Campus Dissenters: Princeton Men Launch Pro-Business Monthly – Student Group Seeks To Sell Slick Magazine Nationally – Pro-Dow and Anti-McCarthy

By Frederick C. Klein

            Princeton, N.J.—What’s that you say, Mr. Executive? The colleges are stuffed with alienated hippies who would rather shave than consider a business career? You’re having a tough time with your recruiting?

            Well, take heart. A group of four-square Princeton University underclassmen are going to bat for you. They’ve come out with a quarterly magazine called Business Today. Its declared purpose is to wash away student hostility and indifference toward business by presenting it as the “fascinating, many-angles world” they say it really is.

            Business Today is no ordinary student publication. It aspires to a national circulation. Its first edition—50,000 copies of which were mailed last week to college students around the country and officers of the 2,000 largest U.S. corporations (the editors bought the company list from Dun & Bradstreet)—is slick-papered, 68 pages in length and typographically handsome. An editor is Malcolm S. Forbes Jr., 20-year-old son of the president of Forbes, a twice-monthly business magazine. The advertising manager is Edward Shudder III, 18, whose father is the president of the Newark News.

In Defense of Dow

            The appearance and demeanor of Business Today’s editors seem guaranteed to reassure corporate advisors and recruiters; none are bearded and all address their elders as “sir.” Likewise soothing are the magazine’s contents. The featured article: “Defense of Saran Wrap: The Real Side of Dow.” In this article, Dow Chemical Co. President Herbert Doan tells in an interview about the “99.5%” of the concern that is not engaged in the manufacture of napalm, an activity that has brought Dow under widespread student attack.

            The magazine is the idea of Jonathan Perel, an 18-year-old freshman from Richmond, Va. Young Mr. Perel, blond and pleasant, says he likes to have a nonacademic side project—while pupil at Collegiate Prep in Richmond, he wrote a 234-page history of the school. He also says that a few weeks at Princeton convinced him that the good name of business was in some need of protection on campus.

            “Kids are down on business because the publications they see usually just presents the favorable side,” he asserts. “When business tries to defend itself, students tend to shrug it off as self-serving propaganda. We figured that students will listen to other students—that a student-run business magazine would get a better hearing.”

            Whether this will be the case isn’t clear yet. The magazine to date has no paid subscribers—its first edition was mailed free to corporations and to university departments of commerce and economics for distribution to their students. Business Today’s newsstand price of $2 (subscribers will get discounts) might be a bit steep for some, even though editors point out that Harvard Business Review also sells for $2 a copy.

Cheers for the Cops

            It’s questionable, too, whether great numbers of students will cheer Business Today’s editorial policies. One of the magazine’s initial editorials applauds Columbia University President Grayson Kirk for his “firm” stand against student demonstrators (“We found it a refreshing sight to see the cops, their clubs a swingin’, disrupt a band of willful ruffians disrupting an entire university.”); Eugene McCarthy’s appeal to collegians. The Senator, according to Business Today, is a “sleeping pill” who substitutes “petulance” for wit.

            Business Today, however, already shows promise of being a hit with advertisers, the first edition carried 21 full-page ads, including ones from IBM, U.S. Steel and Chrysler. Most were recruiting appeals, and a few were couched in terms students are supposed to respond to. Chrysler, for instance, advertised that engineering—not selling cars—is “our bag.”

            Despite their magazine’s pro-business orientation, Business Today’s editors say they aren’t in it for the money. Indeed, the magazine is run on the nonprofit basis under Princeton’s auspices. It’s not that they are against profits, the editors hasten to assert; it’s just that nonprofit status brings them low postal rates, and university affiliation means free office space, legal advice and computer time.

            Aided by those savings, Business Today should “just about” break even on its first edition, says editor-in-chief Perel. Nonprofit status helped in another way, too, he adds: “It got us some top contributing writers for nothing.”

            Featured in the initial Business Today were reprinted political columns by James Reston, William F. Buckley Jr. and David Lawrence. Nine of the 10 major articles (the exception was the interview with Mr. Dian of Dow) were donated by contributors, among them Willis J. Winn, head of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, Fritz Machlup, a Princeton economics professor, and Rawleigh Warner Jr., president of Mobile Oil Corp.

            The editors, however, did contribute a few comments on the featured articles, and it’s doubtful that the contributors took offense at them. Fletcher Jones, the president of a nine-year-old computer firm, wrote an article on the use of computers; he was introduced by Business Today as living proof that “making a million” as an entrepreneur” may not be so far-fetched.”

            William T. Kelly, president of Abex Corp., a New York maker of industrial equipment, wrote an article on corporate diversification and added separately a brief recollection of his own choice of career. To wit: “When I was in college and trying to decide where I would like to spend the rest of my life, it never occurred to me to consider any career other than business.”

            Commented Business Today’s editors: “We found Mr. Kelly’s thoughts on a business career frank and refreshing.”

᛫ May 20, 1968 ᛫