Millikan Report Advises New Government Board To Guide Peace Corps

The "Peace Corps" will be directed by a new Government board designed to supervise--though not to absorb--the activities of private organizations, if the Kennedy Administration adopts a set of proposals by Dr. Max Millikan, Director of International Affairs at MIT. The board would probably include members of the International Cooperation Administration, the United States Information Agency, the State Department, and private foundations and professional groups.

In a memorandum delivered to President-elect Kennedy Saturday, Millikan further recommended that the program guarantee deferment, but not exemption, from the draft; that it be launched on a relatively small scale; and that it emphasize the teaching of specific skills. He also suggested that the name "Peace Corps" be replaced by the title International Youth Service Agency (IYSA).

Millikan, who has advised President-elect Kennedy on questions of foreign aid for several years, was asked, soon after Kennedy's election, to draw up a memorandum listing his own proposals regarding the "Peace Corps" plan.

Although the full text of his memorandum has not yet been made public, Millikan discussed some of his ideas with reporters on Saturday and expanded on them in an interview with the CRIMSON yesterday.

In his report, Millikan recommended that a series of "pilot projects" be launched in the near future; when interviewed yesterday, he said that the Harvard "youth corps" plan was the sort of project he had in mind.

Recognizing that however the ISYA is administered it will experience some failures, Millikan suggests that it be administered by a supervisory board rather than a large, centralized agency responsible for all its activities. Although this board would establish general standards for selection, orientation, and actual field work, it would allow private organizations to work pretty much on their own, Millikan said.

Millikan noted that the board would be unable to make certain that the various private agencies conform to its standards. "One of the costs of my program," he admitted, "is that some of the ISYA groups aren't going to be very good."

Case Against Centralized Agency

But, he continued, a strong centralized agency poses a set of far more serious problems. For example, the terms of each project must be carefully negotiated with the country involved, but an agency centered in Washington would be extremely sensitive to political pressures "to get something done in a hurry."

Further, "if a Government agency is directly responsible for each aspect of the program every failure--and there are bound to be some will be a failure of the United States government. This might defeat the program both here and abroad."

The ISYA should limit itself to about 500 young people during its first several years. Millikan said: fully expanded, it should include a group of several thousand, but no more. In his view, the program is designed to teach specific skills to people in underdeveloped countries-- not to constitute a huge labor force, as some people have suggested.

Because the demand to enter the program probably will far exceed the available openings, Millikan sees the criteria for selection as one of the keys to its success. He recommends that only college graduates be accepted, at least during the program's first years. Their selection, he says, should be based partly upon scholastic achievement and partly upon personality assessments. But because academic standards vary greatly throughout the country, some kind of sectional quota system may have to supplement the actual selection criteria.

To insure that the ISYA does not be come a weapon of the cold war, Millikan said, the Administration's proposal must be worded with extreme care; and then this country must continue to show that it is serious in its desire to cooperate. Discussing the proposals in his report, he said yesterday that the United States should issue a statement welcoming Soviet assistance: "The best way of 'pulling their teeth' is to show that our chief interest is in getting the job done."

It is important, he continued, "to emphasize symbolically the two way basis of the program." Besides bilateral negotiations about each nation's specific needs, he said, the United States and the country involved could cooperate on the orientation process, and perhaps the selection process