The topic for this morning — the recruitment of business history teachers and its allied problems — is an ideal one for discussion purposes. There are practically no facts to impede the free flow of ideas and the limits to the expression of opinion are almost boundless.

My function is to provide an introduction to the discussion. This will be divided into the usual three parts: how are business history teachers presently recruited? What are the strengths and weaknesses in the present arrangement? What should the process of recruiting really be? All of these questions raise a whole series of additional questions of even more fundamental importance.