FORGET who you are. You are now a New Jersey State Senator. Before you lies the task of choosing a site for the long-awaited New York metropolitan jetport. Keeping in mind the area you represent, plus the wealth of technical information available, feel free to caucus, make deals, take bribes, draft legislation, and generally become--as best you know how--a real-life politician.

Should you, even for a moment, remember you are only a first-year graduate student at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, all is lost. Suspension of disbelief is simply essential. "We know it's only a game," says one first-year student, "but if you force yourself to believe, it can be a very worthwhile game."

These "policy conferences"--mock political extravaganzas spread across the first term of the first year--are the most unusual part of the school, says David Denoon (Harvard '66). Denoon took part in the simulated New Jersey State Senate battle, and when he found himself representing the area in which the jetport was to be built, he consulted engineers, airplane people and technicians of all sorts--and finally wrote a bill sticking the jetport on someone else's constituency. Thus he had saved his voters from low-flying planes, massive traffic and sonic booms--in short, performed a first-class public service.

I

The forty-odd students in each class at the Woodrow Wilson School are presumably united by a common goal: the desire to take part in some facet of "public affairs." Exactly what constitutes "public affairs" is unclear, but the definition seems to be narrowing. Two years ago the school was vaguely tolerant of aspiring journalists and not entirely committed to the exclusion of teachers and businessmen; now it is insisting on protobureaucrats. More than ever, its tightly knit (25 courses to choose from) curriculum aims at the production of better civil servants.

At the center of this curriculum stands the policy conference--a real test of a student's political drive. "I wanted to be left alone to read for two years--but the school wouldn't leave me alone," says an understandably dissatisfied second-year graduate student who briefly held a government job before coming to Princeton. "I came here to get away from games," he explains, "and I'm certainly not going to play them when they're not even for real."

Another, perhaps more numerous, group of Woodrow Wilson School malcontents complains of too much academia. For example, Public Affairs 546--"Studies in American Foreign Policy"--offers a reading list that includes over 200 individual items, from magazine articles to books of more than a thousand pages. True, some of the items on this gargantuan list are only recommended, but P.A. 546 is just one of four courses you might take in a single term.

That's 16 courses in two years and scores of well-researched, often lengthy, always demanding papers. "You come here from college expecting paradise," says one second-year student, "but it's just more college."

Richard A. Lester, associate dean of the school, feels that too many students mistakenly imagine an instant source of government contacts. They come to Princeton, Lester says, hoping to become intimate with scads of big wheels from Washington; instead they run into academic types telling them how to play at policymaking, and this turns them off.

If so, the school itself is partly to blame. The high minded rhetoric of its PR literature, with its talk of "Princeton in the Nation's Service" and its promise of smooth sailing for all, encourages students to think they can "beat the hierarchy." When they find out what a Master's Degree from the Woodrow Wilson School is really worth in Washington, they are rightly disillusioned. They begin to wonder if a Law Degree might not have been a more sensible stepping-stone into government after all.

II

This disillusionment has begun to translate itself into positive action. Fewer students are contented with the Master's Degree--more are going on to get Ph.D.'s in Economics or Politics, and a sharply increasing number are entering Law School.

Undoubtedly the draft is responsible for some of this sudden upsurge in academic fervor. Lester sees still other causes. "During the Kennedy years," he says, "students were more enthusiastic about government service. Now they want something to fall back on. It's not just Johnson's personal nature...it's also the war."

Shell Schreiberg (University of Minnesota '64) admits to a slightly more partisan motive for following the Woodrow Wilson School with Harvard Law School. "I want to know that when the Republicans come in," Schreiberg explains, "I can go and practice law."

Like Schreiberg, most Woodrow Wilson students aspire to be in-and-outers. They want to work for the government only briefly in a non-policymaking capacity, teach, write or practice law for a while, and then reusually enough to start them off as government interns of some sort, but from there it's a steep climb to the corridors of power. So the most ambitious students--not to mention some who are less than thrilled about the prospect of a "McNamara Fellowship"--stay in school.