To the administration of the Woodrow Wilson School, this trend must seem a slap in the face. Here they have set up a training program in public affairs, and the trainees go around saying, in effect, that it's not what it's cracked up to be.

"All through my two years at the school," says Meldon Levine (Berkeley '64), "they tried to discourage me from going for a Ph.D." Levine, a Berkeley student government leader before the heyday of the Free Speech Movement, had applied to the Woodrow Wilson School with the intention of becoming a teacher. In light of the school's obvious dislike, even then, for Ph.D. types, he was surprised to learn he had been admitted. But the campaign to turn him away from teaching ultimately had its effect, if not quite the desired one. Today Levine is a first-year student at Harvard Law.

In response to students like Levine, the school has begun to crack down on applicants with side interests. It has also moved into competition with other graduate schools by starting its own Ph.D. program. The hope is that this doctorate in Public Affairs (which requires two years at the Woodrow Wilson School, two to four years in government, and finally another year back at the school) will become the goal of exactly those students who are now toying with fields other than politics after they leave Princeton.

III

THE undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School shares little more than a building with the graduate program. Despite similar pretensions, it is basically just an honors major for Princeton students in the social sciences. Undergraduate courses are chosen from Princeton's Politics, Economics, History and Sociology departments, whereas graduate courses are offered by the school itself.

Jim Barkas, a Princeton junior whose interest is Russian studies, has found the Woodrow Wilson School a way of escaping the comparatively rigid departmental requirements. Barkas enrolled his fall in a "junior conference" on U.S. relations with a divided Europe. The junior conferences--loose equivalents of the graduate policy conferences--split up into "commissions," which in turn split up into individual research projects. Mostly by luck, Barkas found himself studying trade with the Soviet Union.

Mark Katz, another junior, was not so lucky. Since he was interested in international affairs, he signed up for a conference on Congress and foreign policy. The faculty leader of this conference altered the topic to Congress and national security, and with a few flips of the coin (literally), Katz was studying "How military strategy is formed."

The head of Princeton Students for a Democratic Society, Beau Burlingham, insists the undergraduate program (and for that matter, the whole school) is designed "to turn out government bureaucrats." The school asks its students "how to improve the functioning of certain things within certain postulates," Burlingham says. "It's just making the establishment work more effectively."

But Burlingham admits he is in a small minority. In a conference this fall, on 20th-century protest movements, he found that--while he wanted to consider protest movements sympathetically--many of the conference members were seeking ways to get rid of such movements: "They continually wanted to look at protest the way Crane Brinton looks at the Rrench Revolution--as a disease."

For himself, Burlingham concedes, the school has been radicalizing. He believes, however, its effect on most students is to discourage any kind of radical thinking. "Sweeping proposals are frowned on from the word go--the idea is to grind in the notion that most things shouldn't be questioned," Burlingham says.

Few students see any reason to deny the establishment-oriented character of the school's undergraduate program. They learn, in the words of one uncomplaining student, "why Dulles did what he did"--i.e., the constraints operating on government policy-makers. A substantial number (perhaps 25 per cent) of Woodrow Wilson majors go into government, and the majority like the school the way it is.

IV

Many of the mysteries surrounding the Woodrow Wilson School evolve from that year's "magnificent anonymous gift," as it is inevitably described in the PR literature. Before '61, the school's graduate program was merely a bureaucratic unit. Since then, $35 million has provided a building, a faculty, a curriculum, and a massive scholarship program.

Who gave these millions? Speculation is divided, but among those mentioned most frequently are Campbell Soup, the Duponts, Bernard Baruch, and, perhaps less seriously, the C.I.A. Whoever it was, gossip has it that Princeton's president Robert Goheen convinced the anonymous donor to throw all his loot into one pile rather than spread it around. There are those who contend "Firm X" is still watching closely over the Woodrow Wilson School's progress.

To some, this wholly speculative relationship assumes the dimensions of a conspiracy. "Money and personnel flow back and forth between Washington and Princeton," says SDS leader Burlingham, to whom the school is a toy of big government and big business.