Staffing the Government: Bok Outlines University Obligations to Professional Education

The following excerpts are from President Bok's annual report to the Board of Overseers, in which he discussed Harvard's professional schools and the role of universities in general in preparing students for careers in the public services.

The Basic Curriculum

This brief review suggests that it is possible to attract large numbers of students to educational programs that will prepare them for important policy and administrative roles. But the public sector remains sufficiently disorderly and varied in its needs that it is scarcely possible to consider the creation of a single professional program along the lines of a faculty of medicine or law. Many key policymakers and administrators will continue to be drawn from a diverse group of specialists who may never have contemplated a career in public service at the time they graduated from college. As a result, mid-career programs will be needed for more experienced persons without previous training in public management who find themselves moving from specialist roles to positions of broader responsibility. In addition, since there is a strong demand for broadly trained administrators in relatively self-contained professions such as health, education, and urban planning, similar programs must be devised in the other graduate schools that serve these professions. Finally, since careers in public service remain fragmented and uncertain, especially for political appointees and elective officials, ample room must be left for students who wish to hedge their bets by combining an education for public responsibility with a law or business degree.

In short, professional education for the public sector is a task that cannot be left to a single graduate school. It requires the participation of a number of different faculties within the University. And yet, our surveys of alumni in a variety of fields suggest that there is a common body of knowledge and general skills that can contribute to the education of policy analysts and administrators whether they seek their training in a school of government, a faculty of education, a department of city planning, or a school of public health. It is to this basic core of instruction that we must now turn.

The basic knowledge that public leaders need to carry out their responsibilities is very much a seamless web. For simplicity's sake, however, it is possible to distinguish among three major forms of knowledge: a familiarity with the more sophisticated analytic methods that are increasingly used in the planning and evaluation of public programs; a knowledge of methods of organization and management together with an understanding of the political processes that influence government action; and a sensitivity to the problems of ethics and competing values that inhere in all forms of public activity.

Analytic Skills: During the past two decades, government agencies and other large institutions have made increasing use of more sophisticated tools of analysis derived, for the most part, from the disciplines of economics, mathematics and statistics. These methods were widely publicized a decade ago through the heavy use of technical analysis in the Department of Defense under the stewardship of Robert McNamara. Because the techniques have often been applied without sufficient judgment and discrimination, they have attracted their fair share of criticism. Yet the use of methods such as program budgeting, cost-benefit analysis and simulation models has continued to spread beyond the Defense Department to other government agencies and nonprofit institutions. As a result, even the critics must acknowledge that key policymakers should be acquainted with these methods if only to appreciate their pitfalls and avoid becoming captive to elaborate staff studies which they cannot adequately comprehend.

For these reasons, it is important to include an exposure to economics in our basic core. Needless to say, no professional program could hope to train fully qualified economists, or there would be room in the curriculum for little else. But it should be possible to familiarize students with a basic understanding of the relationship among economic variables and the subtler ways in which they influence one another. In particular, such training should enable the student to analyze the role of incentives in influencing the behavior of individuals and institutions, whether the incentives take the form of taxes, interest rates, tariff barriers, profits, licensing arrangements, or public subsidies.

An exposure to statistics can likewise provide the student with skills that are applicable to a wide variety of public programs. The use of survey and sampling techniques can help policymakers obtain more reliable knowledge in evaluating public problems and recommending solutions. Statistics can also provide greater sophistication in making predictive judgments and assessing risks. Familiarity with computer techniques can make available a variety of methods for organizing and utilizing unwieldy masses of data. Even more important, statistics can provide the essential knowledge required to evaluate public programs to determine how effective they are in carrying out their intended goals.

With the help of statistics and economic theory, students can also study a variety of formal analytic methods that are widely employed in considering policy problems. Modeling techniques can simplify reality in ways that help in understanding the effects of government programs and estimating the effects of alternative actions. They can also assist the policymaker in choosing among alternatives to maximize his objectives. For example, the use of linear programming or decision theory can be applied to analyze allocation questions, such as how a political candidate should divide his time and funds, or whether off-shore drilling or building supertanker ports will increase the supply of oil without undue harm to our environment. In addition to these techniques, some attention may be given to methods of game theory, including bargaining and coalition theory, which can be used to analyze situations as diverse as military negotiations, legislative maneuvering or collective bargaining. Finally, students can learn the rudiments of cost-benefit analysis and thereby gain a more systematic approach to assessing the consequences of alternative policy choices.

It is important not to exaggerate the role of these formal techniques in the education of public servants. The professional program I envisage cannot hope to make anyone expert in the use of these analytic methods--although students are plainly free to proceed, if they choose, to acquire more specialized training in any of these areas. What the basic curriculum can achieve is nevertheless important.

It can develop a greater ability to break down complex public problems into a series of more manageable issues.

It can help students to appreciate a host of less obvious effects of government intervention and thus reduce the risk of overlooking secondary and tertiary consequences that often destroy the value of well-intentioned programs.

It can help the student to appreciate where the use of experts and sophisticated techniques can assist in the understanding of complex issues.

Finally, it can train students to be intelligent consumers of material based on advanced analytic techniques--to understand the findings and the methods employed and to appreciate their weaknesses and limitations as well as their strengths. The importance of the latter point can scarcely be overestimated. There will always be a need for generalists who can evaluate public action against a wide range of human, social and political considerations. But generalists will not play this role effectively if they cannot understand the advice they receive from specialists and appreciate both its strengths and its limitations. If the past generation offers any guide, there is little doubt that increasing amounts of advice in the next generation will be based, upon more complicated methods of analysis. Thus, the training of generalists demands an exposure to broadly applicable methods of policy analysis just as it demands appreciation of a variety of matters that transcend these formal techniques.

Problems of Implementation

In sketching this outline of a basic curriculum, I do not mean to ignore the formidable difficulties that will arise in actually creating a useful academic program. Much time and energy will be needed to develop adequate problem-oriented materials for the curriculum, and continuing efforts must be made to refine the body of knowledge and skills on which the curriculum depends. But a more fundamental issue exists which should be faced at the very outset. Is the objective to create a professional school for policy analysis and administration or to establish a graduate school of applied social science?

The difference between these alternatives is not glaringly obvious, for each involves a commitment to research and teaching in the field of public policy. But there are important distinctions, albelt of shading and emphasis. The primary aim of a professional school will be to educate students for positions of leadership in elective or appointed offices while a graduate school will take fewer students and prepare them for academic careers or for staff positions as sophisticated policy analysts. A graduate school will gather a faculty composed of members trained in one of the traditional academic disciplines who share a taste for policy issues. A professional school will likewise include such persons within its faculty, but it will also attract many professors who have received their training in professional schools and have spent some portion of their career in public service. A graduate school will be chiefly concerned with research, often of a disciplinary oriented nature, and even its educational program will be directed toward the development of research skills. A professional school, on the other hand, will place greater importance on teaching and will emphasize curriculum development and pedagogic methods aimed at instilling a capacity to make policy decisions with the help of a variety of skills and disciplines.

Both of these institutions can make an important contribution, and both can play a respected role in the university. But it is important to make a clear choice between the two. Otherwise, it will be extremely difficult to make coherent decisions in selecting students and faculty and developing the curriculum.

In the case of this University, I must acknowledge a marked preference for the professional school. It is clear at Harvard that research on policy issues will continue whether or not any new programs are established. The major new opportunity lies in preparing students for careers in public service. And in the end, the performance of our public institutions will depend much more on the quality of their leaders than on the sophistication of their technical staffs. As a result, if Harvard is to make the maximum contribution to public life, we must devote our energies toward educating those who will occupy positions of authority in public institutions.

Even if a clear decision has been made to develop professional programs for public service, a number of pitfalls will remain which can threaten the realization of this objective. The first of these problems is the risk of devoting disproportionate emphasis to formal analytic techniques. Among the subjects I have described, statistics, economics and the related methods of analysis may appear to have more content because they are more precise and reflect a more developed body of knowledge. Teachers in these fields are likely to complain that a professional curriculum allows them too little time to convey an adequate understanding of their disciplines. As a result, they will surely press for more space in the curriculum. But it would be wise to resist these pressures. The apparent precision of the formal techniques is more than offset by their limited usefulness in resolving the unruly problems that actually confront public officials. As a result, excessive emphasis on technique will simply leave the student unprepared to deal with real problems or, worse yet, encourage him to distort reality in order to achieve apparent solutions by formal analysis. If universities are truly interested in educating key public officials, they cannot ignore the "softer" problems of ethics, values, and the human aspects of administration.