Nieman Fellow Program Offers Journalists Harvard's Facilities on Their Own Terms

Every year since 1938, about a dozen newspapermen have come to Harvard and have been paid to do whatever they want under the Nieman Fellowship program. During their stay they have the run of the College and the professional schools. Faculty and administrators cater respectfully to their desires. In June they return to their jobs, hopefully taking with them some knowledge that will make them better journalists.

It's a fascinating idea, giving Harvard to non-academics on their own terms. But few of the visitors explore the breadth of the University. Most use Harvard just to brush up on their own particular fields of reporting. Science writers study science, business writers study economics.

For most, holding a Nieman Fellowship is like having your father's Diner's Club card and eating all your meals at Elsie's. After all, you were brought up on hamburgers.

It shouldn't be this way. The Nieman Fellows are bright, interested, motivated men and women. Fifteen applicants are rejected for every one accepted. That most of the Fellows use Harvard as a trade school is not so much their own fault as it is the fault of the program itself and of its administrators.

President Conant made the Nieman program virtually shapeless to encourage independent scholarship. Fellows are required only to take one half-course. Under the direction of Louis Lyons, Curator of the Nieman Fellowships from the program's second year until 1964, this shapelessness became purposelessness.

Lyons's innovations during his 25 years were the opening of the program to women (1945), the formation of the Nieman alumni organization (1946), and the first publication of Nieman Reports (1947), the Fellows' quarterly journal on the newspaper business. Lyons's penchant for tradition and alumni solidarity has made the Nieman Fellows more an aristocratic fraternity of journalists than the group of scholars that President Conant had hoped for.

Lyons records this development in his book on the Nieman program, Reporting the News. Talking about the weekly Nieman dinners with leading journalists, he says, "Without the stimulus of these discussions, Nieman Reports would never have been born, nor would the remarkable esprit de corps of the Nieman Fellows have developed as it did, so that within a few seasons what began as an educational opportunity had become one of the prized distinctions in American journalism."

Were it not for Nieman Reports--perhaps the best publication of its kind--the Fellows might easily be confused with one of Harvard's Final Clubs. At a recent fund-raising dinner, the current class of Fellows and a long list of former ones got together for drinks, steak, St. Emilion, and after-dinner jokes. There the same strained conviviality, the same overly boisterous camaraderie that abounds at club punches and initiations.

Louis Lyons shaped the program into this fraternal institution; Dwight E. Sargent, his successor as Curator and editor of Nieman Reports, has made few changes. Sargent is a tightlipped, businesslike man, a different type entirely from his extroverted predecessor. A Nieman Fellow in 1950-51, he is a graduate of the editorial room, not th city desk; and his preoccupation with precision and organization betrays his background.

The fraternal complacency that has characterized some Nieman classes in the past is on the wane under Sargent's leadership. His quiet nature discourages the club atmosphere. But although he has diminished the inward focus of the Nieman program, he has not done much to enlarge the outward perspective.

Sargent continues to run the program much as Lyons did. He meets his day-to-day responsibility of arranging Nieman seminars, a major feature of the program since 1938, but he finds little time for innovations. He also spends several hours a day recruiting men and money for a $1.2 million Nieman fund drive now underway.

The seminars are a formal part of the Nieman year, and "attendance is expected," according to one Fellow. Sargent usually plays it safe when choosing a speaker. Since the only thing the Fellows have in common is their profession, a safe choice for a seminar usually means another journalist or a government, history, or law professor.

"About 60 to 80 per cent of them are in the field of public affairs," Sargent said, "because that's what the Niemans are most interested in. However, a Nieman year is more than just learning about history and government. It's learning about your own profession."

Sargent's conception of the Nieman year makes Harvard little more than a library for journalistic research. Most of the Fellows seem to take his cue. According to the prospectus issued by the University News Office, 10 of the 13 Nieman Fellows for 1965-66 plan to concentrate their most serious study this year in their own fields of reporting. Three of the six Associate (or foreign) Nieman Fellows are coming to Harvard to study their own countries.

For example, Dev Prasad Kumar, special representative of the Statesman, New Delhi and Calcutta, "will concentrate his study in international affairs on the history and politics of India and plans to make a comprehensive study of the development of Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan."

Most Nieman Fellows, then, supplement their specialized seminars with equally specialized independent study. There are several reasons for this.

The practical consideration of getting ahead in the newspaper business discourages inventive and imaginative study programs. For the married Fellows, transplanting a family to Cambridge and enrolling children in school are time-consuming activities that take precedence over investigating thoroughly Harvard's academic opportunities.

Moreover, Harvard intimidates the non-academic and Cambridge the non-Easterner; the combination discourages any man without exceptional self-confidence from leaving his intellectual home base. Equally restricting is the strong tradition in the Nieman program, which results in enrollment by Fellows in courses that have been popular in previous years. The standard "Nieman courses" at the present time are Merle Fainsod's course on the Soviet Union and Robert McCloskey's on constitutional law.

Jack Bass, governmental affairs reporter for the Columbia, S.C., State and a Nieman Fellow this year, illustrates the pattern. Bass, 31, was born in Columbia and has spent most of his life in South Carolina. He arrived at Harvard last fall with his wife and three children, two of them schoolage, and ended up settling in Belmont.

He enrolled in McCloskey's course and wrote his paper on James F. Byrnes, former Supreme Court Justice from South Carolina. He audited Fainsod's course and Galbraith's Economics 169. "Galbraith interests me because many of the problems in underdeveloped countries are the same ones we have in South Carolina," he said.

Bass is affiliated with Dunster House (each Fellow has a House affiliation) but visits there "only about once every other week." He and his wife spend most of their evenings in Belmont "because babysitting is a major expense." Both married and single Nieman Fellows receive the same stipend of $160 a week.

Bass keeps in close touch with events in his state. "There are some big elections next fall and I'll be covering the campaigns over the summer," he explained.

"This year is proving very useful," Bass said, but his exposure to Harvard can only be described as minimal. "I like Cambridge," he said. "You can't beat Harvard Square for people watching."

Some of the Fellows who study here in their particular fields of reporting do so for good reasons and with good results. One of the intentions of the Nieman program is to train competent journalists in special areas; in science, medicine, and economics, for example, an academic refresher is essential if the reporter hopes to talk the same language as the people he is talking to.

Anthony Lewis, a Nieman Fellow in 1956-57, spent his year at the Law School and returned to the New York Times as its Supreme Court reporter. But Lewis was a Harvard graduate and knew just what Cambridge could offer him before he came here on his Fellowship. Many others who specialize their study are merely dabbling in the areas they know most about. It makes the year easier, but it contributes little to journalism, less to Harvard, and less still to the Nieman Fellow himself.

What Jack Bass has missed at Harvard because of family and professional pressures, Robert C. Maynard, reporter for the York, Pa., Gazette and Daily has been able to find. Maynard, 28, comes from New York City, is jazz fan, and smokes Gauloises; so for him the Nieman year has required no major cultural adjustment. He settled in a bachelor apartment near Central Square.

Maynard is the only Fellow in this year's class who lacks a college education, and "not having made the college scene, I face special demands," he said. "There's something about the academic style that's different from the real-world style."

But Maynard planned his study program carefully over the summer. He wrote some academic friends and told them he wanted to study urban problems and automation. "I got back reading lists, guidance, and advice on which professors to seek out and which to avoid," he said. When he got here he enrolled in the speed reading course offered by the Bureau of Study Counsel.

His credit course is Gerald Rosenthal's Eonomics 175, "Social Welfare and Public Policy." He wrote a paper proposing a community self-help project for the Negro ghetto as a "more realistic" alternative to Great Society programs.

He audited Charles Tilly's Social Relations 124, "Urban Sociology," and Martin Kilson's Government 122a, "Government and Politics in Africa." Maynard has appeared twice on WHRB and has done some editing and rewriting for the Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs. "There's no restraint on what a Nieman Fellow

For most, holding a Nieman Fellowship is like having your father's Diner's Club card and eating all your meals at Elsie's. After all, you were brought up on hamburgers.

Were it not for Nieman reports--perhaps the best publication of its kind--the Fellows might easily be confused with one of Harvard's Final Clubs. can achieve for himself at Harvard," he said.

Maynard did not spend much time at Adams House last term but hopes "to spend a lot more there this spring." He plans to travel abroad over the summer and return to the Gazette before fall.

Although he is generally satisfied with the Nieman program, "You sometimes get a sleeper in the seminars," he says. "But I guess that would happen in anything like this."

Maynard does not go along with Sargent's conception of the Nieman year. "This is not a workshop for discussing how you do your job," he said. Maynard has not treated his year as such, and unlike most of his Nieman classmates, he has explored the breadth of Harvard.

Maynard's urbanity and bachelor status give him an advantage to begin with, but Dwight Sargent and the Nieman Office could do much to decrease the handicap of the married Southerner or Westerner. They could also make the Nieman Fellowship more profitable for all its beneficiaries.

In order to integrate the Fellows into the University community, the Nieman Office should handle all housing arrangements for the incoming class, keeping all the Fellows close to Harvard Square. The office should also explore the possibility of placing unmarried Fellows in the Houses.

Stipends for married Fellows should be raised above those for unmarried Fellows to give both the same social mobility.

The Nieman Office should encourage academic diversity by putting all seminars and dinners on a voluntary attendance basis. This way Sargent would not be pressured to find one professor to please all the Fellows and would reach more often into departments other than History and Government.

Most important, the Nieman Office should strongly encourage imaginative and original study plans. The experience of Robert J. Manning, a United Press reporter and a Nieman Fellow in 1945-46, shows that a broad plan of study can contribute to late service in journalism. Although not a college graduate, Manning studied elementary Russian, Shakespeare, American literature, modern British and American poetry, anthropology, and several subjects in the social sciences. He is now Executive Editor of The Atlantic.JACK BASS