Littauer Center Trains Bureaucrats

At one point in his recent campaign for president, Dwight D. Eisenhower took the stump to inveigh against "Harvard words" and Harvard men in the United States government. This may have influenced the voters in Kansas City, but once the Eisenhower administration is underway anyone who makes a short survey of our Washington bureaucracy will still find it riddled with Harvard men.

However, these government servants will not all be graduates of the College or Law School suddenly elevated to high position, but rather career bureaucrats who hold their civil service jobs regardless of administration politics. They are graduates of the Littauer Center of Public Administration, a school which has become so influential in the 15 years since it was founded that it is today recognized as the northern terminus of a two-way shuttle of experts between Harvard and Washington.

The influence that the Littauer School grabbed in the New Deal and will continue to hold in a Republican term is due to the simple belief that the administrator does more than administrate. He must be able, not merely to administer the laws which govern his department, but to lobby for new ones. He must be briefed in public policy as well as administrative practice.

For many years Littauer's broad policy approach has opposed the trade school approach up and down the battlefield of the public service, until, one by one, the country's other administration schools grudgingly adopted the Littauer method.

Other Bombshells

This was not the only bombshell Littauer has dropped into the field of government. Shortly after the war, the School developed the case studies in public policy, to introduce the successful case teaching method of the Law and Business schools into the field of administration. And its Consultant Program, which has secretly brought top government officials to Cambridge every week for the last decade, has established the link between the ivory tower and the Capitol Building, between the theory of government and its practice, that has resulted in the steady professorial migration to Washington of the last few years.

Yet, the Littauer School has never developed itself as consistently and rationally as it has the programs it has exported. Throughout its history, the school has been continually experimenting--absorbing and rejecting new courses and new types of students. Originally formed as a place where mature civil servants could reflect and research on public problems, Littauer has become a hodgepodge of downy-cheeked future administrators, prospective teachers, PhD. candidates, and special government trainees.

Littauer has never been quite sure where it was going in its internal development partly because its has never quite known what it was. Every year it is the task of Arthur N. Holcombe '06, professor of Government, to explain dutifully to incoming students what he calls "the mystery of Littauer." He points out that, other than Dean Edward S. Mason, the school has no faculty members of its own--the men who teach are paid by the Law School, Business School, or School of Arts and Sciences. Nor has it any courses that are not also listed in the catalogue or the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In other words, Littauer is sort of an academic holding company, which draws on the capital of other faculties and other departments to bring academic skills to future public servants.

Barter and Trade

The same sort of barter and trade with the rest of the University takes place among Littauer's student body. Of the 100 students presently in the school, the majority are merely picking up Littauer's Master of Public Administration degree on their way to bigger things. Littauer shares them with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where they are candidates for that School's notoriously complicated "Joint Degree" in Political Economy and Government. Essentially, this "joint degree" program is a limbo for social science students dwell in while they decide whether to teach or go into government.

The only other sizable chunk of Littauer's student "body" is the group in the agricultural extension program of John D. Black, Henry Lee Professor of Economics and dean of American agrarian economists. Over the past five years, this program has tried to bring a little bit of Harvard influence into many of the six million farm homes in the United States. Picked from state agricultural extension agencies and financed by the Carnegie Corporation, Black's 25 or more students do intensive work in their special farm field, and also dip into the more advanced theory of agricultural economies. These academic farmers do bring to Littauer the practical experience most students lack. In fact, after their academic stretch, the agricultural extension students have advanced farther and faster in government that Littauer's other products. Black's colleagues agree that his falls, has had as profound an influence unique program, for all its academic piton the public service as almost all the rest of Littauer.

Classes Without Students

The sudden importance of the agricultural extension program is typical of Littauer's development. The School has always been marked by constant change and unorthodox academic procedure. It was, for example, probably the only school in existence to hold classes for a year before it admitted any students. This was in 1937, when, after Lucius N. Littauer had donated over $2 million to establish the School and Center which bear his name, a special conference was held to blueprint the new approach to administration. Over 75 government leaders attended, some of them so important their names were barred from the press for security reasons. James R. Williams, Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy and first dean of Littauer led the conferences.

Secret Guests

Besides the revolutionary goals, the most important thing to come out of these top-level meetings was Littauer's Washington consultant program. Its procedure soon became traditional. The guest of the day, who might be a bureau chief, cabinet undersecretary, or National Chairman of a political party, would come to Cambridge in mid-afternoon. After addressing a seminar for a couple of hours he would be guest of honor at a dinner. Later the discussion would resume in the plush Littauer lounge. Sometimes, it would be another four hours, the bigwig called time and was spirited away to the airport or train station. Since the guest was exclusively the property of Littauer, the rest of the University never even knew he was in town.

The students were not the only ones who gained from these special events. Often, the government official would bare his most difficult problems to the seminar, in the hope that some bright young man could apply some theory and come up with an answer he had been too harried to discover. It is said that Leon Henderson found solutions to some of the intricacies of price controls in the Littauer Lounge.

Case Studies

During the war, former professor of Government E. Pendleton Herring began to gather studies of actual administrational problems in order to construct a new Littauer course. Whipped into shape by 1946, the course, Public Administration and Public Policy, became the model for public service schools throughout the country. Its case methods dropped students into an actual agency, where, through reading, they fought dogfights with pressure groups and prayed for nickels from Congress, much like real administrators. Many government agencies winced when they saw their most bitter struggles and biggest botches printed up as case studies, but they soon realized that there was no better way to get across the facts of governmental life. Everybody at Littauer now takes this case study course.

Many men on the Littauer "faculty" wish the student body could have been constructed as neatly as some of the seminars. But its development was haphazard. At first, there were 30 or so Littauer and Administration fellows, who shared their seminars with Arts and Sciences graduate students. When the war came, Littauer watched most of its Fellowship material quickly drafted. Some suggested the school close its doors for the duration, and others toyed with the ideas of turning Littauer into a military training schol. But Dean Williams was stubbornly determined to keep his school civilian. In a sudden and drastic change in admissions policy, Williams looked abroad and convinced South American governments to send their bright young men to Littauer. As a result, the School was half Latin American for the duration.

Almost a tidal wave of applications engulfed the school after 1945. They were from vets but not those looking for a "cram course." Attracted by the educational benefits of the GI Bill of Rights, they wanted as much schooling as they could get. By 1946, only ten Littauer students were out for the original, one year Master of Public Administration de- gree. The rest were in four or five-year programs for Arts and Sciences doctors' degrees. Although they all had some interest in government, many had no intention of going into public service. Thus, the original conception of the Littauer student body was completely changed. It has never been quite the same since.

Every year since 1946, the School's official report has pleasantly speculated on cutting down the student body. But every year, the applications have increased. Right now, the Admissions Committee must reject three men for every one it accepts.

Present Dean Mason has abandoned William's hope that the school could return to its original character. He is convinced that Littauer can be just as useful to the government and the University if it continues to pool its courses and students with the rest of the University. "After all," Mason says, "public administration schools are only one of the roads into the public service. And the government could use people with a broader background in the social sciences."

Opposite Approach

Many of Littauer's students, and some of its borrowed "faculty" have suggested limiting the school to a master's degree program, with a complete turnover of students every year. But Mason takes the opposite approach. He would broaden the program still further. Already, he has created seminars that relate administration to law and business, and are taught by faculty members of those schools.

But the character of the school has never been as consistent, or produced as much agreement, as its results. While the debate over the kind of courses and students Littauer should have goes on, the controversy over its approach to the field of public administration has ended. The school's growing body of Washington alumni have enthusiastically endorsed its broader approach toward public administration as the "most useful possible" for their present work.

Thus, with the essential purpose of the Littauer revolution having succeeded, the revolutionists have only the details to quibble about. No matter how mysteriously it develops in the future, the school in the sombre, grey structure on Kirkland Street has established itself as the best public administration school in the country