The Hunting Ground

There is basically nothing wrong with allowing bureaucrats a chance to break away from their jobs for a year, Walzer said. "What they might learn, and hopefully the University is the place to learn it, is self-doubt." As for Washington-Cambridge relations, Walzer says that there have always been plenty of professors at Harvard who are willing to work for the Administration, and that the Institute will simply centralize the politicians' academic hunting-ground.

Adam B. Ulam, professor of Government, evaluated the Institute as being "more or less superfluous." Ulam contends that "it might have been useful to bring the politicians up to Harvard during the Eisenhower Administration -- when Harvard was more divorced from the Government -- but now there are enough professors involved."

Ulam agrees with Hoffmann that the prominent politicians are unable to "say any more than they could on T.V." when they appear at Harvard as public speakers. It would be much better to concentrate on the less prominent figures who could describe the pressures that affect their posture. But even here he is pessimistic about the possibilities: "There are very few men who can express themselves well enough to aptly describe the political process," he said.

The Institute is not designed to recruit, he suggests, but rather it does change a student's perspective. It's object is to attract students to a study of today's policy problems at a point in their education when Ulam believes they should be exposed to history and theory. The Institute aims at exciting young people about becoming the Secretary of Defense -- "undergraduates should be left alone for a few years before they are faced with this kind of specialization."

Martin H. Peretz, instructor in Social Studies, asserts that the Institute must justify itself as a positive gain to the community. "They obviously haven't thought through the full implications of what they're doing--they're just trying to spend all that money," Peretz declared.

"It takes a simplistic view of the political process to believe that officials will change their views after a few hours with the 'experts' at Harvard," he notes.

In a rare moment of sympathy for members of the Administration, Peretz said that it was unfair to put proiminent politicians on a platform and ask them to participate in a public dialogue, because they couldn't be expected to present more than a simplified PR image of their compliciated political lives. "If people come here to talk they must be able to be honest, and in order to be honest they must either have a certain distance from their subject or subtlety of speech." Instead of political or ceremonial events, Peretz says he would like to hear Dean Acheson speaking on Greece and Turkey or Oscar Huing on the origins of the Poverty Program. "If the Institute is genuinely interested in education, it will not continue to bring up one big pol after another," he said.

The Institute should not be recruiting future policy-makers either by subtle or direct methods, he continues. If the Institute insists on sponsoring political and ceremonial events then the students have every right to treat them as such and demonstrate against them. "To present these speakers as anything other than a political event under an academic disguise is a betrayal of the students," Peretz said.

It isn't as if Harvard is isolated from the outside world, Peretz continued, and needs to bring in officials from Washington -- "there are even some of us who think they are already in excess." In forcing the students to examine the Establishment and its mechanical process, Peretz said, the Institute has failed to internalize any kind of critical format which will allow the student to judge the Government as well as understand it. "If the people who are brought to speak to the students about politics can't be candid with them, then they just as well might be appearing on 'Meet the Press' or 'Face the Nation.'"

"One of the implications of what I'm saying might be interpreted as an isolationist stance, when in fact what I'm saying is that contact between Washington and Cambridge should not be institutionalized, but rather left up to individuals.

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET, professor of Government and Social Sciences, takes a somewhat different tack. Lipset points out that Washington (unlike Paris, London, and Moscow) is one of the few major capitals which doesn't support a major university. The result, he contends, has been a marked lack of communication between the scholars and officials. Although the Kennedy Institute will not completely make up for Harvard's misplacement (or Washington's), it will be a great deal better than nothing and should foster closer ties between the Government and academia.

The Berkeley Yell

Although The Institute cannot substitute for the benefits of an academic capitol, Lipset says, it will allow the scholars a greater say in what goes on in Washington--something they have long looked forward to. One of the problems of our geographic location, he continues, is that when intellectuals go to work for the government they are separated from their academic work -- causing a kind of schizophrenia. Harvard has always supported the idea of closer relations between Cambridge and Washington as can be seen from a series of Harvard institutions -- the Graduate School of Public Affairs, the Center for International Affairs, the Neiman Fellows, and a number of Business School programs. Most professors at Harvard are no farther than one person removed from the policy-makers; if they don't know the politician themselves, then at least they know someone who knows them. But at other colleges, such as Berkeley "you have to yell to be heard in Washington."

Lipset does not subscribe to the theory that scholars will be enticed into the narrow world of policy-problem-solving, because he believes that academic prestige and rewards go to the "pure social scientists who don't dirty themselves in the outside world." "As soon as you make the cover of Time magazine, he explains, "your academic career is shot." There are two different kinds of people in the academic world, Lipset continues, "those who are looking for their place in politics, and those who are waiting to write a book which will live."