It’s an energetic place, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, one part graduate school and one part floating think tank. It’s a diverse place, home to nine separate research centers willing to reanalyze anything from the interface of government, business and ethics to the attendant problems of the modern media. The nation’s leading public-policy school is often an empty place, too, as professors rush off to consult with a changing world: one envoy to reshape the Ukraine’s economic base, another to Washington to bring free-market theories to environmental problems, a third to New York to advise the city on training a new breed of community police officer. It is, in short, a place that can barely contain itself; another new building was dedicated last September. (Query: how can you tell the visitors from the staff at the school? Answer: the staffers won’t admit to being lost in the hallways.)
Never, however, has the school’s reach been greater than in the proposed Grand Bargain. The plan lays out a staged transformation of the Soviet economy to a free-market system. Moscow would continue to move toward democracy, allowing smallscale private enterprises, implementing power sharing between the central government and the Soviet republics, and, ultimately, large-scale privatization by 1997. In return for this latest Five Year Plan, the West would supply technical assistance and a great deal of financial aid.
The plan is vintage Kennedy School: a group of smart people bring their experience, shrewdness and self-confidence to bear on a single difficult problem. Project leader Graham T. Allison, a former dean of the Kennedy School, first recruited Grigory Yavlinsky, an economist and former deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation. Allison also tapped Robert Blackwill, a former member of Bush’s National Security Council, Stanley Fischer, onetime chief economist at the World Bank, and Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard professor who helped draw up an economic plan to transform Poland into a free-market system. Last weekend Yavlinsky presented the plan to Gorbachev while Allison took it to Washington. A senior White House official dismisses the plan, and the men behind it, as “out to lunch.” Still, the idea has become the focus of debate in the West - and in the U.S.S.R., where Vladimir Shcherbakov, deputy for economic affairs, called it “a pretty piece of paper” - and has pushed the Bush administration toward Creating an economic scheme of its own.
When it suits his purposes, President Bush - as well as his aides - makes fun of the Kennedy School as “Harvard Yard’s boutique.” He used that jab in 1988 when he was vying with former Kennedy lecturer Michael Dukakis. After the election, however, Bush filled his team with former Kennedy faculty members, including budget director Richard Darman, chief domestic-policy adviser Roger Porter and Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. These appointments explain the school’s reputation as a resting place for liberals waiting for a Democratic president: all the Republicans have been hired for jobs in Washington.
Despite the frenetic pace - or because of it - the school remains a magnet. More than 1,000 candidates applied for the 225 spots in the two-year master’s program this year and midcareer government officials continue to vie for seats in the coveted executive seminars. Their courses tend to be heavily quantitative as though government and politics were a matter of measurements. Lately the school has tried to build more values and management philosophy into the curriculum, but there isn’t always time. “It has been a wild ride,” says newly appointed Acting Dean Albert Carnesale, considered to have the inside track for the dean’s job. From Washington, to Moscow, to Cambridge and back. Have Harvard pedigree, Will Travel.
The Kennedy School is home to academics, pols-in-waiting and students seeking policymaking jobs.
There are 725 students and 70 full-time faculty members.
The school’s nine institutes have attracted high-profile directors including ex-television correspondent Marvin Kalb, retired three-star general Bernard Trainor and Shirley Williams, a former British Labor cabinet minister. ..BL.
Tuition for next year: $14,662.
Roughly 10 percent of the class of 1990 were hired by state and local government while 28 percent went to work for federal agencies. The private sector hired 36 percent.
