Political Prep School, Princeton Style:

FORGET who you are. You are now a New Jersey State Senator. Before you lies the task of choosing a site for the long-awaited New York metropolitan jetport. Keeping in mind the area you represent, plus the wealth of technical information available, feel free to caucus, make deals, take bribes, draft legislation, and generally become--as best you know how--a real-life politician.

Should you, even for a moment, remember you are only a first-year graduate student at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, all is lost. Suspension of disbelief is simply essential. "We know it's only a game," says one first-year student, "but if you force yourself to believe, it can be a very worthwhile game."

These "policy conferences"--mock political extravaganzas spread across the first term of the first year--are the most unusual part of the school, says David Denoon (Harvard '66). Denoon took part in the simulated New Jersey State Senate battle, and when he found himself representing the area in which the jetport was to be built, he consulted engineers, airplane people and technicians of all sorts--and finally wrote a bill sticking the jetport on someone else's constituency. Thus he had saved his voters from low-flying planes, massive traffic and sonic booms--in short, performed a first-class public service.

I

The forty-odd students in each class at the Woodrow Wilson School are presumably united by a common goal: the desire to take part in some facet of "public affairs." Exactly what constitutes "public affairs" is unclear, but the definition seems to be narrowing. Two years ago the school was vaguely tolerant of aspiring journalists and not entirely committed to the exclusion of teachers and businessmen; now it is insisting on protobureaucrats. More than ever, its tightly knit (25 courses to choose from) curriculum aims at the production of better civil servants.

At the center of this curriculum stands the policy conference--a real test of a student's political drive. "I wanted to be left alone to read for two years--but the school wouldn't leave me alone," says an understandably dissatisfied second-year graduate student who briefly held a government job before coming to Princeton. "I came here to get away from games," he explains, "and I'm certainly not going to play them when they're not even for real."

Another, perhaps more numerous, group of Woodrow Wilson School malcontents complains of too much academia. For example, Public Affairs 546--"Studies in American Foreign Policy"--offers a reading list that includes over 200 individual items, from magazine articles to books of more than a thousand pages. True, some of the items on this gargantuan list are only recommended, but P.A. 546 is just one of four courses you might take in a single term.

That's 16 courses in two years and scores of well-researched, often lengthy, always demanding papers. "You come here from college expecting paradise," says one second-year student, "but it's just more college."

Richard A. Lester, associate dean of the school, feels that too many students mistakenly imagine an instant source of government contacts. They come to Princeton, Lester says, hoping to become intimate with scads of big wheels from Washington; instead they run into academic types telling them how to play at policymaking, and this turns them off.

If so, the school itself is partly to blame. The high minded rhetoric of its PR literature, with its talk of "Princeton in the Nation's Service" and its promise of smooth sailing for all, encourages students to think they can "beat the hierarchy." When they find out what a Master's Degree from the Woodrow Wilson School is really worth in Washington, they are rightly disillusioned. They begin to wonder if a Law Degree might not have been a more sensible stepping-stone into government after all.

II

This disillusionment has begun to translate itself into positive action. Fewer students are contented with the Master's Degree--more are going on to get Ph.D.'s in Economics or Politics, and a sharply increasing number are entering Law School.

Undoubtedly the draft is responsible for some of this sudden upsurge in academic fervor. Lester sees still other causes. "During the Kennedy years," he says, "students were more enthusiastic about government service. Now they want something to fall back on. It's not just Johnson's personal nature...it's also the war."

Shell Schreiberg (University of Minnesota '64) admits to a slightly more partisan motive for following the Woodrow Wilson School with Harvard Law School. "I want to know that when the Republicans come in," Schreiberg explains, "I can go and practice law."

Like Schreiberg, most Woodrow Wilson students aspire to be in-and-outers. They want to work for the government only briefly in a non-policymaking capacity, teach, write or practice law for a while, and then reusually enough to start them off as government interns of some sort, but from there it's a steep climb to the corridors of power. So the most ambitious students--not to mention some who are less than thrilled about the prospect of a "McNamara Fellowship"--stay in school.

To the administration of the Woodrow Wilson School, this trend must seem a slap in the face. Here they have set up a training program in public affairs, and the trainees go around saying, in effect, that it's not what it's cracked up to be.

"All through my two years at the school," says Meldon Levine (Berkeley '64), "they tried to discourage me from going for a Ph.D." Levine, a Berkeley student government leader before the heyday of the Free Speech Movement, had applied to the Woodrow Wilson School with the intention of becoming a teacher. In light of the school's obvious dislike, even then, for Ph.D. types, he was surprised to learn he had been admitted. But the campaign to turn him away from teaching ultimately had its effect, if not quite the desired one. Today Levine is a first-year student at Harvard Law.

In response to students like Levine, the school has begun to crack down on applicants with side interests. It has also moved into competition with other graduate schools by starting its own Ph.D. program. The hope is that this doctorate in Public Affairs (which requires two years at the Woodrow Wilson School, two to four years in government, and finally another year back at the school) will become the goal of exactly those students who are now toying with fields other than politics after they leave Princeton.

III

THE undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School shares little more than a building with the graduate program. Despite similar pretensions, it is basically just an honors major for Princeton students in the social sciences. Undergraduate courses are chosen from Princeton's Politics, Economics, History and Sociology departments, whereas graduate courses are offered by the school itself.

Jim Barkas, a Princeton junior whose interest is Russian studies, has found the Woodrow Wilson School a way of escaping the comparatively rigid departmental requirements. Barkas enrolled his fall in a "junior conference" on U.S. relations with a divided Europe. The junior conferences--loose equivalents of the graduate policy conferences--split up into "commissions," which in turn split up into individual research projects. Mostly by luck, Barkas found himself studying trade with the Soviet Union.

Mark Katz, another junior, was not so lucky. Since he was interested in international affairs, he signed up for a conference on Congress and foreign policy. The faculty leader of this conference altered the topic to Congress and national security, and with a few flips of the coin (literally), Katz was studying "How military strategy is formed."

The head of Princeton Students for a Democratic Society, Beau Burlingham, insists the undergraduate program (and for that matter, the whole school) is designed "to turn out government bureaucrats." The school asks its students "how to improve the functioning of certain things within certain postulates," Burlingham says. "It's just making the establishment work more effectively."

But Burlingham admits he is in a small minority. In a conference this fall, on 20th-century protest movements, he found that--while he wanted to consider protest movements sympathetically--many of the conference members were seeking ways to get rid of such movements: "They continually wanted to look at protest the way Crane Brinton looks at the Rrench Revolution--as a disease."

For himself, Burlingham concedes, the school has been radicalizing. He believes, however, its effect on most students is to discourage any kind of radical thinking. "Sweeping proposals are frowned on from the word go--the idea is to grind in the notion that most things shouldn't be questioned," Burlingham says.

Few students see any reason to deny the establishment-oriented character of the school's undergraduate program. They learn, in the words of one uncomplaining student, "why Dulles did what he did"--i.e., the constraints operating on government policy-makers. A substantial number (perhaps 25 per cent) of Woodrow Wilson majors go into government, and the majority like the school the way it is.

IV

Many of the mysteries surrounding the Woodrow Wilson School evolve from that year's "magnificent anonymous gift," as it is inevitably described in the PR literature. Before '61, the school's graduate program was merely a bureaucratic unit. Since then, $35 million has provided a building, a faculty, a curriculum, and a massive scholarship program.

Who gave these millions? Speculation is divided, but among those mentioned most frequently are Campbell Soup, the Duponts, Bernard Baruch, and, perhaps less seriously, the C.I.A. Whoever it was, gossip has it that Princeton's president Robert Goheen convinced the anonymous donor to throw all his loot into one pile rather than spread it around. There are those who contend "Firm X" is still watching closely over the Woodrow Wilson School's progress.

To some, this wholly speculative relationship assumes the dimensions of a conspiracy. "Money and personnel flow back and forth between Washington and Princeton," says SDS leader Burlingham, to whom the school is a toy of big government and big business.

Money certainly is in abundance at the Woodrow Wilson School. Graduate students get an automatic tuition-plus-$2000 scholarship; if a student is married and has a child, he resceives another $1200; if his wife works, and earns, say, $4000 a year, that's $7200 annually. Hardly in keeping with the struggling student image.

Nor does the money stop there. Summer travel-study groups -- this year's and last's went to Latin America -- are fully subsidized. Graduate students who don't participate in the travel groups take summer jobs in some area of public service, and if their salaries are in any way inadequate, the school will supplement them. Perhaps the most astonishing example of how the Woodrow Wilson School treats money is its pre-paid interview system. Applicants can zip down to Princeton to look the school over for a few days, and the school picks up the tab. That kind of money is obviously an attraction by itself: students vaguely interested in government can sooner see spending two lavish, aimless years studying politics than three rough, possibly costly, years studying law.

V

The one group not drawn to the Woodrow Wilson School has been the radicals. There are a few students like Burlingham in the undergraduate branch, but virtually none higher up. So the argument put forth by some critics of the school--that it converts its students into establishment thinkers to begin with.

Richard Ullman, associate professor of Politics and International Affairs, argues, however, that "if anything," the school produces "anti-establishment types." Some students learn to dislike the establishment, Ullman suggests, after closely studying it. "These are establishment types only in that they now know what the establishment is."

But even among those who like the school, there are many who disagree with Ullman on this point. "The school made me more conservative," concedes Law Student Schreiberg. "We came out of it ready to go into government without any naive ideas about what we could accomplish."

This is the Woodrow Wilson School's goal: to shed its students of an innocence about practical politics. What the school's critics ask is whether universities should be getting rid of naive ideas--or promoting them