What? No Swimming Pool?

On August 19, 1963, former President John F. Kennedy '40 came to Cambridge to choose a site for a school of Government and Library which would be named after him. Citizen protest drove the library away from Cambridge to Columbia Point, but nearly 15 years after Kennedy's death, the school will be inaugurated this week-end. The ceremonies will symbolically launch what President Bok hopes will be a major professional school for public servants.

"The John F. Kennedy School of Government wants people who can run a junior prom," says Dorothy Bambach, dean of students at the Kennedy School.

The theory seems to be that if you can squeeze some coordinated effort out of unruly high-school students, you will, after some Kennedy School training, be able to perform the same magic on unruly bureaucrats.

The School offers two main programs to transform prom organizers into government agency organizers and policy makers: the ten-year-old Master of Public Policy Program (MPP) for those with at least five years of experience in the public sector--the first degree offered by the School when it was founded in 1937.

The School has come a long way since 1937. It was called The Graduate School of Public Administration, before 1966 when a $10 million grant from the Kennedy's changed it's name and boosted its image. Located in Littauer Center, along with the Government and Economics Departments, it "had to rely on the part-time volunteer services of those two departments' faculties in order to do its teaching," Don K. Price, professor of Government, and dean of the School from 1958 until 1977, recalls.

Price was the first outsider to be brought in primarily to work for the School which had grown--but not drastically--since 1937 when he arrived to assume the position of dean. He says that there were only two courses designed "clearly and specifically" by the School for its own purposes, although an increasing number of courses in the Government and Economics Departments were designed with the School in mind. All courses were formally listed as being in the Ec or Gov departments. "Classes were held all over the lot. I taught them wherever I could beg, borrow or steal some space," Price says.

A turning point in the development of the School was the formation of the MPP program. The Program was conceived in 1968, by Bok, then dean of the Law School, Robert H Ebert, Walker Professor of Medicine and then dean of the Medical School and John T. Dunlop, University Professor and then dean of the faculty. The deans "recognized that many students in law and medicine wanted to work in public and governmental areas, not go into private practice," says Price. "Neither in the Law or Medical School was it possible to include in the curriculum the sort of things they needed to know if they did that."

Bok, Ebert and Dunlop talked over the idea of a public policy curriculum with Price and they began to push for the formation of the MPP program and joint degrees with the Law and Medical Schools. They pushed hard enough and the 18 members of the first MPP class entered the Kennedy School in the fall of 1969. "It was not until the public policy degree was created that we began to develop courses that were listed as the School's courses," says Price.

In his Annual President's report of 1973-74, Bok focused on the goals--or "mission" as Kennedy School people like to say--of Harvard's school of government: to train a "new profession" of public servants to hold responsible positions in the government.

Governmentis getting so important, big and complicated that "like it or not, public officials will establish the framework that determines the ability of each segment of society to achieve its goals...," Bok wrote. He added, "Since Universities are primarily responsible for advanced training in our society, they share a unique opportunity and obligation to prepare a profession of public officials equipped to discharge these heavy responsibilites to the nation."

Bok aspires to a vision of the School in the 80's becoming a substantial professional school--he hopes it will be for the public sector what Harvard's Schools of Medecine, Law and Business do for their respective professions--Improve them. "The legal system and profession function better because we have law schools," says Bok.

Poohbah Palace

The new building on Boylston Street represents a major footstep for Bok. The space there will almost double the level of activity that the school had last year in Littauer Center. A five year plan calls for student enrollment to reach a peak of 500 and the addition of seven executive programs (short intensive programs for people already high on the ladder of government) to the three now in existence. The faculty will increase from 30 to 50 members and the number of research programs from one (the Center for Science and International Affairs) to six.

The School is "busy raising money, developing a very muscular intellectual agenda for a center in business and government, another in regulation, another in capital formation, one in energy and environment," Ira Jackson, associate dean of the Kennedy School, says.

Everyone at the School seems pleased, to say the least, about the school's new home. Sometimes the pervading feeling around the building borders on ecstatic jubilation. "God, this is a machine for teaching," exclaimes Mark H. Moore, associate professor in public policy, as he views a typical classroom, designed to give teacher room to interact with the students.

Moore says the whole building permits easy interaction. He notes the enlarged public spaces, such as halls, which leave less room for offices, and the porousness of the building, which permits one to view the floors above and below one. In Littauer, seeing five people on a given day seemed to be "an insurmountable task," Moore says. Now, he claims he can see them all within the first hour of his arrival in the building.

One of the more talked about public spaces in the Kennedy School is the ARCO forum donated by the Atlantic, Richfield Company. It occupies the entire center of the main floor. Comfortable seats located on three floors can be turned sideways to face the forum, which is equipped with a large television screen, which is not working yet. Officials hope to sponsor important events at the forum such as speeches and debates which could be nationally televised.

An even more important aspect of the building, according to the Kennedy School people is the centralization of its facilities.

Jonathan Moore, director of the Institute of Politics succinctly sums it up: "If you're not living off by yourself, but you're living in the same physical community, with the other elements, the other resources, the other partners, everything works a lot better."

The separation from the School "has never given a chance to live with our family," Moore said, the family consisting of the Institute, the administration, the faculty, the programs and the students. The Kennedy School of Government has come a long way since Price had to scrounge around for class space. It also has a long way to go before it can fulfill Bok's vision of a Harvard Business School for the public sector.

The training at the School is geared for someone "who aspires to be assistant secretary or deputy assistant secretary at the federal level of the state and local equivalent of it," says Graham T. Allison, Jr. '62, dean of the Kennedy School.

The Kennedy School teaching method leans heavily on the "case method"--also taught at the Business School. A case is a description of a real management situation, usually from the point of view of one person. The question is "what would you do?"...Most students are generally satisfied with the classes. "I came here to get a good grounding in formal analytic techniques like economics, operations research, statistics...I'm geting that so I'm very happy," says Michael Gravitz, a MPP-JD student.

It is difficult to get such training on the job, students say. "Who the hell on the job has got time to go sudy econometrics or learn a few things about decision analysis under somebody who is the best in the country? You don't is the answer." another student remarks.

The case method of instruction seems to please most students. The cases give one a "vicarious experience...a sense of confidence, of having gone through it before," and a methodology, a way of looking at a problem, claims Dan Brinza, a MPP-JD student.

However, Elaine Lubin, also a MPP-JD student, feels differently about the case method. "I didn't feel that I came out of the case method with anything other than knowledge of current American issues," she says. She thinks the case method has little application to real situations. "To the extent that it applies, it's not very profound and most of the time it doesn't apply...I felt like I was in Kindergarden."

Fair to Poor

Faculty members and students appear to agree that the School is very weak in two essential areas central to government: ethics and management.

Two buzz words in the Kennedy School official register are ethics and sensitivity, yet there is only intermittent discussion of ethical problems. Students joke about "ethics month," a sequence in political analysis and public management on "Moral Obligations of Public Officials."

Ethics "certainly is an area that is weak and when you find the major course offered by Price and me, neither of whom have any credentials for offering a course" you know something is wrong.

To help deal with the problem "we have secured funds for a professorship of applied ethics and public policy," Allison said. The professor will develop ideas about applied ethics and formulate a curriculum.

"They haven't quite figured it all out yet," says Brinza. The Kennedy School curriculum is still evolving and, since there is no tradition of training in public policy, still an experiment. Officials at the School like to compare it with the Harvard Business School. The Business School was founded in 1907 "and for the first 30 years really didn't amount to much," says Allison. Only during the war did it become "the preeminent institution in professional training for managers and business that it has become." The question is whether or not a school of government can come to play an analogous role."

Allison's querie is not far off the mark. Dunlop speaks of the two schools as complimentary. People in the public sector can benefit from knowledge of the private sector and vice-versa, he says. He is helping raise funds for two parallel professorships, one on each side of the river, to be occupied by professors with a high degree of competence in business-government relations.

The Kennedy School is aspiring to play the role of industry leader to other public policy programs. "The curriculum and the conception that underlies the program" will be, if not copied, "borrowed from liberally," Bok says.

Tomorrow, The Kennedy School, which attempts to teach its students to deal with political reality, will have to confront some political reality itself: protest. The Southern Africa Solidarity Committee and the Black Students' Association will demonstrate against the School's acceptance of Engelhard money which was made by exploiting black miners. It could perhaps be called a lesson in applied ethics.