A Life of Troubleshooting

Ten years ago this month, John I. Dunlop emptied the dean of the Faculty's office in University Hall, leaving a campus fraught with student agitation and faculty in-fighting. However, within the same month Dunlop departed an academic pressure cooker, he was thrown into another fire as President Nixon's director of the Cost of Living Council. There he faced dissimilar yet equally challenging problems.

While it is not uncommon for Harvard faculty to beat the well-trodden path between Cambridge and Washington, D.C., few have played such key roles in both as Dunlop.

The 68-year-old California native served as Dean of the Faculty from 1969 to 1973 and chaired the Economics Department for five years before that. But he has always kept a hand in White House policy matters acting as a part time adviser to every President since Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 and serving as Gerald R. Ford's secretary of labor.

Today, as Lamont University Professor, the gravel-voiced labor specialist has only a modest-sized office in the Littauer Center but he carries the same double burden that he has throughout his career. At Harvard Dunlop now leads a seminar on labor-government relations designed for doctoral candidates in the Business School and the Economics Departments. In addition, he teaches in the Trade Union Program, which brings national and international trade union leaders to Harvard for 12 weeks of seminars.

But it is Dunlop's public sector tasks that keep him busiest. A regular adviser to President Reagan on labor and industrial issues, he also serves on Reagan's Productivity Committee and chairs the administration's sub-committee on human resources. In addition, he leads the state Joint Labor Management Committee, which Gov. Michael Dukakis formed to arbitrate police and fireman labor disputes.

Roger Porter, assistant to the president for policy and executive secretary of the Productivity Committee, describes Dunlop's approach to labor-industrial problems as "motivated by regulatory reasonableness and regard for cost efficiency." The former Kennedy School of Government faculty member adds. "Dunlop's ability to contribute usefully on a broad range of subjects has earned him respect in labor, government and academic circles."

Although Dunlop supports a number of Reagan's economic policies, such as tax reductions to increase business incentives, deregulation, and hikes in defense spending, he is quick to point out the internal contradictions of reducing taxes and raising interest rates. In general, he expressed ambivalence about the President's rosy economic forecasts, saying. "The economy will recover but to what extent no one can say."

Speaking of his old bailiwick in Washington, Dunlop characterizes current relations between organized labor and the Reagan Administration as strained, attributing the differences to clashes in ideology and personalities, most notably the bitter air traffic controller's strike in 1981.

Sitting back in his Littauer office, Dunlop reflects about his days as dean, in what administrators today like to call the troubled times.

"I'm pleased to note that there are relatively few scars left on campus from that period," he says. "We had serious problems with the faculty who were torn by many issues and a student body preoccupied with the war in Vietnam."

Over the four decades that he has been affiliated with the University, Dunlop says he has observed noticeable changes in the characteristics of Harvard undergraduates. The extended economic recessions since 1973 have made for a more serious, conservative student body than he dealt with more than ten years ago, he says.

Among the most critical changes in the University, according to Dunlop, is the growth of the graduate schools. "A long theme of mine was to improve the ties between the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the professional schools", he says, adding that as dean he sought to encourage joint appointments.

Retirement from Harvard, slated for 1985, will probably not signal a less active agenda for Dunlop as his responsibilities in federal and state governments are likely to continue. And one activity that the author of 14 books and countless articles on labor and industrial relations is sure to keep working at is writing. "I'm always writing books," he says.