Spreading the Word

It is 1970 in a small village outside of Nairobi, Kenya where several Kennedy School of Government professors are travelling informally. A villager approaches Richard J. Zeckhauser, professor of Political Economy, to ask for help with a water flow problem: would Professor Zeckhauser know how to design a new system which would prevent the waste stream from contaminating the fresh water supply?

"I really regretted not being able to help him, but I knew nothing about that type of project," Zeckhauser recalls. The villager just didn't seem to understand that as an economic theorist who participated in several seminars at the University of Nairobi, Zeckhauser was only equipped to give academic, not technical advice.

But it is easy to understand why the confusion occurred. At that point, Third World officials were more accustomed to receiving direct help than they were at being taught to help themselves. In the years since, however, the University's international assistance has taken a dramatic turn. Harvard has practically ceased its export of experts, and has now settled on a role more appropriate for an educational institution: to provide curricular advice to Third World universities.

This type of assistance actually started 30 years ago, when the Business School sent experts abroad to teach management techniques to try and stabilize the nascent economics of post-war France and Italy. But the bulk of the work, in the ensuing era, sought to change the world through more direct means.

The 60s was a time of unprecedented participation of American academics in policy-making, both in the war on poverty at home and in setting up similar programs in developing countries. Starting in 1962 when President Kennedy called upon the Business School to supervise the establishment of a business school for Central America in Nicaragua under the auspices of his Alliance for Progress program, Harvard has played a leading role in aiding Third World nations. Most of this assistance came in the form of counsulting services for specific projects, such as how to increase crop yield in a particular region.

But by the end of the decade a growing disillusionment with the effectiveness of these programs took the place of the ideal that throwing money at a problem could make a difference.

Robert E. Klitgaard, '68, special assistant to President Bok who deals with international affairs, cites the situation of the Pakistani revolution of 1970 as an instance where planning by American social scientists was blamed for causing disaster. In 1958 several professors, including David Bell, associate professor of Business Administration, began to serve as development advisors, drawing up a national plan for Pakistan. When, at the end of a bloody revolution 12 years later, Bangladesh seconded from West Pakistan, Pakistani intellectuals blamed the national plan, criticizing it for emphasizing progress at the expense of equal distribution of resources among the eastern and western Halves.

In addition to growing skeptical about the effectiveness of such programs, many developing countries have grown out of them. Dwight H. Perkins, director of the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), notes that "when a country reaches a level where it no longer needs such advice, it is no longer appropriate for Harvard to help." Perkins notes the difference between the stages of development between Asian and African countries. Asian nations have for the most part more of an established core of administrators than African nations, and therefore have less of a need for direct aid.

'A final impetus for change has been the realization that Harvard itself could profit, both from the new case provided by developing nations and from constructive criticisms of the exported methods.

Klitgaard sums up Harvard's changing role: "In the 60s, the idea was that we had the magic and they had the needs. In the 80s, it's much more of a two-way street." He adds that now, whenever he goes abroad, "I always come back to this country with new materials."

So while the B-School has, in the past three decades, set up seven institutes of business management which have taken the case study method to Turkey, the Philippines, India, Nicarauga and Iran, other Harvard affiliates have in the past decade followed suit.

The HIID and the K-School have set up curricula at universities in Indonesia, Philippines and Mexico. "Over the years, the emphasis of HIID has shifted from development advice to institution building," Perkins says, adding that "then our help was more direct and now it is more removed." Klitgaard says that "the export of the '80s is the training to solve problems, rather than the solutions themselves."

The shift at Harvard apparently reflects a national trend. Since the 60s, the Agency for International Development (AID), the federal government's main channel for foreign assistance, has grown dissatisfied with captial development projects--such as road, dam and hospital building. Instead, it has increasingly favored training programs in areas such as business management as well as grants that bring foreign students to the U.S. to study, says Walter A. Grady, an AID spokesman. "We've shied away from capital development because we've learned the lesson that they don't really benefit the poor."

The extent to which Harvard's curriculum is shipped abroad differs from project to project. The Business School has peddled its case study method wholesale and has actively supported new institutions in Italy, Turkey, India and Nicaragua, while other professors prefer to operate as individuals, lending a favorite case or problem set to an already existing institution.

Others are called on to provide curricular advice, instead of closing existing programs, such as the plans which a group of HIID faculty are drawing up at the request of the Aga Khan for his proposed Third World university. The length of the training programs also varies--from the two year business management programs the B-School set up in Barcelona, Spain, Nicaragua, and Iran, to two-week long curriculum consultations and seminars such as the one Klitgaard and his colleagues presented to a Mexican university of public administration in 1980.

In general, when providing curricular advice today, Harvard shrinks away from setting up new institutions--a common practice of the B-School in the 50s and 60s. The expense of setting up new institutions, coupled with the instability of some Third World countries, has prompted Harvard to opt for more temporary programs. The Nicaraguan Business School, built in 1962, turned into a hospital for several months during the early part of the revolution. The Iranian business school, opened in 1972, closed in June 1980 by the decree of the Ayatollah Khomeini. These incidents make two-week seminars seem more appealing.

"There is no more institution building going on at the Business School," says George Cabot Lodge, professor of Business Administration, who played a key role both in the conception and the establishment of the school in Nicaragua. "Instead we prefer short-term projects, setting them up and taking them down like a circus."

Accompanying this trend toward conserving resources is a newly discovered faith in the effectiveness of training foreign students at Harvard. "In the 60s we had the notion that we knew the answer and that we could make a difference. Now we are beginning to think that the most efficient way (of training Third World students) is to have them come here," Lodge adds.

For this reason, the Mason program at the K-School, which draws 50 Third World leaders each year, is flourishing in its 25th year and the Business School's International Teachers program is also thriving. Although less that 10 percent of the Mason fellows come from a strictly academic background, a substantial number of the program graduates become a channel of academic export upon returning to their home countries, says Nancy Pyle, director of the program. In developing countries, governments maintain closer links with universities, frequently asking former ministers to teach, Pyle notes. In addition, the contacts the fellows make with K-School professors often prompt them to ask for help in setting up programs based on their K-School experience.

Pyle said that some Mason-fellows are so impressed with what they have learned about management that they want to import their favorite courses lock, stock, and barrel. One former minister in the Burmese government upon returning home from his year as a Mason fellow persuaded his government to establish a K-School course on microeconomics as part of the curriculum at the University of Rangoon. He wired the Kennedy School and asked for the entire course packet to be sent special delivery.

For a country interested in establishing a public policy program similar to the K-School's, the Mason program has served as an ideal way to test the water. When a K-School delegation took its fellows on a field trip to Egypt this spring, faculty at the American University of Cairo unexpectedly asked Academic Dean Albert Carnesale for help in setting up a public policy curriculum. This fall, one of those professors will enroll at the K-School as a Mason fellow, Pyle said, adding. "This man's presence in the Mason fellow program will be the take off point for the development of a new curriculum in Egypt."

All these programs, despite their differences, do have a common strand. They are, in Klitgaard's words, "capacity developing": instead of merely providing solutions, they are establishing a new class of managers--whether in the public or private sector--who will be the nuts and bolts of maintaining that country's development.

But in setting up institutions and seminars, Harvard is doing more than exporting its curriculum: Harvard is exporting its value of professionalism as defined by the Business School and the Kennedy School. While many of the developing countries have well-established programs in economics, the programs do not emphasize the practical skills that go along with the technical skills such as managing, decision-making, and administration, that separate the professional from the academic.

Zeckhauser noted that before the Harvard visitors came, training at universities in Indonesia was so theoretical that "Indonesian PhD's graduate without the slightest idea of how to do anything." He adds, "We're starting to teach them how to think well."

The value placed upon theoretical expertise at Third World universities can have adverse effects. Zeckhauser recalls from an experience in Indonesia that academics at the university tended to teach the most difficult material they knew--often to the bewilderment of the students--because they thought that the most advanced material would advance the country the most. "They tended to emphasize prestige over practicality."

The flip side of this is that while developing nations readily accept technical expertise, it is sometimes more difficult for them to accept the validity of the professional skills included in the Harvard package.

Klitgaard recalls a seminar that he and several colleagues conducted in Mexico in the fall of 1980 which was a condensed version of the K-School's "Workshop" course on the fundamentals of management--memo writing and cost-benefit analysis. A Kennedy school professor was working from a case study on the cost and benefits of building a dam, and explaining how to weight the cost of finding alternative accommdations for Indians in the proposed site against the benefits of the improved power the dam would provide. A Marxist member of the Mexican faculty broke in and criticized the technique as being too capitalistic and rebuked the K-School delegation for importing capitalism under the pretext of professionalism.

But in general, the programs have been accepted, and through trial and error, Harvard in the 80s has settled on curricular advice as the export that will best aid developing nations. Despite the University's tendency to be low key--by using individual contacts, and by restricting advice to already existing institutions or to short-term seminars--the requests from developing nations keep flooding in.

Shanta Devarajan, assistant professor of Public Policy at the K-School, and a native of Sri Lanka, reports that only last week he received a request for help from a university from his home country which is interested in developing a program in business management.

"I have a feeling that the age of the resident advisor is dwindling, and that the short-term program, curricular reform and the exchange program is taking its place," he says.

Thomas P. Sellers, associate director of the K-School's Masters in Public Administration program--which supervises the Mason fellows--sums up the rationale behind this approach: "Consulting lasts as long as the product of that consulting and it's difficult to leave behind anything permanent. The advantage of training is that it trains human beings and there's nothing more permanent than a human being."

Before the Harvard visitors came, 'Indonesian Ph.D.'s graduated without the slightest idea of how to do anything... We're starting to teach them to think well.'

--a K-School professor