Promoting Public Service in the Home of Technocracy

Since the presidential campaign, the Kennedy School of Government has become synonymous in the media with technocratic competence and the name--and the failure--of Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Just three months ago, an article in The New York Times referred to Harvard's Kennedy School as a "'temple of technocracy' on the Charles" and quoted the former Boston Mayor Kevin White as saying that while he had once actively brought young Harvard graduates into City Hall, he would not hire Kennedy School people now.

"They're creating a new political class that knows how to administer but doesn't know the people in the neighborhood," the article written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author J. Anthony Lukas quoted White as saying. "They talk about competence. I'd rather not be called competent. I'd be offended by that word."

A month later, President Derek C. Bok joined in the scrutiny of Harvard's youngest professional school--the school which many have said the president regards as his principal legacy. In his first public response to the criticisms levelled at the Kennedy School, Bok called on the school to pursue a curriculum that would help public servants "move beyond being mere bureaucrats and technicians to become the kinds of human beings to whom we would willingly entrust decisions that affect our lives."

Last week the school gave its first official signs of reaction to the persistent criticisms. Ending the first phase of an intense two-year-long curriculum review, the school's faculty by a wide margin voted its approval of the general direction of the review's coordinating committee, which called for a greater emphasis on ethics and politics in the curriculum.

The likely shift will be a significant one for a school which throughout the past 20 years has been dominated by quantitative and management-oriented approaches to teaching government.

The faculty's public approval of the suggested changes comes soon after the presidential campaign, the Lukas article and Bok's appointment of a well-known scholar, Professor of Government Robert D. Putnam, as the new dean.

But despite the fact that many view Putnam's selection as a signal from Bok that the school must consolidate its curriculum, most Kennedy School professors insist that the recent review was not prompted by the external criticisms.

"I don't think the campaign had much to do with it, or how the Kennedy School was perceived during the campaign," says Baker Professor of Public Management Herman "Dutch" Leonard, who chaired the review's coordinating committee. "It was just time for the school to sit back and ask ourselves what the mission of the school was and if our curriculum was doing that."

During the past 12 years, the school has pursued a course of explosive growth under outgoing Dean Graham T. Allison '62, which many have said left the curriculum unfocused and for too long a time ignored. The current review is the first conducted at the school since the curriculum was implemented 20 years ago.

"Yes, there were things that needed changing in the school's previous approach, and yes, we needed midcourse corrections," Putnam says. "But the changes emerged above all from self-criticism rather than from outside criticism of the school."

Whether or not the school's review is a reaction to external or internal criticism--or both--the debate it has sparked over the extent to which quantitative approaches should continue to dominate the school's curriculum promises to reshape the school under Putnam.

While Allison played a relatively insignificant part in the review--leaving the process in the hands of faculty and students--professors say they expect Putnam will play a larger role in determining the future direction of the curriculum review. The next stage, they say, will include the actual development of courses in ethics and politics.

"We've gotten a big boulder rolling and we're in motion, but now a lot of what is going to happen will depend on Dean Putnam," Ramsey Professor of Political Economy Richard J. Zeckhauser says.

Many professors say that the addition of courses in ethics and politics to the core has left an older guard of professors in the quantitative subjects--and also some professors of management--feeling somewhat isolated and skeptical about the shifts in the school's approach.

The coordinating committee of the review suggested that the core curriculum for the school's two-year Management in Public Policy Program (MPP) replace three semesters of required courses in statistics, public management and micro-economics with courses in ethics, politics and macro-economics or finance.

Zeckhauser, an economist and one of the school's leading quantitative professors, says there was still much disagreement among the faculty about the content of the ethics course, with skeptics fearing that the course may end up having little substance.

"I would prefer that ethics pervade the curriculum rather than be taught in one class," Zeckhauser says. "People who are big supporters of the ethics course say that we will get ethics to eventually do just that, but I don't think that will be true."

Emphasizing Ethics

But over the past few years the movement to incorporate ethics and values into the curriculum of the graduate school has been an ever-growing one, increasing in support from almost all directions.

"From the beginning of the curriculum review, it came out clearly that many people, including the president, believed that if the review did nothing else, it surely must address getting more ethics into the curriculum," says Professor of Public Policy Steven Kelman '70. "I think it is a really important and significant step that the Kennedy School becomes the first public policy school in the country to require an ethics course."

In his annual report, Bok stressed the importance of teaching ethics to public officials who will be forced to make ethical choices when setting the agendas of a community.

"Public servants in positions of responsibility do not merely resolve policy problems," Bok wrote. "They must discover what problems are 'out there' and decide which ones to address."

The Kennedy School curriculum should teach student of government how to think systematically about ethical questions involved in agenda-setting and governance, Leonard says.

"The Kennedy School of Government has always been about thought as a guide to action," Leonard says. "Now we want to examine how you should structure thought so it influences action in a positive way."

Although the core course in ethics would be limited to MPP students only, Leonard says he hopes to see the ethics program gradually come to include students from all programs in the school.

"I hope that one of the things that we do with our curriculum review is to keep things experimental for a few years," Zeckhauser says. "I want us to try a lot of different things and see what works."

And Putnam adds that he has no plans to dismantle the quantitative aspects of the Kennedy School's curriculum.

"We do not want to diminish the quality of the kind of things that we have been strong in in the past. The emphasis on quantitative, careful analysis is very important," Putnam says. "But is also important to be disciplined and careful and systematic in thinking about values, just as the school has long been careful and systematic in thinking about the quantifiable elements."