An Elegant Abstraction

ACCORDING TO the the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest sentence in the world does not belong to Marcel Proust, but to Nicholas Murray Butler, former president of Columbia University. The sentence, 4284 words long, is in his annual president's report for 1942-43, President Bok's Annual President's Report for 1973-74 can make no such claims to a world record for verbosity or anything else, unless there's one for most yawns elicited from a single text. But Bok's report, a sort of State of the University address presented to the Board of Overseers, makes certain important observations and judgments that deserve careful scrutiny.

Most of the report is devoted to the idea of professional education for public service. What is needed, Bok says, "is nothing less than the education of a new profession," whose students "will share the common experience of holding important positions of responsibility involving policy making and administration." Probably the worst thing about the report is the reason Bok cites for instituting this plan. On the most superficial level. Bok refers to the loss of public confidence in the government because of the "divisive" issues of Vietnam, the "spectacle" of Watergate, and the failures of major federal programs such as the "New Frontier" and the "Great Society" to deal with problems like urban decay and racial strife.

Then purposefully ignoring their political causes. Bok attempts to explain these failures as a result--at least in part--of big government arising out of the New Deal, which in turn has created several administrative problems in government. It is not only the general trend in government that necessitates this "new profession," according to Bok, but "tendencies at work in public employment."

THE administrator's plans for an administrators' school seem to ignore the fundamental issues of the role of the university and its relationship to the state: Bok deserts all notions of the university as an independent environment nurturing disinterested scholarship. In his report, Bok calls his new professional school a "major opportunity and responsibility;" he repeats this several times.

But Bok never makes clear what exactly the "opportunity" is in creating this "new profession"--it would seem that the real opportunity for the University in its present financial state would be to get more government funding. But even assuming that grabbing this "opportunity" is motivated by the disinterested search for knowledge, there is still the question of the University's "responsibility" or "obligation." One of the real dangers of Bok's latest brainchild is that it is so uncritical. It meets the immediate demands of government without ever questioning them. Centralized government and increasingly complex bureaucracies seem to be the only forms of government stressed in this program.

The plan is also modeled on prevailing notions about existing economic structures throughout the report Bok refers to the "private sector" and the "public sector" in an almost grotesque parody of Harvard's adamantly neo-classical Economics Department. In the report's outline of a core curriculum for public leaders Bok includes "an exposure to economics" with an emphasis on training that "should enable students to analyze the role of incentives in influencing the behavior of individuals and institutions." There seems to be no room for Marxian economics in the program because the program simply reflects the status quo in the American government.

Bok's predecessor, Nathan Pusey, had a lot to say about the role of the university in modern America in a book called The Age of the Scholar, In his essay, "Leadership and the University." Pusey warned of "excessive preoccupation with the ordinary in life and...idolatrous service to economic activity." Probably his best point came at the essay's conclusion:

The danger as it now presents itself to us in a new form is apt to grow as colleges and universities look increasingly to government and business for the sustenance they must have to keep alive. Limited dependence of this kind need not necessarily be harmful, but it cannot fail to be dangerous if there is not a clear, prior recognition of the way universities deeply and truly serve society.

In one sense Bok's plan is enlightening because it finally makes clear the way Harvard feels it serves society. It seems to confirm Pusey's fears about the fate of American universities which had always had "a peculiarly practical orientation," and "very little--perhaps too little--of the ivory tower." Harvard has hardly been an ivory tower these past few years. Its reliance on government funds (and more recently, with the Med School's Monsanto contract, on industrial funds) continues to increase. And its impact on government has been significant--Ford's administration is the first to have three former Harvard academics as cabinet members: Kissinger, Dunlop, and Schlesinger.

Bok's analysis of the need for more professionally educated public servants might easily be applied to Harvard itself. As Charles U. Daly, vice president for government and community affairs, said in a memo made public earlier this year, the University is run by a "Mass Hall gang," that is "too 'corporate'...viewing things solely in a business sense as opposed to being sensitive to the special concerns and needs of a scholarly operation."

A very crucial passage in his analysis can also be applied to Bok's attitude:

If policy analysts are truly concerned with achieving results rather than creating elegant abstractions, they must consider the political and administrative factors that often determine the ultimate effects on different policy alternatives.

If Derek Bok is--as he seems to be--a policy analyst, then as self-appointed Chairman of the University-wide Committee on the Harvard Program on Public Policy and Administration. he'd better consider carefully the consequences of his own elegant abstraction for a free environment at Harvard dedicated to the free pursuit of knowledge.