Moore says the whole building permits easy interaction. He notes the enlarged public spaces, such as halls, which leave less room for offices, and the porousness of the building, which permits one to view the floors above and below one. In Littauer, seeing five people on a given day seemed to be "an insurmountable task," Moore says. Now, he claims he can see them all within the first hour of his arrival in the building.
One of the more talked about public spaces in the Kennedy School is the ARCO forum donated by the Atlantic, Richfield Company. It occupies the entire center of the main floor. Comfortable seats located on three floors can be turned sideways to face the forum, which is equipped with a large television screen, which is not working yet. Officials hope to sponsor important events at the forum such as speeches and debates which could be nationally televised.
An even more important aspect of the building, according to the Kennedy School people is the centralization of its facilities.
Jonathan Moore, director of the Institute of Politics succinctly sums it up: "If you're not living off by yourself, but you're living in the same physical community, with the other elements, the other resources, the other partners, everything works a lot better."
The separation from the School "has never given a chance to live with our family," Moore said, the family consisting of the Institute, the administration, the faculty, the programs and the students. The Kennedy School of Government has come a long way since Price had to scrounge around for class space. It also has a long way to go before it can fulfill Bok's vision of a Harvard Business School for the public sector.
The training at the School is geared for someone "who aspires to be assistant secretary or deputy assistant secretary at the federal level of the state and local equivalent of it," says Graham T. Allison, Jr. '62, dean of the Kennedy School.
The Kennedy School teaching method leans heavily on the "case method"--also taught at the Business School. A case is a description of a real management situation, usually from the point of view of one person. The question is "what would you do?"...Most students are generally satisfied with the classes. "I came here to get a good grounding in formal analytic techniques like economics, operations research, statistics...I'm geting that so I'm very happy," says Michael Gravitz, a MPP-JD student.
It is difficult to get such training on the job, students say. "Who the hell on the job has got time to go sudy econometrics or learn a few things about decision analysis under somebody who is the best in the country? You don't is the answer." another student remarks.
The case method of instruction seems to please most students. The cases give one a "vicarious experience...a sense of confidence, of having gone through it before," and a methodology, a way of looking at a problem, claims Dan Brinza, a MPP-JD student.
However, Elaine Lubin, also a MPP-JD student, feels differently about the case method. "I didn't feel that I came out of the case method with anything other than knowledge of current American issues," she says. She thinks the case method has little application to real situations. "To the extent that it applies, it's not very profound and most of the time it doesn't apply...I felt like I was in Kindergarden."
Fair to Poor
Faculty members and students appear to agree that the School is very weak in two essential areas central to government: ethics and management.
Two buzz words in the Kennedy School official register are ethics and sensitivity, yet there is only intermittent discussion of ethical problems. Students joke about "ethics month," a sequence in political analysis and public management on "Moral Obligations of Public Officials."
Ethics "certainly is an area that is weak and when you find the major course offered by Price and me, neither of whom have any credentials for offering a course" you know something is wrong.
To help deal with the problem "we have secured funds for a professorship of applied ethics and public policy," Allison said. The professor will develop ideas about applied ethics and formulate a curriculum.
"They haven't quite figured it all out yet," says Brinza. The Kennedy School curriculum is still evolving and, since there is no tradition of training in public policy, still an experiment. Officials at the School like to compare it with the Harvard Business School. The Business School was founded in 1907 "and for the first 30 years really didn't amount to much," says Allison. Only during the war did it become "the preeminent institution in professional training for managers and business that it has become." The question is whether or not a school of government can come to play an analogous role."
Allison's querie is not far off the mark. Dunlop speaks of the two schools as complimentary. People in the public sector can benefit from knowledge of the private sector and vice-versa, he says. He is helping raise funds for two parallel professorships, one on each side of the river, to be occupied by professors with a high degree of competence in business-government relations.
The Kennedy School is aspiring to play the role of industry leader to other public policy programs. "The curriculum and the conception that underlies the program" will be, if not copied, "borrowed from liberally," Bok says.
Tomorrow, The Kennedy School, which attempts to teach its students to deal with political reality, will have to confront some political reality itself: protest. The Southern Africa Solidarity Committee and the Black Students' Association will demonstrate against the School's acceptance of Engelhard money which was made by exploiting black miners. It could perhaps be called a lesson in applied ethics.