THE WASHINGTON EXODUS

Every four years, in Washington and concurrently in Cambridge, there is a changing of the guard.

As professors wait for The Call from the president or a cabinet member, department chairs anxiously question their senior faculty members about future plans, and students watch the newspapers and the course catalogues carefully.

With each administration, a few top experts with ties to the right places get on the Delta shuttle and say goodbye to academic life. On their coattails travel junior colleagues and friends, and in their wake sit rudderless graduate students with half-finished theses.

This year, the University saw its usual complement of scholars leave and a few return. Health care, foreign policy, economic and tax choices, welfare reform and labor politics will all see the impact of Harvard minds and Harvard research over the next four years.

Still, there are questions raised by the leap from academia to policy-making, despite the successes of figures such as Henry A. Kissinger '50 and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Politicians and academics both ask if professors, knowledgeable in research, are the right people to actually translate that research into reality. Is it their responsibility to serve their nation when called, or is their proper role in the classroom and at the computer terminal, adding to the store of ideas available to the practitioner?

The contrast between public service and the academic life is fairly clear, even more so when the former professor is in a sexy-sounding field like "intelligence," as is Dillon Professor of International Affairs Joseph S. Nye.

Now chair of the Central Intelligence Agency's National Intelligence Council, the government professor does not quite introduce himself as "Nye, Joseph Nye," on the phone, but his day is emphatically not that of a scholarly recluse.

"Last week I was in Bosnia," he says. "I went to a city where fighting was going on" for a fact-finding mission.

Not all of Harvard's Washington insiders have quite as glamorous a job description as Nye, but most can refer more or less casually to encounters with cabinet-level officials. And all of them share the same complaints and comments about life on the Potomac versus life on the Charles.

The main gripe is the grueling pace and pressure of a hierarchical, high-energy administration compared to the more relaxed lifestyle of most academics.

"Things just happen at warp speed," says Kennedy School Associate Professor of Public Policy John D. Donahue, who has been nominated assistant secretary of labor for policy. "Problems I had weeks to get my mind around at Harvard I have 45 minutes for here."

Others miss the people of Harvard, and lament that they don't even have time to lunch with the numerous Cambridge transplants they are aware of.

"We kind of know we all exist, but we're all too busy to hang out and schmooze," says Danziger Associate Professor of Economics J. Bradford De Long, who is now deputy assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy. (He adds that he has yet to find an adequate substitute in the nation's capital for Out of Town News.)

But the pulls toward Washington are many, and while they have regrets about students and lost leisure time, the Washington professors are sharing the heady experience of actually doing what many of their colleagues only write and lecture about.

"It's satisfying to see one's ideas reflected in statements the president makes and in policies international institutions make with developing countries," says Ropes Professor of Political Economy Lawrence H. Summers, who is undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs.

"It was an agonizing decision [to leave], but I felt the position I was offered was a very rare opportunity for an economist to really use his economic ideas to have real impact," says Summers.

That phrase summarizes for academics the appeal to academics of what is unquestionably the big time the way "The Show" does for minor league baseball players. Harvard professors are having "real impact," and the catalogue of policy initiatives they are involved with is impressive and comphrehensive.

"I will be working with the president to develop major human rights initiatives in all aspects of foreign policy," says former Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs John H. Shattuck, now assistant secretary of state for human rights.

Specifically, Shattuck will work to guide the process of granting China Most Favored Nation trade status, which depends largely on the nation's progress on human rights. He will also be preparing for an international world conference in Vienna on human rights. Shattuck will be deputy head of the U.S. delegation to the gathering.

Summers worked on the package of U.S. support for Russia revealed in April. He is involved with an initiative to reduce Africa's debt burden and to encourage family planning there. He also participated in the Uruguay Round of international trade talks.

The Harvard touch is equally present in domestic policy.

De Long remembers his office on "full alert trying to produce and process quantitative data to help the congressional vote for the budget." Day to day, he analyzes the impact of the spending and regulatory roles of the government.

Assistant Professor of Economics David M. Cutler, a liason between the Council of Economic Advisors and the National Economic Council, is involved with Hillary Rodham Clinton's Health Care Task Force.

Donahue is working to create a school-to-work transition system for high school graduates and "trying to develop ways to redefine the labor angle [from] work force protection to work force development."

The list could go on and on. As the institution's collective ego merits, few areas of government, few campaign-speech initiatives and few front-page stories seem to be without at least some minimum involvement by a Harvard figure, and often an academic.

The potential for hubris-filled University admissions material aside, the prodigious presence of Harvard professors is part of a larger influx of academics into government increasingly prevalent since the 1940s.F-1