TOKEN RADICALS'

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In his defense of the Center for International Affairs (CRIMSON, October 21). Raymond Vernon suggests that a broad range of political viewpoints is represented at the Center. After all, we are there as the two token radicals in a total professional staff of more than 100, a group (he hastens to add) which would have included representatives from the Warsaw pact and even the Soviet Union itself, had the Center's talent hunt met with more receptiveness east of the Elbe.

Vernon's juxtaposition of our names with those of two members of the executive committee of the Center (Bowie and Huntington) is intended to suggest balance. This is less than convincing to those who are familiar with the autocratic decision structure of the Center (in which we play no part whatsoever), or to those who know that Vernon's list of government apologists runs in the dozens while he runs out of house radicals at two.

In its thwarted search for a yet more representative staff, the Center is faced with a cruel dilemma. Members of national liberation movements or even citizens of the tamer communist countries are not likely to want to come to the Center, given its intimate association with the U. S. government.

But let us imagine that the Center did attract this type of person, and began to express a diversity of viewpoints on the full range of issues facing the poor countries and the international system. It might then be possible for the Development Advisory Service to send an advisory group to North Vietnam or Cuba, and for Center staff to advise the Pather Lao forces or the Venezuelan guerrillas on agrarian reforms or educational techniques or strategy.

Are we to believe that the development of a multi-viewpoint Center along these lines has been blocked only by communist intransigence? Who are they trying to kid? Is the Defense Department or the Department of State likely to continue to pay for this kind of Center? The Ford Foundation is not likely to be of much help either if we may judge from the fate o? the Institute of Hispanic-American and L?so-Brazilian Studies at Stanford, an institution whose only apparent shortcoming was a propensity to attract Latin Americanists with independent views on the U. S. rote in the hemisphere.

But to concentrate on questions of tokenism, government financing, and many of the other issues raised in the Hyland-Vernon non-exchange would be to miss a fundamental point. The Center for International Affairs is not much different from most social science departments in the type of research and methodological outlook it encourages. Center research and policy advice is dominated by a tacit assumption pervasive among social scientists in general, namely that their role is to devise solutions to problems without overstepping the institutional and political confines of contemporary American society, and without violating our carbon copy image for what a good society would be like in other countries.

For example, Western economists tend to assume that the primary objective of poor countries is and should be the maximization of per capita income. This economic index has meaning only in the context of a market economy and implies an acceptance of the status quo income distribution. Egalitarian goals are introduced at best on an ad hoc basis, and the human costs of rapid economic growth-the fracture of community, for example-are seldom considered. A companion objective typically assumed for poor countries, that of "political development." aims at little more than convergence with western political system. Thus, the conventional confines of the fields of study define a set of objectives, thereby inhibiting critical discussion of the goals of development and reducing consideration of development policy to maters of technique.

Whatever the intellectual origins of these short-comings, they can hardly appear to the poor people of the world as mere oversights. This development policy is consistently biased against equality as an objective and against revolution as a means. It thereby helps to protect the interests of local ruling groups and the international business community.

This kind of methodological framework is prone to produce not social critics but social engineers-technicians whose stunted vision of the possible and ethnocentric definition of the good severely limit their usefulness either in pursuing creative research or in helping to overcome the obstacles to humane progress here or in the third world.

A Thorough elaboration of this view of modern social science and its impact on the poor countries should provide a focus of attention for those who oppose the operations of the Center. We would also hope that Vernon and other directors of the Center, should they choose to defend further their function, will concentrate on these fundamental issues rather than dwelling smugly on isolated good deeds.