HIID's consulting project in Iran has probably received the harshest criticism in the University community. The Iran project, which stationed as many as 12 Harvard advisers in Iran at once, focused on planning the growth of Iran's capital city, Teheran. As the project nears its November termination date, HIID officials admit that Harvard's work in Iran has been less than successful. David C. Cole, associate director of the Institute for Overseas Projects, concedes the Teheran effort "has not been a very effective project. We haven't been able to accomplish very much."
"There hasn't been any serious limitation on our freedom there, but Iran's still a very difficult place in which to operate. The people don't tend to be oriented to problem solving. Too many conflicts developed," Cole adds.
Still, HIID officials tend to view Harvard cooperation with regimes generally considered repressive and authoritarian as a liberalizing influence. Frequently, they say, HIID's projects are designed to create new elites and "open up" closed societies. And once involved in an overseas project, HIID officials maintain that Harvard does not simply blindly accept the caveats and guidelines of the host country's government. No matter what the size of the contract, "we're always prepared to pack up and leave if the government asks us to, or if we feel we can't work effectively," says Cole. "But as long as the government doesn't try to distort our project and frustrate our efforts, we go ahead."
In several instances, Harvard development teams have parted on less than amicable terms with host countries. After Colonel Acheampong's military takeover in 1972, the government of Ghana asked Harvard to pack its bags. And when a military junta took over in Greece in 1967. Harvard terminated a contract with the Greek government.
Most recently, Ethiopia broke off a major, multi-million dollar HIID contract in 1975, during the leftward shift of the Ethiopian government that followed the deposition of Emperor Haile Selassie.
"It was our hope that a moderate regime would come in, a reform regime. And there was evidence, we thought, that a number of the relatively informed, educated, enlightened Ethiopians might well take power," Eddison says. "But that didn't happen. A number of them were jailed or killed and eventually the power shift went the other way to the extreme left."
The HIID team left a few months after the government began to look for more radical solutions to the country's problems. "Where a country wants to move to the extreme left, they don't want us and we're really not in the position to give them the kind of advice they're seeking," Eddison explains.
Even as HIID continues to expand its operation overseas, the institute seems committed to altering the focus of its development interests. Recent projects have seen a movement away from the "trickle-down" approach to development that marked Harvard development efforts in the '50s and '60s. The trickle-down theory called for the creation of an industrial and business elite, which was supposed to stimulate development. By the late '60s, however, this theory had been severely challenged by critics who argued that it merely widened the gap between a small elite and the poor masses of the developing country. Cole says institute projects have developed "much more of a concern for the poorest of the poor, the people who have been bypassed by development efforts at the national and regional efforts for the past 30 years."
Until now, almost all HIID projects have placed consultants in the capital cities of developing countries, where they have worked alongside the elites in business and government. Recent projects, however, have tried to place advisers in the hinterland regions, where HIID consultants can work along with villagers.
One recently concluded institute contract calls for the development of educational, agricultural and health resources in an isolated pocket of North Sudan. The Abyie district along the North-South Sudan border is 80 miles from the nearest railhead; during the five-month long rainy season, there are no passable roads out of the area. The native black African population, which opted to stick with the Moslem, Arabic north after the Sudanese civil war ended in 1970, survives through subsistence sorghum farming and livestock raising. HIID anthropologist David Sharry has begun the advance work for this project, out of communication with HIID personnel, officials in Kharthoum and the rest of the outside world for that matter, for months at a time.
Next week, Cole and John Viallaume, an HIID education specialist, will fly to Kharthoum to meet with anthropologist Sharry. According to Cole, Sharry will have to walk 80 miles to catch a railway boxcar making the three-day, 50-mile journey to the Sudanese capital.
"The Sudan project is much more like a peace corps project. The people are younger, they're living far more simply, putting up with much more hardship--they are out in the bush gathering data, living close to the land and the people," Eddison says.
HIID officials are quick to agree that Harvard undergraduates--except for the relatively few studying economic development--are barely aware of the work of HIID as Harvard's representatives in the Third World. "Our position is that we don't go out of our way to have public relations releases. It's not like we're trying to drum up business like a private firm," Eddison says. Unlike most other centers of research at Harvard, HIID makes no funds available to undergraduates who are interested in economic development projects. Cole says HIID has included funding for undergraduate research in many of the grants it has requested from foundations during the past several years, but the requests are always denied by the increasingly poverty stricken foundations.
One very real point of contact does exist between HIID and undergraduates: each year, the Edward S. Mason Program in Economic Development brings 20 to 25 public officials from foreign countries--ranging from Brunei to Swaziland--to Harvard, where they complete studies for a master's degree. Many of these representatives of the Third World elites--a potpourri of cabinet ministers, bank directors and corporate managers--enroll in undergraduate economics and government courses.
Whether Harvard will further expand its role in the Third World remains an open question. Cole contends a "moderate" expansion of HIID's activities overseas would help broaden the base of development activities based here in Cambridge. "We can still perform a more effective research and teaching role with some expansion," Cole says. Since most of the consultants on HIID projects are recruited from outside the University, the institute could expand its role in the Third World without draining major resources from Cambridge. But Cole maintains that HIID is not simply fishing for contracts, and that the institute will not establish a project with a country unless Harvard development people with permanent appointments are committed to the project.
Currently, HIID officials are discussing possible projects with the governments of Mali, Zaire, Bangladesh and Venezuela for the near future. As the institute broadens its commitments throughout the underdeveloped world, the consultants at HIID may even circumnavigate the globe, ending up in Harvard's more immediate backyard: a recent institute proposal, still in its developmental stages, calls for a development policy and management program for American Indian tribes.