Bok says he had to nurture the young KSG.

“The Kennedy School was very young, very small, very fragile, and it was fighting for its place in the sun,” Bok says. “That may have created some frictions that don’t exist anymore…It just had to struggle very hard and promote itself very vigorously. When you’re new, people regard you with suspicion, but that disappears as people get used to you.”

But according to Putnam, government faculty felt the University’s resources were being misdirected, from substance to style.

“The Kennedy School was born in a period of tension between government and the people who created KSG,” Putnam says. “It was like any rivalry between two siblings. Government thought the Kennedy School was an upstart getting pushed by Bok [that] had pizzazz but not depth. It was a conflict between the advocates of relevance and rigor.”

Still Simmering

Putnam, who holds a joint appointment with KSG and FAS, insists the deep mutual distaste predated his arrival.

“It’s almost entirely ancient history,” Putnam says. “The passing of personal rivalries [made the government department and KSG] more closely aligned, and I would say relationships are pretty good.”

The increase in the size of KSG’s faculty and the hiring of top-notch scholars from academic departments across the country under Nye have also helped to bring the schools closer, says KSG Academic Dean Frederick Schauer, Stanton professor of the first amendment.

“Just from raw volume [of faculty], there’s a lot more points of contact, and relationships have gotten a lot closer,” Schauer says. “It’s produced a lot more collaboration with FAS and a lot more respect.”

But many graduate students in government say that just because the relationship has improved does not mean it is a healthy one.

“It’s cordial, but they do their own thing. The faculty don’t interact much,” said Carlos E. Diaz-Rosillo, a KSG alumnus and current government graduate student. “It seems like [government professors and students] don’t like the Kennedy School, but I don’t think it’s actually the case.”

The core distinction between a professional and liberal arts school creates a sizable intellectual and bureaucratic gap for professors seeking to collaborate across the faculties—a difficulty exacerbated by Harvard’s tradition of every-tub-on-its-own-bottom.

“People whose experiences in political science at the Kennedy School tend not to be sufficiently aware of the very similar tendencies going on elsewhere in the University,” Bok says. “But there’s a great absence of collaboration between all the faculties of Harvard. Why don’t they collaborate? They just don’t, that’s all.”

“You might think it’s the easiest thing in the world for people in pure mathematics to work with people in applied mathematics, but they don’t either,” he adds.

Some government professors suggest they may be hesitant to reach out to collaborate in teaching with their KSG colleagues because they fear that KSG connections to the real world of politics and policy cloud the ability of its students to approach research impartially.