Young, Gifted and Unemployed

Eric Roth '70 is a Harvard graduate out of work. In the three years since his graduation, he has dug ditches in Minneapolis, built waterbed frames in Berkeley, hitchhiked in Guatemala but has not been able to find a job with the freedom, flexibility and responsibility he wants.

Now he is one of 16 participants in an experimental program conducted by the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning (OGCP) and designed to help him create the job he is looking for.

The new program, called the Task Force on the Redesign of Work, was organized in September in response to an increasing number of recent graduates like Roth who want to work but cannot find a job that appeals to them.

Paul C. Harris '71, who originated the program and is now the task force director, has had a postgraduate experience similar to Roth's. After Harvard he entered an executive training program at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York but quit in three months because he felt it was too constraining. He came to Boston to study music, worked for McGovern in Illinois, came back to Cambridge to work as a bartender, and finally ended up washing dishes at Grendel's Den. Then he went to Francis D. Fisher '47, director of the OGCP, with a proposal.

Harris told Fisher that he felt the OGCP helped people find jobs that already existed. His idea was to try to help people find jobs that don't exist, to act as a mediator between the kinds of people companies need and the kinds of jobs graduates want, to create "innovative jobs."

Harris explained that the typical work structure--40 hours a week at one task in one place--just "doesn't meet the needs of many young people who want to work, who are seeking a greater flexibility and fulfillment." He explained that the task force program is an attempt to help some of these people create their own kinds of jobs.

The 16 graduates in the program meet once a week to talk about jobs and to draw up lists of working conditions that would be ideal to them.

In the lists, Harris wants the graduates to put down what they would like in a job if they could have anything. Then they can start to think about where they will be willing to make the inevitable compromises, he said.

Next, Harris contacts local companies and gets a list of their problems which he takes back to the task force to see if anyone is interested in working on them. The graduates then write up a more specific list of what they want, and Harris returns to the company to define its problems some more.

"The two lists will keep changing until, hopefully, they end up the same," he said. "That way we find an interesting job for someone and at the same time help the employer."

But a number of local firms contacted by The Crimson seemed hesitant to commit themselves to the task force idea.

Robert H. Northrup, senior vice president in charge of personnel for the State St. Bank, said it would be "unrealistic to create a job for someone with no experience."

"The idea of the program sounds a bit too innovative for us," Northrup said. "My impression of the reaction of firms in general would be that they would not be ready for an experiment like this."

A spokesman for the personnel office of the John Hancock Co. said independent project assignments within an institutional structure are "extraordinarily difficult to arrange."

"We get requests like this from every college," the spokesman said. "We'd be willing to talk about it, but whether we could do anything is something else. We're cutting back, not creating jobs. And even if we were, we'd hire someone better qualified than a person fresh out of school."

Harris said that although the program may seem overly idealistic in its goals, the people in it tend to be fairly realistic about their prospects, if not actually pessimistic, as Roth says he is.

Roth says some of the job qualities he wants are independence, conditions conducive to creativity and learning, responsibility, the chance to influence company policy, and a flexible schedule.

Roth would like to work for a large company in the area of worker dissatisfaction and alienation, factors which he believes lead to inefficiency.

He thinks this inefficiency could be at least partially alleviated by restructuring lines of company communication and changing schedules. The job he wants would allow him to study a company's operating efficiency and suggest options and alternatives to relieve worker dissatisfaction and increase output.

Harris thinks this is the kind of ambition that can be translated into an innovative job.

He thinks it may be possible for him to get a company to hire someone like Roth but admits that a company with this sort of problem would be more likely to hire a consulting firm with trained specialists rather than an inexperienced, out-of-work graduate. But he still has hope.

"We might get a company to take someone like Eric on a small scale instead of their hiring a large, expensive consulting firm," he said. "It's easily worth it for the company to at least try something like that."

Both Roth and Harris have doubts about how the task force approach to creating innovative jobs will work. Roth said he tends to be cynical and pessimistic about the idea; Harris said he just doesn't know. Roth, out of work, said he needs a job immediately to pay off, among other things, his loan from Harvard. Harris said he doesn't want the task force to hold out false hope to its participants, but the idea is worth a try simply because it is all there is.

Both say, however, that most of their classmates from Harvard are either unemployed or unhappy in the jobs they have. Their friends' jobs, they say, are neither challenging nor fulfilling.

It seems that that other big "H"--happiness--does not automatically come with a Harvard degree.