III.

Financing the Center for International Affairs is a big and complicated business. The main burden is borne by the Ford Foundation, which gave Harvard $12.5 million in 1964 for general support of international programs. It was the largest single gift in the University's history.

Not all the grant will go to the Center: $2.5 million will be used for the construction of a new International Studies Building on the site of the Kennedy Memorial Library (the new building will consolidate all the activities of the Center and bring it under the same roof with regional centers, such as the Russian Research Center); $45 million is endowing nine new chairs; and the remaining $5.5 million is being used annually to support research. The Center gets a large chunk of that money; last year, for instance it received $515,000. And to supplement this, the Center is receiving an increasingly large amount of money in public funds.

This is a new source. The Center never contracted with the government until three years ago, but last year the total in federal funds zoomed to $204,000. With this money, the Center is doing work in a variety of fields:

* The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency contracted for a study of Sino-Soviet relations and arms control;

* the Agency for International Development sponsored a project for the development of a quantitative programming method;

* the Department of Defense financed a study of the feasibility of an international agreement preventing the spread of nuclear weapons;

* And the National Science Foundation continued its support of research on social and cultural aspects of modernization.

According to Schelling, the Center has been willing to accept grants or contracts from any agency in the American government that is willing to meet the demands of the University and the Center. This policy rules out security-classified contracts or unclassified contract that impair the Center's standards or its right to publish. The Center has added another restriction: it will research for the government "only to the extent that the research interests of the Center and of the government coincide."

Nor will the Center, declares Schelling, build up a research staff, dependent on continual government contracting. He feels that foundation grants are not much different from government contracts in the fact that both may "explicitly or implicitly constrain the freedom of the research organization." "The expectation of further grants and endowments," he says, "can inhibit, consciously and unconsciously, a research organization in the conclusion it reaches, in the research it undertakes, and in the people it attracts."

What the $12.5 million Ford grant did, however, was to assure a continuity of programs without financial pressure until 1970. "We are getting almost as much money from Ford as we did before," Schelling observes. "The grant merely served to perpetuate for five more years the programs we began."

A University-wide committee, chaired by President Pusey, annually dispenses the $5.5 million allocated to research. This committee was to co-ordinate closely the activities among the regional studies centers, the Center for International Affairs, the graduate schools, and the Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

"The grant converted what had been a departmental relation to the Ford Foundation to a University approach to Ford, but it has not brought and closer relations between the departments and centers," says Schelling.

"In a way," he adds, "it could have fragmented us if we had to compete for funds from a smaller grant. But this grant was ample en- ough to avoid the invidious process of stating why our department is more worthy of funds than another."

It was first thought that the University committee would review all the international programs, but in fact it has not tried to do more than fairly divide the money.