They will meet professors who want to use the Institute to further their studies of government, and studies who are interested in politics. The institute's programs for undergraduates tentatively include a debating "union" similar to those at Oxford and Cambridge; a series of seminars on political topics led by institute visitors; summer jobs in political offices campaigns; and formal and informal appearances by the Institute's visiting politicians. Neustadt emphasizes, however, that all these programs are experimental and may changes once the Institute formally gets underway this fall.

Though its programs are not yet definite, the Institute has already exercised some influence on Harvard that may lead to enormous changes.

It is probably not a coincidence that in the year before the Institute's creation two former Kennedy administration officials -- Adam Yarmolinsky and Daniel Patrick Moynihan--have joined Neustadt, a former White House staffer, on the Harvard Faculty. Both are expected to serve as senior associates of the Institute. And their arrival suggests that other men leaving the government may decide to come to Harvard, where the Institute is certain to keep politics in the atmosphere.

An effect more difficult to define will be the Institute's impact on its specific target, relations between politicians and scholars. Events in the two years since plans for the Institute were first announced have made it clear that these plans came at an especially fortuitous time. For since that time the scholars and politicians whom the Institute seeks to bring together have been threatening to fly apart entirely. The university community has been heard in public debate, and it has made it clear that it is dissatisfied with the performance of the government. Washington, in turn, has evinced little enthusiasm for the academics' appearance as public figures. At a teach-in at Harvard last summer a speaker, Professor Staughton Lynd of Yale, suggested that the President was insane and was vigorously applauded. Meanwhile, in a capital once overrun with professors, academic credentials seem now to be treated more as a disease than as a qualification for public employment.

Nor does there appear to be much chance that, whatever others may hope, college students and professors will leave the world of active politics and return to their ivory towers. "In much of Washington, I should judge, this university involvement is regarded, perhaps rather hopefully, as a passing phase," John Kenneth Galbraith told a commencement audience at the University of Michigan last month. Galbraith himself took a different viewpoint: "Universities and colleges will be an increasingly powerful force in our public life. The question is not one of neutrality, but how they will participate."

Galbraith pointed to the increasing size of universities -- by 1970, 6,700,000 students will be taught by 480,000 teachers -- and said he thought it impossible for so large a group to exercise no power. He suggested that universities will continue to be principally concerned with foreign policy, and that the effect of this will be "altogether healthy."

At almost the same time Galbraith spoke, Walter Lippman '10 was making some of the same points in a speech in California. Modern man, he said, has been emancipated from traditional authority and is now looking for some reservoir of wisdom and truth from which he can draw. Lippman suggested that the universities will ultimately take on this role, even in areas of public policy.

Thus, from quite different points of view, both men suggested that the political role of universities will be greatly enlarged. But an expansion of the present role of scholars in politics might not have altogether happy consequences for the American political system. Much of the energy professors and students have poured into politics in the last few years has been carefully kept out of the system. Many of them think it is a bad system and almost all agree that the traditional methods of working within it--fighting at the polls and lobbying with legislators and policy-makers -- are to unproductive and too difficult.

Galbraith argued in the same speech that not all academics have learned how to serve the political ideas they have adopted:

To the goals that he advocates, the good scholar or the good pupil gives the closest attention. He rises in holy anger if you tell him, however tactfully, that he doesn't know what he is about. And usually, in fact, he does. He has given his objectives a lot of thought. But then he signs a petition, grabs a sign, or joins a delegation without giving a moment's consideration as to whether this is an effective way of advancing his goals.

"To identify one's self dramatically with an idea is not to serve it," Galbraith argued. And how should scholars promote their ideas? Many would argue that the system is unhealthy and must be circumvented. Perhaps it will be one goal of the Kennedy Institute to provide means for those scholars who want their ideas to be heard in the government. The urgency of the present student protests suggests that if academics continue to experience frustration at the hands of the government they may become a disruptive political influence -- one that feels it has no place in the society, one that works apart from other groups, one that works apart from other groups, one that works through methods of disturbance. Perhaps a lesson of the past few years is that social groups will turn to these means if they feel they have no other way of making their opinions felt. The Kennedy Institute may find itself able to suggest ways of working through the normal political process to scholars and students. And this is just one of a number of possibilities a visionary might see for the Institute. Certainly it will aid academics in the study of politics. Perhaps it will offer some service to elective politicians, a group not now well served by society.

Roles Not Defined

Neither the role of the Institute nor that of the Library as a whole has yet been well defined. To explore the limits of both will take more than careful work by a few men; it will take the active co-operation and support of the University. That means, among other things, money. And when this issue is raised, a University president must evaluate the need of a program and compare it with other needs that press upon him university has so many needs that may tend to slight all of them to some extent. But some programs are more important than others are and they serve a disproportionate share of the university's resources. The Kennedy Library may well be the chief last mark of President's Pusey's years in Harvard. It is a program that may revolutionize much of the University as fully as the House system revolutionized the college. If its potential fulfilled, it will be a program work of all the support Harvard can get it