Dean Stresses Large Role of Peace Corps

In an hour-long discussion yesterday, Dean Monro emphasized both Africa's "fantastic need" for education and the importance of Harvard's efforts to help the Peace Corps meet this need.

His speech suggested that the involvement between the University and programs like the Peace Corps will increase during the coming years, although he avoided any definite statement on this subject.

Speaking before the first meeting of the Hillel Round Table in world affairs, Monro covered several different aspects of the relationship between Harvard and the Corps. He said, for example, that because of the Peace Corps' association with the University, foreigners will conceive of it as an educational program rather than a politically inspired government operation.

Monro also traced the history of relations between the University and the Peace Corps, starting with Kennedy's early statements on the Corps, and leading up to the eventual absorption of Harvard's efforts into its official program and the selection of the University as a summer training site for Corps volunteers. Before the merger with the government program actually took place, Monro pointed out, the University had made enough progress on its own to open correspondence with a Nigerian college and discuss sending 15 students abroad.

Taking up another approach, Monro stressed the value of letting students find out "what it's like to live in a country where half the babies are dead before they're three." He praised the Corps not only for what it hopes to achieve abroad, but also for "what we're going to learn from this."

Most of the University's efforts in teacher training and indoctrination would be aimed toward work at the college and late secondary school level, Monro predicted. The reason for concentrating at this level is that Nigeria, the area into which Harvard-trained Peace Corps volunteers are sent, already has a good lower-level educational system.

Monro said he hoped that teacher training at the University, in the form of seminars, might be continued through the winter. He did not know whether this could be done most easily inside or outside of the official Peace Corps program.