President Bok calls for "nothing less than the education of a new profession"--government employees and elected officials--in his third annual report to the Board of Overseers.

The 33-page report, which Bok mailed to the overseers this week and released yesterday, outlines plans for "professional education for the public sector" by Harvard's graduate schools, especially by the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Bok wrote that education for government work should include programs in analytic methods, organization and management, and "the problems of ethics and competing values that inhere in all forms of public activity."

The past decade has undermined public confidence in the capacity of government to cops with the nation's problems," Bok wrote, adding that the growth in the size of the federal government since the 30s has made its work increasingly difficult.

"In the face of these problems," he wrote, "universities have a major opportunity and responsibility to set about the task of training a corps of a able people to occupy influential positions in public life."

While professional training for government work should include purely academic study, Bok wrote, it should ideally concentrate more on "instilling a capacity to make policy decisions with the help of a variety of skills and disciplines."

More Public Policy

Bok said in a telephone interview yesterday that he may try to raise "several million" dollars from foundations and private donors to finance expansion of the Kennedy School's public policy program, which now accepts only 25 students a year.

He said the fund drive and the expansion of the Kennedy School to encompass the goals he outlined in his report is now "in process" and will take "considerable mutual cooperation and collaboration" among Harvard's graduate schools over the next several years.

Don K. Price, dean of the Kennedy School, said yesterday that the school is now "halfway along the road" toward accomplishing Bok's goals, and said the school has "been developing this way for the past 20 years."

Bok's first two annual reports dealt with the College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences respectively.