While Brown stepped down from the podium, his face exhibiting no emotion, Allison took a microphone beside the stage. His voice fraught with barely restrained fury, he warned, "If you don't shut up right now, Secretary Brown will leave." The audience proved more receptive to the administration position than another gathering has 13 years before. As applause drowned out the hoarse, profane shouts of protest, Graham Allison made his way up to the K-School forum's second tier and personally escorted the rabble rousers out of the building.

Allison sticks to his guns. "Students, of all people, should be exposed to a broad range of perspectives. Not to hear any counterarguments is wrong," he says. "But simply to distrup...you're within your rights to ask questions, even to have a short argument. But you're not within your rights to shout and scream."

Another incident involving Allison and "the right to shout and scream" took place year before the Brown incident. The occasion was the dedication of the $11 million building for the K-School, and the plans for that day were grand. But about 400 demonstrators chanted throughout Bok's address, protesting the naming of the school's library for Charles W. Engelhard--a magnate who earned much of his fortune in South African gold-mining.

The days leading up to the dedication were filled with tense, round-the-clock negotiations between student groups demanding that one member of the organizing groups be allowed to speak at the ceremony, and several administrators, including Allison.

In his address at the building's inauguration, Allison said at the beginning that a representative would only be allowed to speak if the protestors "respected the dedication." Drowning out the University's president with chants does not exactly coincide with Allison's idea of respect. But the ceremony's featured speaker, Ted Kennedy, played politician and told the crowd of more than 5000 he and his family would assuredly stay to hear a spokesman chosen by the demonstrators, adding that he hoped the rest of the audience would remain as well.

Spokesman Mark Smith '72-4 gave a rousing speech denouncing apartheid following the end of the ceremony. It made the network news. K-School officials reflected later that Allison and his fellow negotiators had been trapped by the Senator's politicking.

But the Engelhard library issue did not filter away from the k-School as quickly as the throngs did. Jackson estimates Allison spent more than 500 hours dealing with the controversy. Schelling recalls the issue in vivid terms, saying, "It was a terrible blow, a stunning shock to the whole school. It was an exceptionally difficult political and diplomatic problem, on both sides. He (Allison) was under enormous pressure from alumni threatening to withhold money, deans of other schools who saw it as an important precedent, and concerned faculty and students."

By the time a committee had hammered out a solution in late May, the Engelhard issue had exhausted all concerned. Allison and his team devised a classic compromise--the library would not be named after Engelhard but a commemorative plaque would be hung on a library wall. Schelling says, "We came out not unscarred but well and healthy."

Allison comments ingenuously on his role in the conflicts that have dotted his career. "Sometimes maybe I've erred in failing to be sensitive enough to the concerns of some constituents who feel deeply about, and even offended by, the presentation of ideas. There is danger in a University environment of being too cautions about confronting ideas. My approach is not to shy away from ideas," he says.

"There's nothing chicken-hearted about Graham Allison," Jackson says, adding, "He's a tenacious, dogged apostle of points of view, but is mature enought to modify or correct his point of view when opposing arguments prevail." Schelling points out that the dean's position often shrouds his inner self. "A lot of people probably find him a little distant, harsh, overbearing, or thick-skinned. To do his job he has to be--most of us are not good at giving people bad news, but as dean he is fully responsible for all the hard decisions," Schelling says, evoking questions about the island of Timor arrangement.

The same way that Allison's personality seems a split between bureaucratic and entreprenurial prototypes, the K-School is undergoing a process of introspection and uncovering a dual strain: training students to manage effectively and to think creatively. But in summing up the K-School's goals, Allison cannot resist listing three major aims: competence in public management, understanding of basic public policy issues, and encouraging people to "think hard about the aims and limits of government."

And in the same way that Allison has been freed of many of his taxing administrative chores with the arrival of Hale Champion, executive dean, he hopes that the K-School can free itself to address larger questions. "I think old-fashioned questions of political philosophy will become more wide-spread," he says. If they do, Graham Allison will be right in the thick of the debate, whether at a Trilateral Commission tryst or a Council of foreign Relations meeting. He will travel to keep in touch with what he terms the "marketplace"--he squeezes about six appointments a day into his weekly sojourns to Washington or New York--always on the ball, hustling, but never fully forgetting his role as a model for bureaucrats.