Harvard's International Affairs Center: New Emphasis Towards Research Projects

I.

When Professor Robert R. Bowie organized Harvard's Center for International Affairs in 1958, he wanted to attract first-rate public officials from the United States and other countries to spend an academic year at the Center on leave from their services. He envisioned an exchange between these visiting Fellows and the Center's Harvard associates that would have "significant effect" upon international policy-making.

That idea never materialized.

"I think the goal was chimerical," reflects Edward S. Mason, Lamont University Professor and one of the original senior members of the Center. "Countries cannot spare their leading policy makers for six or eight months. The Fellows who have come to the Center are capable public officials, but no one could pretend they were the top policy makers in their countries."

With the passing of Bowie's grand scheme for the Fellows program, the Center changed its complexion: growing academic functions have replaced earlier service ambitions. In both the Center and its semi-autonomous branch, the Development Advisory Service (DAS), there has been a proliferation of research projects and publications.

The change has been radical. In 1958-59, the Center's first year of operation, expenditures for research totaled $29,000-slightly less than the $31,000 spent for the Fellows program. This year $761,000 is being spent on research, $60,000 on the Fellows.

Large grants and contracts have enabled the Center to undertake longterm, expensive research projects. In 1958-59, a $56,000 allocation by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was the largest source of income in the Center's $129,000 budget. In 1955-56 the University provided office space and maintenance, but not a penny of the $995,000 budget. Instead, foundations grants and government contracts accounted for over 90 per cent of the funds.

As a result, the Center's output is enormous. During 1965-66 alone, 13 books and 113 articles were published under its auspices.

The only teaching conducted at the Center are regular research seminars for Faculty members. Research Associates, and Fellows. The Center has a permanent group of nine Faculty members, who also serve in the departments of Government, Economics, Social Relations, and the Business School. In addition, the Center takes over part of the salaries of about 15 Faculty members in order to allow them more time for research with less teaching responsibility.

Outsiders are invited in as Research Associates for a period of six months to two years to engage in specific research and writing for publication. There are about 30 of these people, including a staff member of the Rand Corporation, British author Barbara Ward, and Paul Seabury, professor of political science at Berkeley.

Although the Center does not subsidize graduate students, it provides some post-doctoral support. "One thing we are beginning to do successfully," says Thomas C. Schelling, professor of Economics and the Center's Acting Director in 1965-66, "is to keep an eye on someone doing a good Ph.D. thesis in one of our fields. We may ask him to join the Center on half salary and turn his thesis into a publishable book."

The Center is officially far removed from the undergraduate's world. It confers no degrees, offers no courses for credit. Nevertheless, its impact on students is considerable.

Over the years, it has been a strong drawing card for Harvard, and, without it, there would probably be no Schelling here to teach international games and strategy, no Lipset to analyse the social basis of political institutions, and no Huntington to teach about the causes of political change and stability. Karl W. Deutsch, professor of Government at Yale, joins the Harvard Faculty next year with the guarantee that he be an associate of the Center.

What makes the Center so attractive is not only its emphasis on research, but also the depth and diversity of that research.

To take but a few examples:

* Schelling heads a research project on theory of conflict and on the political and diplomatic role of military force.

* Morton Halperin started a project on the military role of Communist China.

* Hollis B. Chenery and a group of associates are developing a theoretical framework for evaluating the effectiveness of foreign aid.

* Seymour Martin Lipset is studying the role of students and universities in the politics of underdeveloped countries.

* Samuel P. Huntington and his associates are probing the growth of political institutions in young nations.

* Alex Inkeles, with a group started in 1961, is studying how work in factories or comparable enterprises affects a person's attitudes and habits that relate to his adjustment to a developing country.

* Bowie, on leave from the University to become Counselor in the State Department, and Henry A. Kissinger have been conducting extended projects on the nature of international systems and on the ways in which varying concepts of the international environment influence the making and execution of foreign policy.

And, in the last few years, the Center has organized a number of regular research seminars which are also open to scholars from Harvard, M.I.T., Brandeis, and Boston University. What these seminars and the research projects both show is a strong concern for problems of underdeveloped countries--an emphasis that has not always been of first importance at the Center. "This trend has not been deliberate," says Schelling, explaining that three of the four senior Faculty members at the Center's beginning, Kissinger, Bowie, and himself, concentrated on Atlantic problems, diplomacy, and Eastern Europe. Only Mason studied underdeveloped countries.

But since then, Inkeles, Huntington, Chenery Lipset, and Raymond Vernon--all concerned primarily with development--have become senior Faculty members (now known as the Executive Committee). Of this years' $761,000 allocated for research, $477,000 is going towards the study of development and modernization, And when added to the $1,279,000 spent by the Development Advisory Service last year, the dominating interest in development is even more apparent.

II.

The Development Advisory Service has expanded interest in economic development that was absent in the early days of the Center. Though organized as a part of Harvard for only three years, the DAS really began 14 years ago when Mason and the Ford Foundation set up an economic advisory office in Pakistan at the request of its government. Another office soon followed in Iran. With the help of David Bell, then a lecturer in Economics, Mason handled the DAS himself until four years ago when the growing task was too much.

He then re-organized it into a semi-independent part of the Center for International Affairs. Harvard appoints the permanent staff here, and contracts are negotiated through the Center. But a separate University committee, chaired by Mason, meets five or six times a year to set DAS policy.

The DAS is now providing 38 permanent economic advisers to the governments of Pakistan, Argentina, Colombia, Liberia, Malaysia, and Greece. And it is reaching the limits of its capacity. "The DAS can undertake additional field projects in the near future only at the risk of reducing the quality of advisers overstraining its management capacity, and minimizing opportunities to absorb and disseminate the experience gained in the field," Gustav F. Papenak, Director of the DAS, explains.

The feedback from advisers, who rotate back to Cambridge every two or three years, is increasing the DAS's academic contributions. Last year, one adviser returned; this year, three; next year, seven. About 22 short-term advisers go out for three months and provide a more immediate feedback into teaching and research.

Although the DAS has had no formal teaching function in the past, this year it is undertaking a graduatelevel course and using cases drawn from the experience of overseas advisers. Moreover, a slew of professors in economics--Simon S. Kuznets, Arthur Smithies, John R. Meyer, and Mason, to name a few--have gone out with the DAS to consult with field experts and then applied their findings in courses.

III.

Financing the Center for International Affairs is a big and complicated business. The main burden is borne by the Ford Foundation, which gave Harvard $12.5 million in 1964 for general support of international programs. It was the largest single gift in the University's history.

Not all the grant will go to the Center: $2.5 million will be used for the construction of a new International Studies Building on the site of the Kennedy Memorial Library (the new building will consolidate all the activities of the Center and bring it under the same roof with regional centers, such as the Russian Research Center); $45 million is endowing nine new chairs; and the remaining $5.5 million is being used annually to support research. The Center gets a large chunk of that money; last year, for instance it received $515,000. And to supplement this, the Center is receiving an increasingly large amount of money in public funds.

This is a new source. The Center never contracted with the government until three years ago, but last year the total in federal funds zoomed to $204,000. With this money, the Center is doing work in a variety of fields:

* The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency contracted for a study of Sino-Soviet relations and arms control;

* the Agency for International Development sponsored a project for the development of a quantitative programming method;

* the Department of Defense financed a study of the feasibility of an international agreement preventing the spread of nuclear weapons;

* And the National Science Foundation continued its support of research on social and cultural aspects of modernization.

According to Schelling, the Center has been willing to accept grants or contracts from any agency in the American government that is willing to meet the demands of the University and the Center. This policy rules out security-classified contracts or unclassified contract that impair the Center's standards or its right to publish. The Center has added another restriction: it will research for the government "only to the extent that the research interests of the Center and of the government coincide."

Nor will the Center, declares Schelling, build up a research staff, dependent on continual government contracting. He feels that foundation grants are not much different from government contracts in the fact that both may "explicitly or implicitly constrain the freedom of the research organization." "The expectation of further grants and endowments," he says, "can inhibit, consciously and unconsciously, a research organization in the conclusion it reaches, in the research it undertakes, and in the people it attracts."

What the $12.5 million Ford grant did, however, was to assure a continuity of programs without financial pressure until 1970. "We are getting almost as much money from Ford as we did before," Schelling observes. "The grant merely served to perpetuate for five more years the programs we began."

A University-wide committee, chaired by President Pusey, annually dispenses the $5.5 million allocated to research. This committee was to co-ordinate closely the activities among the regional studies centers, the Center for International Affairs, the graduate schools, and the Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

"The grant converted what had been a departmental relation to the Ford Foundation to a University approach to Ford, but it has not brought and closer relations between the departments and centers," says Schelling.

"In a way," he adds, "it could have fragmented us if we had to compete for funds from a smaller grant. But this grant was ample en- ough to avoid the invidious process of stating why our department is more worthy of funds than another."

It was first thought that the University committee would review all the international programs, but in fact it has not tried to do more than fairly divide the money.

"The grant is not being used as an administrative weapon to integrate each department," Schelling asserts. "It would be easy for the committee to use the budgetary process to manipulate its own ideas, but it has resisted that temptation."

But the question is whether or not the grant will result in departmental co-ordination in the long run. Indirectly, Schelling thinks the Ford grant will somewhat integrate the various centers through the nine professorships. It ties the University together more, he says, because these professors, split between various departments, can remind each other what is going on elsewhere. Four of these professorships went to the Law School, one to the School of Education, and four to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the School of Public Administration. So far the grant has provided professorships, or split professorships, to Lipset, Richard A. Musgrave, Professor of Economics, and Jerome A. Cohen, Professor of Law. Deutsch will receive another chair next year, and M. Crozier, a visiting Professor in Social Relations from France, has a temporary professorship this spring term.

But still less than half of the professorships have been designated, and the international studies building is not under construction. Therefore the Ford grant has had little chance to co-ordinate the different departments and centers in international studies yet.

One thing that the Center, the DAS, and all the departments have in common is lack of space. In the past, the main interest in international studies has centered around the Russian Research Center, the International Affairs Center, and Eastern studies focusing on Chine. But Latin American studies have spread considerably in the last two years, and the Japanese Department has expanded with the return of former Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer. "When the new building is constructed," Dean Ford remarks, "one thing is for sure: there will be a scrap for space."

Now, less than half the International Affairs people operate from 6 Divinity Avenue. The rest are scattered in the ROTC Building, at 1737 Cambridge Street, and on Sumner Road. "The new building will be more important for having the entire International Affairs Center together than for having us near the other centers," muses Schelling.

Though no one will deny that the new building will help extensively by bringing together various departments and their libraries, there are nevertheless some reservations. "The building will serve the University's purposes well," says Mason, "but it may also blur the autonomy of the Center."

The autonomy of the Center, however, is rapidly becoming an irrelevant issue. Any defined functions or corporate feelings were swallowed by the maze of research projects that brought to the Center a swarm of associates from various disciplines. These, in turn, have scattered to four different locations. While the Fellows have moved out in the University from their enclave at the Center, the University has moved into the Center and expanded it past the bounds of simple autonomy