Around the World in 25 Years

Until Harvard's Center for International Affairs was a decade old, the institute was known logically enough by the abbreviation CIA. But then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the center's role in influencing government policy came under so much debate and scrutiny that the monicker had to be changed to CFIA, then to CFIA, to eliminate the undesirable connotations.

"It was a very strange era," Benjamin M Brown, director of the Fellows Program says now "The Fellows Program was considered by uninformed people as a kind of training ground for U.S. imperialism."

Since that turbulent interlude, though, the CFIA, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, settled back into the quiet which marked its earlier years. Surviving several attacks from anti-Vietnam protestors and a bombing, it has expanded and gone about its business, which to date has included producing about 250 books and publications, a series of presidential administrators, and untold amounts of research on international topics. This week, it will celebrate that anniversary with a gala whose guests will include former National Security Advisor Zbiginiew Brzezinski.

Established in 1958 to respond to the intellectual and political pressures of Cold War diplomacy, the Center paralleled similar ones at MIT, Princeton and Columbia. A strong sense of mission, veteran members say, characterized the CFIA's beginnings; scholars hoped to address the "unprecedented task" of stabilizing the sharply divided, bipolar, and newly technologically equipped world. The need the Center first defined was twofold--for wider knowledge, and for men to apply that knowledge to foreign affairs. Accordingly, a staff of permanent faculty members was established to complement a Fellows Program, in which "practitioners"--diplomats, government officials and military officials of all nationalities--could spend a year in academia.

The center opened in 1958 as a small, compact research institute which produced a steady stream of scholarship through the 1960's, and was instrumental in the development of the new field of arms controls. The original nucleus of faculty members included Henry A. Kissinger '50, Edward S. Mason, Thomas C. Schelling, and director Robert R. Bowie; the first Fellows Program had 12 "practitioners."

But by the late 1960's the arms research, along with the amount of influence the Center was thought to have on government policy made the Center a target for anti-Vietnam groups. This influence exists, says current Center Director Samuel P. Huntington, Dillon Professor of International Affairs, but is indirect, resulting from the eventual effects of center research and from an inevitable exchange of personnel.

"The center, as such, did not have any political influence on national policy," Huntington says, adding, "But when Kissinger left (in 1969) and went into government, he had a great deal of influence."

Center officials and Fellows have played significant roles in governments both in the U.S. and in other countries. Several of the current center faculty held positions in the Carter Administration: Huntington in the National Security Council Professor Joseph S. Nye in the State Department and former director of the Center and Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs Raymond Vernon from the Treasury.

The Fellows of the Center also have a wide range of significant political connections because of the nature of their appointments. Chosen on the basis of their work as political "practitioners," their ranks include Robin Renwick, who served as Loar Soames' advisors in Zimbabwe, Benigno Aquino, ex-Presidential candidate in the Phillipines, and Korean dissident Kim Dae Jung, who will join the program next year.

But these important political connections sometimes have unfortunate results. In the late 1960's they provoked violent attacks from leftist groups which included a small number of Harvard students.

The first major assault took place in September 1969, when 20 to 30 members of The Weathermen, a militant offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), rushed into the offices of the Center, chasing out staff members and physically assaulting those who resisted. They gave Benjamin H. Brown, director of the Fellows Program, a serious gash above the ear, and once inside the building, they painted the slogans 'Pig' and 'Fuck US Imperialism' on the interior walls.

"It was, in my opinion, an outrage," says Bowie. "There was a lot of absolutely false propaganda about the Center that was designed to influence student thinking. The protestors played on a genuine concern of at least some of the students about Vietnam." In October, 1970, a bomb went off in the office of a Center Fellow, Detonated, it substantially damaged a floor of offices and the library. A final attack against the CFIA--ironically, Huntington recalls, on his birthday--brought more than 1000 Boston-area demonstrators marching to the CFIA, in April 1972. There, more than 100 of them broke in and ransacked the building, setting fire to papers and books. The damage was estimated at $25,000, not to mention the loss of research.

Since the activism and criticism died down, the Center has expanded greatly from the small, cohesive group it once was, reacting to an increasingly complex, multi-polar world picture.

In the early 1970s, one of its major programs became an independent center. The Development Advisory Service (DAS), created at the Center in response to requests for advice in development planning in poor countries, became the Harvard Institute for International Development in 1973. Similarly, the arms control work carried out evolved into the Program of Science and International Relations. In 1978, that program also became independent of the Center. The Center also broadened the scope and number of its seminars and established new links with the University. In 1971, it took on the first Student Associates--mostly graduate students and a few undergraduates writing theses--and created a new, intermediate position of Associate for almost 50 faculty members.

The Center's influence now permeates the University in subtler ways, as most Fellows and associated are affiliated with Houses or other non-credit seminars. Two years ago, for instance, Center affiliates taught close to 30 Harvard courses.

"Originally, the Center was conceived of as a place to bring faculty in from different departments," says Bowie. "Every member of the Center is active in teaching." The Center, he adds, has "actively contributed" to the quality of teaching at the University because the faculty wears two huts.

Likewise, the interaction between the academics and the Fellows and the Center is considered of prime importance as that interaction and exchange "tends to reflect a more valid theory on the part of the theoreticians and better practice on the practitioners' part," Brown says.

"We've found that in an academic setting they can explore each others minds with fewer inhibitions than if they meet each other in diplomatic roles. Here they're free agents," he adds. "The Center contributes to broaden them personally." Just being in the University community, in fact, can have that effect; In the late 1960's and early '70s, Brown says, the Fellows took a keen interest in the student marches and protests, and some of them actually joined them.

"I think those experiences had a profound effect on the thinking of some of them on the Vietnam War, and made them question it," he adds.

Along with the structural growth, the CFIA had expanded the amount and range of its research between 1980 and 1982, income from research grants jumped almost fourfold--aided by a new endowed chair in international economics, a gift from the Frank Boas Foundation. Research expenditures grew by 171 percent. And all of the Center's approximately $2 million in this year's budget is--and always has been--independent of the University.

Individual research by Fellows at the Center has continued to be extensive. A Fellow in 1980, former Secretary General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry Mordechai Gazit, published his analysis of U.S.-Israeli relations in the Partisan Review. Current projects include John G. Keliher's analysis of ground force weapons and arms control in Central Europe, and an examination by Korean journalist Don-Shik Choo of relations between North and South Korea and the U.S.

The number of Faculty affiliated with the Center has also increased from four in 1958 to 10 in 1978, and then to a high of 34 in 1982. Since 1978, the number of research scholars has grown from 29 to 56. Only the Fellows Program is being held at a level of 20 Fellows, as well as four Associate Fellows who, for various reasons, cannot commit themselves to a whole year.

Critics of the center say that this numerical expansion has cast the Center the cohesiveness it once had. But Huntington stresses that there is still an emphasis on interaction and that the expansion has added a welcome breadth to the research carried out. The increased size has, however, brought some logistical problems: more than 35 percent of the staff has already overflowed from the offices in Coolidge Hall, which the Center has occupied since 1979, into "annexes" on Kirkland Street.

Though change and expansion have brought "a different, more complicated sense of mission," Huntington says, the essential focus of the center is still research. Brown agrees "The issues have become more complex," he says. "and while that involves some puzzlement. It makes it very exciting."