Older Fellows

Because it has never shied from an experiment, the Littauer School of Public Administration has become one of the University's more successful graduate schools. In its fifteen years, it has tailored its program to fit the needs of bigger government, tried to produce administrators who would shake some lead out of the feet of bureaucracy. But in the shuffle of change and growth, one of the School's very first experiments, the Littauer Fellowships, has lost much of its size, importance, and original purpose.

When the Littauer School was still in blueprints, the Littauer Fellows were to be the lifesblood of the School. Plucked from the ranks of the more promising men of four or more years experience in public service, they received a free year of advanced education. Like the Niemen Fellows and the Advanced Management men at the Business School, they reversed the tradition of education first and experience second. They were to use their savvy to see through the excess theory of the courses they took, and train themselves for bigger government jobs.

The Littauer Fellows were supposed to benefit the School as well as themselves. Planted among the younger students, they could dispense advice from experience picked up during their terms in Washington. Their presence would bolster the administrational esprit de corps of which Littauer is so fond. And most important, they were an antidote to the ivory towered influence that flows from Littauer's brother-sister relation with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Unfortunately, this ambitious experiment has fallen a casualty to inflation. Frozen by the size of the school's endowment, the stipend attached to each Littauer fellowship is not now high enough to attract the same caliber of men as during the depression. The men who get today's Littauer Fellowships, while promising students, lack the experience of the old boys. And if inflation persists, the experience level for the fellowships will continue to drop until it approaches the brief or even blank government training of most Littauer students.

Littauer's curriculum is too delicately adjusted to the inexperienced to fully reconstruct the old, professional days. But the school can still use some old hands in government. Although there are a few of them in the School's agriculture and foreign service programs, their work is too specialized to serve the purpose of the old Littauer Fellowships.

Juggle the Budget?

More experienced Fellows; then, are needed. But how can the Fellowship renaissance come about? Some have suggested slicing the number of Littauer Fellowships to raise the ante for each one. This is a neat bit of budget juggling, precisely what the Nieman Foundation tried when it was caught in the inflationary vise.

But when the prospect of admitting a smaller number of seasoned Fellows is weighed against taking in larger numbers of greener ones, the benefits are not great enough to recommend this juggling as anything but a last resort.

In recent years, Littauer has tried a second plan, a sort of manna from heaven idea of asking the Government to finance some Fellowships itself. Such a proposal has firm backing in precedent. Large corporations, trade unions, and the Army have found it profitable to ship promising men here, prepaid, for a year of advanced study. Government agencies, which admit the excellence of Littauer's training program, would like to give promising recruits year of educational leave with pay. If they did, these men could study at Littauer without taking a slice in income.

But bureaus can only finance such educational leaves on appropriation from Congress. Twice in the last three years, the educational leave project has fought its way up to the Capitol, only to die in committee. Congress, it seems, has yet to realize the long-term value of such an investment.

If the Littauer School, then, wants such grants from Congress, it will have to lobby for them. It could be done. The School has many professors who have reached positions of considerable prominence braintrusting in Washington. If they dropped some influence in the right places (and they, as students of government, should know where these places are) they might squeeze the money out of Congress. Two or three of them have tried this in the past, but it will take more professional-influencing if Littauer is to get any results.

Unless the paid educational leaves come through, the budget juggling method may be necessary. But whatever the method, Littauer should try to return to the old conception of its Fellowships, and so renew the professional character which was Littauer's dream, and can still be one of its prides.