In April, 1965, two months after the tax study was started, Calkins resigned as PACE president, moved from Shaker Heights into Cleveland, and jumped into the race for one of four seats on the Cleveland School Board.
Calkins was immediately cast in the role of crusading reformer challenging the entrenched party hacks. He ran an exhausting campaign, fought hard to shake a suburbanite-carpetbagger image, and finally came in third out of six candidates. That was enough to get him a four-year seat on the Board.
Since then, Calkins' record has been surprisingly consistent with the outlines he set during the PACE days. During the campaign and after the election, he emphasized the same PACE issues. Cleveland needed better schools, more money, closer cooperation with industry.
In his Congressional testimony, which has become more frequently in the last year, Calkins has again stressed the problems that came out of the old PACE study. In 1967, he told the Senate subcommittee on education the Senate subcommittee on education that inner-city schools could work if they had enough money and enough good teachers.
At that hearing, Robert Kennedy derided Calkins' request for some school aid as "pouring money into the same old system when there's no sign it works." Calkins retored that the city schools have failed only because they have been continually shortchanged.
In 1968, Calkins appeared before the education subcommittee again and urged them to send more money into the cities' vocation education programs. And less than six weeks ago, Calkins--serving as chairman of the National Advisory Council on Vocational Education--hit the same theme saying that job training classes in schools would save the country millions of dollars that it now spends on remedial training for unemployable adults.
VII
THESE CLEVELAND details are currently interesting only because they offer important clues to the way Calkins thinks about Harvard.
One undeniable mark of Calkins' school board record is his commitment to standard "liberal" causes. In his action on the school board, in his intricately-designed tax plans, and especially in his testimony before Congress, he has pleaded for more money to let the big cities meet their crying ghetto needs.
Calkins has urged private investors to put some of their money into black businesses in the ghetto. He made a speech last fall and suggested the creation of some national foundation to direct those philanthropic investments.
In the internal function of the Cleveland board, Calkins has also tried to make governmental procedures more accessible to the people they serve. Last year he fought with other board members in order to get the board's meetings moved to local schools, where parents who were being affected by integration plans could question the board members.
Two years ago, Calkins led another crusade. He headed a drive to repeal an 18-year-old loyalty oath that Cleveland had required of all its school employees.
There are many other examples of Calkins' allegiance to classic liberalism. In his school board campaigns, he received unprecedented backing from labor unions and the Americans for Democratic Action. He said at Harvard last month that he wants the U. S. to get out of Vietnam, and his opposition to the war was on record long before that. He has supported Civil Rights movements, in the South and in the cities.
But there is another clear strain in Calkins' thought that keeps this budding liberalism from veering over into ROTC abolishing radicalism in his views on Harvard. Underlying his commitments to specific political and educational goals has been Calkins' unflagging devotion to pragmatism as a political philosophy.
Calkins is a man who likes to get things done--in the most immediately efficient was possible. He finds the vulnerable chink in the problem he wants to solve, and he begins his attack there. If the attack is fruitless he moves elsewhere. He does not ram his head into the wall.
