"There is no more institution building going on at the Business School," says George Cabot Lodge, professor of Business Administration, who played a key role both in the conception and the establishment of the school in Nicaragua. "Instead we prefer short-term projects, setting them up and taking them down like a circus."

Accompanying this trend toward conserving resources is a newly discovered faith in the effectiveness of training foreign students at Harvard. "In the '60s we had the notion that we knew the answer and that we could make a difference. Now we are beginning to think that the most efficient way [of training Third World students] is to have them come here," Lodge adds.

For this reason, the Mason program at the K-School, which draws 50 Third World leaders each year, is flourishing in its 25th year. The Business School's International Teachers program is also thriving. Although less than 10 percent of the Mason fellows come from a strictly academic background, a substantial number of the program graduates become a channel of academic export upon returning to their home countries, says Nancy Pyle, director of the program. In developing countries, governments maintain closer links with universities, frequently asking former ministers to teach, Pyle notes. In addition, the contacts the fellows make with K-School professors often prompt them to ask for help in setting up programs based on their K-School experience.

Pyle said that some Mason fellows are so impressed with what they have learned about management that they want to import their favorite courses lock, stock, and travel. One farmer minister in the Burmess government upon returning home from his year as a Mason fellow persuaded his government to establish a K-School courses on microeconomics as part of the curriculum at the University of Rangoon. He wired the Kennedy School and asked for the entire course packet to be sent special delivery.

For a country interested in establishing a public policy program similar to the K-School's, the Mason program has served as an ideal way to test the water. When a K-School delegation took its fellows on a field trip to Egypt this spring, faculty at the American University of Cairo unexpectedly asked Academic Dean Albert Carnesale for help in setting up a public policy curriculum. This fall, one of those professors will enroll at the K-School as a Mason fellow, Pyle said, adding, "This man's presence in the Mason fellow program will be the takeoff point for the development of a new curriculum in Egypt."

All these programs, despite their differences, do have a common strand. They are, in Klitgaard's words, "capacity developing": instead of merely providing solutions, they are establishing a new class of managers--whether in the public or private sector--who will be the nuts and bolts of maintaining that country's development.

But in setting up institutions and seminars, Harvard is doing more than exporting its curriculum; Harvard is exporting its value of professionalism as defined by the Business School and the Kennedy School. While many of the developing countries have well-established programs in economics, the programs do not emphasize the practical skills that go along with the technical skills such as managing, decision-making, and administration, that separate the professional from the academic.

Zeckhauser notes that before the Harvard visitors came, training at universities in Indonesia was so theoretical that "Indonesian Ph.D.'s graduate without the slightest idea of how to do anything." He adds. "We're starting to so think well."

The value placed upon theoretical expertise at Third World universities can have adverse effects, Zeclchauser results from an experience in. Indonesia that academics at the university tended to teach the most difficult material they knew--often to the bewilderment of the students--because they thought that the most advanced material would advance the country the most. "They tended to emphasize prestige over practicality."

The flip side of this is that while developing nations readily accept technical expertise, it is sometimes more difficult for them to accept the validity of the professional skills included in the Harvard package.

Klitgaard recalls a seminar that he and several colleagues conducted in Mexico in the fall of 1980 which was a condensed version of the K-School's "Workshop" course on the fundamentals of management--memo writing and cost-benefit analysis. A Kennedy School professor was working from a case study on the cost and benefits of building a dam, and explaining how to weigh the cost of finding alternative accomodations for Indians in the proposed site against the benefits of the improved power the dam would provide. A Marxist member of the Mexican faculty broke in and criticized the technique as being too capitalistic and rebuked the K-School delegation for importing capitalism under the pretext of professionalism.

But in general, the programs have been accepted, and through trial and error. Harvard in the '80s has settled on curricular advice as the export that will best aid developing nations. Despite the University's tendency to be low-key--using individual contacts, and restricting advice to already existing institutions or to short-term seminars--the requests from developing nations keep flooding in.

Shanta Devarajan, assistant professor of Public Policy at the K-School, and a native of Sri lanka, received a request this spring for help from a university in his home country which is interested in developing a program in business management.

"I have a feeling that the age of the resident advisor is dwindling, and that the short-term program, curricular reform and the exchange program is taking its place," he says.

Thomas P. Sellers, associate director of the K-School's Masters in Public Administration program--which supervises the Mason fellows--sums up the rationale behind this approach: "Consulting lasts as long as the product of that consulting and it's difficult to leave behind anything permanent. The advantage of training is that it trains human beings and there's nothing more permanent than a human being."

'There is no more institution building going on at the Business School... we prefer short-term projects, setting them up and taking them down like a circus."