President Bok's Prep School

FEW TIMES in the history of Harvard has Washington been on the president's mind as much as now. Derek Bok made clear his anxieties about recent events in the capital in two major addresses this year. The first, his third annual speech to the Overseers in March, was a lengthy speech devoted almost entirely to the prospect of educating professionals in the public sector. Bok cited the failure of federal "Great Society" like programs, rampant inflation, and the "spectacle of corruption in the highest places," as justification for a bolstered public policy program. The speech warned of an increasing incapacity of generalists, or coordinators of specialists in huge bureaucracies, to evaluate and make decisions properly. Bok said that an increasing federal responsibility and accompanying problems in coordination and insensitivity as the government grows larger to meet those needs has forced the University to turn from graduate to professional education. He called for more and better programs in the Kennedy School, Business School and School of Public Health to educate not just congressmen but all members of the public sector at state and local levels.

The programs sounded pretty much like a philosophy of total altruism and good citizenship--a kind of tutoring service for policymakers and a chance for freshmen midwestern senators and young eastern seaboard congressmen to dig into off-shore drilling and farm price support case studies for a small admission fee.

But then later in June, before a small Commencement audience. Bok provided a rationale that betrays another motive much more pertinent to Harvard. Bok devoted a major portion of that June address to increasing government intervention on the University campus:

If our leading universities make vital contributions to the quality of medicine and health, if their scientific discoveries feel the process of technological development, if degrees open doors to valuable opportunities and careers then society will wish to make sure that these capacities are used in ways that contribute to society's welfare. As a result the critical issue for the next generation is not Harvard's survival but its independence and freedom from ill-advised government restraint.

Bok warned then of the "inevitable dangers in public regulations--dangers of clumsy legislation, of stifling bureaucratic requirements, of erratic fluctuation in government funds."

HE DIDNT elaborate at the time but it is clear that the clumsy legislation that Bok cited may, in his eyes, include bills like an education bill to open student files that Ford signed into law last year. A small amendment to that bill, which allowed for University students to look at their records, thus destroying confidentiality, forced too many administrators and educators here to spend too much time alternately trying to understand, lobby against and avoid the law. The files law, although a relatively innocuous form of government interference, may have served as a harbinger, showing Bok the futility of trying to block legislation in the final stages. It also served to show the usefulness of teaching Congress beforehand about the potential damaging side-effects of well-intentioned legislation.

Bok put all the suggested programs of his March speech in perspective when he mentioned in June that the University

...must seize the initiative and help to devise new mechanisms that will enable us to work with the government to insure that universities respond to public needs without being subject to restrictions that ignore our special circumstances and impair our ability to be of continuing use to society.

So with these two speeches Bok has found a way to wed the needs of a nation to the desires of Harvard. While the congressmen are boning up on policy implementation and the politics of reform, the educators can protect their own interests by showing how certain legislation intended for good use may have side effects that send universities into a quandary. In fact, it's a kind of pre-lobbying.

IN ACTUALITY, this early prevention of in deference will operate much more subtly. A better example of how Bok's mechanisms could work is in the University's ambitious plan to work with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in a program for the nation's health managers. For its part of the $ 5-million five-year contract with HEW to teach people with jobs ranging from Blue Cross rate-setters to environmental policy-makers, the University may get to drive home its points about the detriments of HEW-oriented legislation. A possibility would be to show the dangers in health manpower legislation which would dictate to medical schools where doctors are to practice and how primary care physicians are to be produced. Administrators may see potentially damaging side-effects to this type of government interference a lot quicker if they are in direct contact with the people who it might hurt.

But regardless of how Harvard manages to reorient Washington's desires, with the health management course there seems to be little doubt that society comes out ahead of the Harvard-Washington tug of war. The educators involved in the program are readying the two courses, one on occupational health and safety to be given in January, and another on health policy management and policy-making in February. The February course's objective is to show administrators how costs can be cut and care improved in hospitals. The January program gives the administrators a share of the expertise in legislating against pollution dangers that was formerly restricted to rich manufacturers and their well-staffed lobbying groups.

THE PROGRAM'S potential benefits are clear. But the program also reveals possible pitfalls that can occur when a university has as one of its goals education of the professionals. For one, the programs are given at times when few workers with important positions have time to get away from them. Thus there is the potential that attendance may be too small to do any good.

Secondly it is unclear whether a group of talented but young and relatively inexperienced teachers can educate people who have been making a living out of running hospitals and setting rates for the past 30 years. But as Marc Roberts, director of the February program, and professor at the School of Public Health said a few weeks ago, "You don't have to be the most experienced person in the room in order to show people new ways to do things."

Whether the health programs pan out or not is problematic at this point. But the program does sound like a logical move in a world of government bureaucracies that is plagued with illogic. And if somehow Harvard manages to get a break in legislation and a slackened role of government interference from HEW, it seems like a small price for the nation to pay for improved health care.

As for the overall program of public sector education, you can't help feeling that there isn't a trade-off being made somewhere, because basically Harvard is educating bureaucrats to be bureaucrats, even if they go back to Washington being better bureaucrats. By the time they leave Harvard they should be well-indoctrinated in the hazards of government interference on the college campus. And with that indoctrination may come Harvard administrators' chances to pay closer attention to what is happening on campus rather than in the capital.