Seminar Is Crossroads For Diverse Ideas, Interests

'Herman Kahn is inhuman!"

Beniamino Placido, Italian member of the International Seminar, throws out his arm to reinforce his words. From his hand a forgotten book-bag swings like an over-wrought pendulum.

Five members of the Seminar are discussing the afternoon's guest speaker, a well-known defense specialist, analyst of deterrents, calculator of the probability of war. The talk has continued for an hour on the brick sidewalk outside Holworthy Hall and shows no sign of abating.

Which do you prefer?" Placido goes on, mocking the television commercials to which five weeks in America had exposed him. "War Plan A or War Plan B? We have also War Plans C, D, E, and F."

In Quincy House the next morning some seminar members are eating breakfast, and the topic of conversation is the same. "Herman Kahn does not want war. These people who call a man a war-monger merely because he is willing to face reality..." General Wu of Nationalist China searches for the words to describe such people, fails, concludes impatiently, "Childish, absolutely childish!"

Both men's comments taken together convey the spirit of the International Seminar, an exchange program whose most striking feature is the diversity of experience and opinion of its members. The Seminar, unlike most projects organized to bring adult foreign visitors to the United States, cuts boldly across both national and professional lines. It includes among its participants professors and members of parliament, labor leaders and playwrights.

The Seminar owes its existence to its Director Henry Kissinger, professor of Government.

Kissenger was convinced in 1951 that the generation reaching positions of leadership vitally needed a chance to escape purely professional concerns and purely nationalistic attitudes. His idea bore fruit in the foundation of the Seminar. Each summer since 1951 the program has brought these young leaders to Harvard (all expenses paid), where for eight weeks they both study and experience the unfamiliar reality of American life.

Important Consequences

Unlike the international gatherings which gain public attention, the Seminar closes each August with no treaties signed, no results of joint research announced, no policy statements formulated. The Seminar, however, has consequences as important as any of these.

In their own countries former Seminar members interpret United States actions in light of what they have learned at the International Seminar. Their attitudes are important, for they are in a position to make political decisions that involve the United States, and to shape public opinion within their own nations.

The diversity that is the Seminar's special feature is responsible, however, for its largest problems.

To enjoy their stay here, for example, members of the International Seminar need some kind of social life. For the younger members of the Seminar it is not difficult to mix with the Cambridge student population, and for older members of the Seminar who have acquaintances here, filling spare time is no problem. The seminar members from Ireland, Brian MacMahon and Denis O'Sullivan, have met relatives, friends, and friends of friends in predominately Irish Boston and must occasionally wonder if they have ever really left home.

Social Life Arranged

But other members of the Seminar lack the chance to become well-acquainted with adults outside the Seminar itself. Their program arranges everything from beach trips to a concert at Tanglewood, and many Cambridge families invite Seminar members to their homes on weekends. The contacts these activities provide, however, are casual and sporadic.

As the temperature rises in Cambridge and the weeks go by, members of the Seminar do not view things American with their initial enthusiasm. At the same time they begin to feel less satisfied with their tri-weekly study sessions of American cultural developments, politics and economics. The program is designed to strike a balance between open discussion with papers read by seminarists, and lectures.

This summer, however, the program has been weighted toward chairmen dominated discussions and lectures and the seminar members who want to contribute to the seminar feel frustrated. All men with responsible positions in their own countries, they resent being treated like students, unable to contribute their own viewpoints.

But the mid-summer frustration is forgotten by the end of the Seminar, precisely because the diversity which caused problems in meetings provides informal exchanges of opinion between Seminar members that cannot be forgotten.