During the last few years, we have seen an upsurge in Americans' concern over their right to peer beyond the "classified" label that veils the actions of governments, agencies and institutions. At Harvard, though, at least one area has held fast against the onslaught of freedom of information legislation. Outside of the University's upper administrative echelons, few people know how the Overseers' visiting committees perceive the schools or departments they visit, nor does the Harvard community learn which of the committees' recommendations are put into effect.

In 1975 and 1976, however, minutes and reports of one group, the visiting committee to the Graduate School of Design (GSD), were released without authorization. Last year, the Overseers took the unprecedented step of canceling the annual meeting of the GSD committee. The Overseers cited a "breach of confidentiality" that undermined "the mutual confidence and trust that must run between the School and the Visiting Committee."

Although no GSD department emerged unscathed in these reports, the Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP) came under particularly sharp scrutiny. The committee's negative appraisals of the CRP raise questions not only about the department's new curriculum, and related schisms within the faculty, but also about the focus of the planning profession itself.

The visiting committee in its 1976 report concluded that the GSD suffers from a "drift away from professional competence." The report stated the CRP in particular places too much emphasis on policy analysis and social sciences, unwisely downplaying planning as a professional discipline. Earlier in this decade, the department terminated its doctoral program, focusing almost exclusively on a two-year masters degree program for professional training in planning. Although most members of the faculty defend the CRP's current curriculum, a few professors have voiced criticisms even sharper than those of the visitors, terming the program inadequate for a professional's background. This issue may loom even larger during the coming year as the CRP decides whether to apply for renewed recognition from the American Institute of Planners, which would in turn require the AIP to re-evaluate Harvard's program.

Although the AIP does not accredit schools formally, it does "recognize" professional degree granting programs. In order to receive recognition, the CRP must prove, among other things, that students in the program become acquainted with the physical, social, economic and ecological "process of human settlement," Robert Brown, staff director of the New England River Basins Commission and a member of the National Education Development Committee of AIP, says. Students must also acquire first-hand experience with "the planning process" and the techniques of professional urban and regional planners.

Harvard's current AIP recognition expires next year. John F. Kain, the CRP chairman, says it is "inconceivable" that the program will not qualify. Other faculty members and visiting committee members, with a different perspective on planning education, are less certain.

In 1971, the Harvard administration established a committee to outline a direction for future planning programs. In President Bok's 1973-74 annual report, he stressed that the GSD, like Harvard's other professional schools, train public leaders. Bok has made subsequent statements supporting the direction in which Maurice D. Kilbridge, who became dean of the GSD in 1970, has steered the school.

Critics of the program contend that the CRP places undue emphasis upon economic and quantitative analysis. Kilbridge and Kain refute these allegations. Since Kain became department chairman two years ago, the CRP has revised its core curriculum, which now requires seven courses for first-year planning students. Four of these courses--Economic Analysis for Planning, Quantitative Methods for Planners I and II, Public Finance and Budgeting--stress economic or statistical analysis. In addition, first-year students this summer received an introductory welcome letter from the department, suggesting several preparatory texts in statistics and microeconomics. The letter also stressed the importance of typing skills.

The CRP's critics, including a number of visiting committee members, accept economics as one aspect of planning but they claim that the current program gives short shrift to social, political and physical factors in the planning process. Faculty members who share Kain's viewpoint, many of whom entered the department within the last few years, note that the remaining core courses--Planning Process: Political and Institutional Analysis, Planning Law and Administration and Urban Growth and Spatial Structure--provide students with the necessary foundation in other relevant disciplines, including physical planning. H. James Brown Jr., professor of City Planning, sums up the opinion of many of his colleagues saying, "the notion that too much economics is included is based on little information of what is really in the program."

In the second year of the program, students focus on a specific policy area, such as transportation. They must also complete at least one workshop, usually working with a client, on a "real world" planning problem. Another member of the department, who wishes to remain anonymous, is skeptical. He says that the first-year core provides an unnecessarily heavy dose of economics and that the second year is overly specialized. Students are simply not getting a broad enough basis for careers in planning.

A current member of the department, Francois C.D. Vigier, professor of City Planning and Urban Design, says he is "not terribly optimistic" about the AIP's acceptance of the core as a basis for professional education. Vigier, a trained architect and planner, is one of the few faculty members who joined the department before the 1971 modifications began. He says before the CRP curriculum changes, economics was not stressed although students had the option of taking courses in that discipline, as well as other social sciences, in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He terms more than half the "real life" problem-solving workshops as "quite odd" or only peripherally related to planning. "What we are teaching now may be superb--but is it planning?"

Vigier believes that the current CRP program "speaks to urban phenomena but not to planners"--it addresses part, but not all, of what a planner needs to know. If the CRP is actually closer to an urban economics program than to a professional training school, it does not clearly belong in the Design School, he says. In fact, he says that "we might as well be in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences or in Timbuktu, for that matter."

Another source close to the department, who also declined to be identified, says the entire GSD is "lopsided." Bok and Kilbridge, who is a former professor of Business Administration, are leading the GSD "towards second rate economic planning, economic landscape architecture, economic architecture. If Bok wants a school in planning or architecture as a theory or philosophy, that's fine. But it shouldn't be called professional education. Students aren't well prepared to take on planning jobs." He added that "the GSD is suffering from economic indigestion."

The source and other critics have also claimed that the department's roughly fourfold expansion since the late '60s "creates a mechanical approach to teaching--if students are to develop their own ideas for planning, they have to be able to work closely with the faculty." Although the faculty-student ratio worsened, William A. Doebele, professor of Advanced Environmental Studies in the Field of Implementation, says it was a "temporary dilution--there's been an enormous catch-up in the last two years."

Kain says that the increase in the department size actually disproves charges of narrowness. The department used to have the equivalent of five full-time professors teaching. Now there are more than 20 professors. The larger faculty offers more courses and presents broader perspectives on planning than the small staff could, Kilbridge says.