Harvard Buildings:

ACROSS KIRKLAND Street from the Science Center is the Lawrence Lowell Lecutre Hall, an empty, old, red-brick building with a lot of potential. The College has no real student union, and the empty lecture hall might become a good place to focus for the College's social life.

As the Square becomes a wasteland of banks and boutiques, all of the old hangouts that the alumni reminisce about are gone or going. Students have no place to meet and hang out. The administration could provide the lecture hall with needed repairs and redesign it to hold a few places where students could buy a hamburger and fries, sit, bullshit and people-watch until three in the morning on a Friday night.

There is enough space to put in rooms where bands could play to anyone who wanted to listen, lounges for VCR movies, or just places for people to see and be seen. The building would also be a great place to display student art.

For any administrators who might wonder where the money would come from, there is an answer. The rents from the hangouts would cover at least part of the cost. The University could save some money by allowing students at the Graduate School of Design to redesign the hall. The GSD students would probably jump at the chance to design something that would actually be built and they probably know more about creating a space for student than any 60-year-old big-name architect.

THE KENNEDY School of Government prides itself on teaching value-neutral analysis to future public sector managers. At a glance, this seems like a wonderful idea: teach future managers techniques they can use to make the government work better for everyone.

The idea behind teaching administrative and analytical techniques for people in government to use for any goal at all sounds reasonable. But technique are inextricably linked with values. In this case, they are the values of professionalism, expertism, and rationalism. These-isms pull bureaucrats away from what government is about.

Government has a lot more to do with how people feel about their world than how "experts" vainly try to make it. I once found myself standing in a park in Bolivar, Tennesse listening to Senator Jim Sasser give a speech. An old farm lady who saw my grey suit came up to me with tears in her eyes. She wanted to thank me for what the Senator and his staff had done. They had gotten her son discharged from the Marines when the Marines were about to put him in jail for two years.

The look in that lady's eyes is what government is about. Teaching techniques to make good policy is important, but teaching them in an atmosphere of distance from the things that make them important makes no sense. Students learn not only the techniques but also the distance.