, south of Paris, to inaugurate a Harvard-style Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires. Chief purpose of the new Institut will be to train a whole new generation of European businessmen capable of operating the expanded businesses made possible by the European Common Market.

For this task, the Institut got off to an appropriate multinational start. The 62 first-year enrollees (chosen from 160 applications) represent 14 countries, attend lectures in English, French and German, are taught by German, Belgian, French, Canadian, British, Italian, Dutch, Swiss and U.S. professors. To be accepted, each student has to speak two of the teaching languages, be able to understand a third. Initially, classes are being conducted in a corner of the palace, a French national monument, but Director General Willem Christopher Posthumus Meyjes, a Dutch diplomat, expects in four years to have a new campus outside Paris. Ultimate goal: 800-900 graduates a year.

The man behind the Institut is Harvard Business School’s Professor Georges F. Doriot. French-born General Doriot, 60 (he served in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps), began plugging five years ago for a European graduate business school to serve the European Common Market he saw coming. The Paris Chamber of Commerce agreed to sponsor and administer the school. The European Productivity Agency offered to help pay professors’ salaries; various European and U.S. companies gave money, set up a student loan fund that is helping 80% of the first class to pay the $1,400 tuition. Harvard delegated Doriot and Business School Dean Stanley F. Teele to help organize the school, contributed case histories of U.S. companies, arranged to assist in preparing case histories of European companies. To get these, say Harvardmen, will require a minor revolution in European businessmen’s traditional aversion to giving out information. But they expect to have no trouble persuading businessmen to cooperate once they see the point.