KSG, Gov. Dept. Relations Still Chilly

It’s no coincidence that professors in the government department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and faculty at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) work in two buildings bearing the same name.

KSG’s Littauer building and the FAS’s Littauer Center are both thriving centers for the study of government at Harvard.

KSG grew out of Harvard’s old Graduate School of Public Administration, which was established through a gift from Lucius N. Littauer, Class of 1878, and was historically housed in the FAS Littauer building, which is adjacent to the current Science Center. When the school moved to JFK Street in 1978, its new building was given the same name in order to reflect the school’s shared history.

For years, the confusion regarding their buildings was the only overlap that existed between KSG and its counterpart in FAS, the Department of Government, despite the similarity in research interests at the two schools.

In the decades after KSG’s establishment, professors recall an icy standoff between FAS government faculty and the politicians and policymakers who historically taught at KSG, with heated personal rivalries all but precluding productive collaboration in teaching and research.

But the extent of the thaw in that relationship over the past decade is unclear.

While some government department faculty cite the three joint Ph.D. programs between KSG and FAS and increased research teamwork as evidence that the rivalry between the institutions is, in the words of Malkin Professor of Public Policy Robert D. Putnam, “ancient history,” the missions of the two schools remain fundamentally different.

While the government department is an academic program that seeks to train scholars, KSG is a professional school aimed at training administrators and policymakers—a philosophy that has not changed, despite KSG Dean Joseph S. Nye’s success in luring prominent career academics in many social sciences to teach at the Kennedy School.

Graduate students in FAS say relations between the government department and KSG have warmed more slowly than most professors indicate.

And the perception that KSG students lack the desire or ability to conduct top-notch scholarship has outlasted the public animosity that existed between KSG and FAS in the 1970s and early 1980s, according to some faculty members and FAS graduate students.

Current graduate students in the government department report that a general disregard for the intellectual capability of KSG masters’ students—the vast majority of the school’s enrollment—remains at FAS and continues to cause friction at the graduate level.

And while stressing that research collaboration between the faculties has increased, some FAS professors acknowledge that KSG faculty’s proclivity to appear in the press wins them few friends in FAS. The Split

KSG as it exists today moved to its JFK Street location under former University President Derek C. Bok in 1978, having previously been housed in the FAS Littauer building next to the Science Center.

In its early years, the new school required substantial amounts of money and resources that some say might otherwise have gone to fund research or new appointments in FAS.

“There was a certain amount of ill will between the Kennedy School and government because Bok had put a lot of money into the Kennedy School,” says Roderick L. MacFarquhar, chair of the government department.

Bok says he had to nurture the young KSG.

“The Kennedy School was very young, very small, very fragile, and it was fighting for its place in the sun,” Bok says. “That may have created some frictions that don’t exist anymore…It just had to struggle very hard and promote itself very vigorously. When you’re new, people regard you with suspicion, but that disappears as people get used to you.”

But according to Putnam, government faculty felt the University’s resources were being misdirected, from substance to style.

“The Kennedy School was born in a period of tension between government and the people who created KSG,” Putnam says. “It was like any rivalry between two siblings. Government thought the Kennedy School was an upstart getting pushed by Bok [that] had pizzazz but not depth. It was a conflict between the advocates of relevance and rigor.”

Still Simmering

Putnam, who holds a joint appointment with KSG and FAS, insists the deep mutual distaste predated his arrival.

“It’s almost entirely ancient history,” Putnam says. “The passing of personal rivalries [made the government department and KSG] more closely aligned, and I would say relationships are pretty good.”

The increase in the size of KSG’s faculty and the hiring of top-notch scholars from academic departments across the country under Nye have also helped to bring the schools closer, says KSG Academic Dean Frederick Schauer, Stanton professor of the first amendment.

“Just from raw volume [of faculty], there’s a lot more points of contact, and relationships have gotten a lot closer,” Schauer says. “It’s produced a lot more collaboration with FAS and a lot more respect.”

But many graduate students in government say that just because the relationship has improved does not mean it is a healthy one.

“It’s cordial, but they do their own thing. The faculty don’t interact much,” said Carlos E. Diaz-Rosillo, a KSG alumnus and current government graduate student. “It seems like [government professors and students] don’t like the Kennedy School, but I don’t think it’s actually the case.”

The core distinction between a professional and liberal arts school creates a sizable intellectual and bureaucratic gap for professors seeking to collaborate across the faculties—a difficulty exacerbated by Harvard’s tradition of every-tub-on-its-own-bottom.

“People whose experiences in political science at the Kennedy School tend not to be sufficiently aware of the very similar tendencies going on elsewhere in the University,” Bok says. “But there’s a great absence of collaboration between all the faculties of Harvard. Why don’t they collaborate? They just don’t, that’s all.”

“You might think it’s the easiest thing in the world for people in pure mathematics to work with people in applied mathematics, but they don’t either,” he adds.

Some government professors suggest they may be hesitant to reach out to collaborate in teaching with their KSG colleagues because they fear that KSG connections to the real world of politics and policy cloud the ability of its students to approach research impartially.

“We want to maintain a detachment from current politics [in FAS]—we don’t want to be too partisan,” says Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53. “There’s a perception that students at the Kennedy School are more on the liberal-left side of things than [students] here.”

Different Strokes

But the deference FAS faculty and students often show for prestigious KSG professors does not always apply to the school’s students.

KSG students often are taking a break in the middle of established careers in politics or policy, while government students are typically laying the foundations for academic careers.

But the schools’ historic separation has not stopped KSG students from routinely cross-registering in FAS classes. And when such different approaches to the same topic collide in the classroom—the more professional and the purely academic—students and faculty are not immune to passing judgments.

“The perception in government is that [Kennedy School students and professors] are not rigorous academics, and the Kennedy School perception is that government is really removed,” says Diaz-Rosillo.

“People who cross-register [in KSG courses] sometimes say they didn’t feel intellectually challenged in an academic sense, and Kennedy School people feel what they learned [in FAS classes] was interesting, but they don’t see how it applies,” he adds.

Many FAS graduate students say these views result from Kennedy School students making poor impressions on classmates and professors when they cross-register in FAS courses.

“They come up here, and they’re not always in it for the long haul,” says Samuel E. Ewing, a government teaching fellow. “They’re not going to become academics, and they’re not always thought to be as gifted in the field.”

“There’s a perception that students are less well-prepared to deal with complex issues in the policy school,” says James H. Fowler ’92, a fourth-year government graduate student. “Kennedy School students are able to communicate, but there’s an ad hoc-ness they have, a lack of scientific rigor.”

Fowler recalls one government seminar—Eaton Professor of the Science of Government Robert H. Bates’ “Politics and Economics of Policy Reform”—which was discontinued after the prevalence of KSG students in the course slowed down discussion considerably.

Bates says he stopped offering the course because his research interests changed, but that the weak background in formal political theory of the eight or nine KSG students—out of 12 in the seminar—made discussions difficult.

“If I were to offer the course again, I’d just make a separate section for the policy students,” he says. “But I would have to teach it too, which is a significant consideration.”

Bates’ colleagues guardedly acknowledge that KSG students are often looking for something different when they cross-register than what FAS provides.

“Sometimes I’ll have to make clear this is about policy analyses, not policy problems,” says Stanfield Professor of International Peace Jeffry Frieden.

The Faculties

Yet KSG junior faculty counter that FAS’s ivory tower traditionalism prevents its students and faculty from appreciating either the quality or the rigor of the interdisciplinary work done on JFK Street.

“Folks that are not particularly interested in policy issues or in applying their theoretical work to the real world don’t really understand the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of methods that we use,” says Assistant Professor of Public Policy Sangeev Khagram.

“It’s a problem of just not understanding what the endeavor is about. You’d say, ‘I’m studying this,’ and they’d say, ‘I don’t really understand.’ There’s a difficulty of communicating what you’re trying to accomplish with people in FAS,” he adds.

KSG faculty say they are held to the same intellectual standards as their peers in FAS.

“We are evaluated on our academic performance in academic journals,” says Assistant Professor of Public Policy Susan C. Eaton. “The Kennedy School makes that very clear to us.”

But Khagram explains that academics’ failure to recognize the quality of KSG faculty’s work—at Harvard and elsewhere—puts KSG professors at a disadvantage in the world of academia.

“[KSG’s interdisciplinary research] goes contrary to the incentive structure in Arts and Sciences, where everything you do from the time you’re hired as a junior faculty member is becoming an expert in some field within that discipline,” he says.

“That’s how you get promoted, how you understand yourself. I could be doing incredibly rigorous work, but it would be interdisciplinary and policy-oriented, so I would not be seen as strong a candidate.”

“We try to be rigorous, but interdisciplinary and practice-oriented. At the Kennedy School, I can publish in journals that can have a real effect on the world,” Khagram adds.

But it is precisely the prevalence of KSG faculty in the media that, some professors say, causes FAS scholars to snip at their counterparts on JFK Street. KSG publishes a 54-page guide with biographies of its experts and their interests specifically for the media.

“The Kennedy School is extremely good about getting into the papers,” Bates says. “If someone gets an op-ed, great, but it’s not a substitute for writing for your colleagues or peers. The attraction of the press to the Kennedy School for sound-bites can grate.”

Cross-Registering Ruffles

The prevalence of these views has created a perception that the government department discourages its students from taking KSG courses, according to Diaz-Rosillo, the head teaching fellow for KSG Professor Roger B. Porter’s cross-listed course on the American presidency.

“It might seem that government is opposed to [its students] taking Kennedy School classes because...they ask a lot of questions before they allow you to cross-register,” Diaz-Rosillo says. “But there are good reasons why. They want to make sure you’re not just taking a Kennedy School course because it sounds cool.”

But according to Government Head Tutor Russell Muirhead, the bulk of the “three to 20” requests by undergraduate government concentrators to cross-register each year are approved.

Muirhead says he scrutinizes each request to see if the instructor has a Ph.D. in political science or a related field, whether readings are drawn from scholarly work in government-related disciplines (which he prefers) or newspapers and magazines, whether the written work is similar to FAS-style assignments, and whether the government department offers a similar class.

“We take the education we offer seriously, and we don’t want to devolve that on any other party,” he says. “But we look sympathetically on these requests.”

The increase in collaboration between the Kennedy School and the government department in recent years has by all accounts been beneficial to both faculty and students.

Benjamin L. Read, a fifth-year government Ph.D student, found his seminar with KSG students one of the high points of his time at Harvard.

“I took Bob Putnam’s course, where the participants were across the board, including a lot from the Kennedy School, and it was one of the most stimulating courses I’ve ever taken,” he says. “It wasn’t as keenly focused on academic issues, but it was really fascinating.”

And as the recruitment of such luminaries as William Julius Wilson, Christopher Jencks and Andres Velasco has brought KSG increased academic gravitas, faculty collaboration has increased dramatically.

“For the six faculty members [at KSG] with interests very close to mine, I’ve had as much interaction with them as with people in economics,” Frieden says. “There are lots of opportunities for fruitful collaboration that are specific to a field, and those have taken place.”

Frieden suggests that the greatest obstacles to more collaboration in teaching and reserach are bureaucratic rather than political.

“They have priorities there, and teaching a course at FAS means they have to teach one less course at the Kennedy School,” he says.

Most graduate students and professors alike say that the schools have a lot to learn from each other.

But after more than 20 years of coexistence, this sentiment is not unanimous.

“I’m not sure all my colleagues would agree,” MacFarquhar says.

—Staff writer Daniel K. Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.