Down but not out Farm life

For many professors at Harvard, retirement barely puts a dent in the usual daily routine; most continue to work out of their Harvard offices, do research and a bit of teaching. But Thomson Professor of Government Arthus Mass isn't content to take his place in this time-worn tradition.

Maass says he will celebrate the end of his 36-year Harvard teaching career by buying a few hundred acres of barren California desert and trying to turn the plot into a workable farm, using a new irrigation method he developed. And Maass will be doing more than just homesteading. He plans to conduct two research projects, advise a small number of seniors on their theses, and find time for a season ticket to the Boston Symphony.

With goals like these, perhaps it is no surprise that Maass is retiring at 66, the earliest possible age at Harvard. "All the peer pressure not to retire is immense," Maass says. "If you decide you want to do it, you fear it will be interpreted another way"--that you "have nothing to say to the students...or that your research has dried up."

Maass is best known for his studies of Congress, in particular the mechanisms Congressional committees use to affect policy. But he stresses, "my academic life and scholarly life have two sides to them. I've done a lot of work going way back on ecological matters, particularly water."

Maass last year published Congress and the Common Good, a book that "goes against the grain of political science today and shows that Congress has sometimes tried to do what's right, and makes a good case for it," in the words of Shattuck Professor of Government James Q. Wilson.

As Wilson tells it, "I persuaded him to write it. Arthur was teaching this course on Congress and the Common Good. One day I walked into class and told him, 'one day you're going to retire--why don't you write it down?' And I wouldn't leave until he promised to do it."

Maass says he now wants to move his research into a different area--the danger that U.S. attorneys, while fighting corruption nationwide, might ironically weaken state and local government.

In his other field of interest, Maass says, "I have one big research project on the role of speculation in developing areas that require irrigation." He points to his soon-to-be home of California an example of the beneficial role speculation campaign in development.

On his own farm, Maass says he hopes to develop "a new type of irrigation." He wants to bring exotic crops, such as Italian seedless to intoes, into the Mojave Desert or somewhere similar, and is "fairly far along in working out the project." He says the prospect of living out of a trailer in the desert doesn't faze him since he does not plan to live there full-time.

Maass, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University in his native Baltimore, has been a teacher at Harvard since 1948. Wilson calls Maass "both the historian and the conscience of the Government Department. He's spent most of his life there. No dean can ever pull a fast one on the Government Department when he is there to say "'it wasn't done this way.'"

Maass says he is confident he can succeed as a scholar-farmer, a modern-day Thomas Jefferson, as it were. And indeed, in Wilson's words, Maass "is never unprepared--if this were baseball, he would be the runner who could never be caught off base."