Newly-Established Peace Corps Draws Students

In 1961, the College was in the midst of planning Project Tanganyika, a program that would eventually send 20 Harvard and Radcliffe College students to teach in secondary schools in Africa over the summer.

Project Tanganyika was intended to be one of many future trips offered by the Harvard African Teaching Prospect, a Harvard-sponsored program that would organize Harvard student volunteer efforts in Africa.

But at the time, Harvard was not alone in looking to international service.

The Peace Corps, like the Harvard African Teaching Prospect, was conceived of after World War II in order to cultivate cultural exchange and provide a forum in which American youths could dedicate themselves to a constructive cause.

On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy ’40 signed Executive Order 10924 providing for the temporary establishment and administration of the Peace Corps.

“The Peace Corps and the first volunteers were going overseas” the following summer, according to Stephen C. Clapp ’60, a former Crimson Editorial Chair who joined the Peace Corps shortly after his graduation.

Now in its 50th year, the Peace Corps currently assists in 77 nations and counts 8,655 individuals as part of its volunteer efforts.

But in 1961, as public support for the nascent Peace Corps grew, the fate of the comparable Harvard program dimmed as the energy of the Harvard-based program flowed directly into the development of the Peace Corps. Because the individuals who drove the development of the Peace Corps and the Harvard African Teaching Prospect were often one and the same, the two separate programs were deeply intertwined.

CREATION OF THE CORPS

When Kennedy announced the creation of the Peace Corps in March 1961, students involved in Project Tanganyika were vigorously fundraising and memorizing conjugations in Swahili.

Fifty undergraduates had applied to teach English in Nigeria during the following summer as part of the Harvard program—a smaller pool than the 370 upperclassmen that expressed interest when polled in the fall of 1960.

But within a week of the Corps’ creation, Dean of the College John U. Monro ’35 suggested that the Peace Corps could ultimately subsume part or all of the Harvard African Teaching Prospect.

Discussions on how to implement the Harvard African Teaching Prospect were stalled as Monro pushed for further understanding of the relationship between the Peace Corps and its comparable Harvard program.

Rather than compete with the Peace Corps, Harvard assisted in the planning and implementation of the program.

Monro travelled to Washington, D.C. three times in April to meet with representatives of other universities and heads of government foundations about the initial planning of the Peace Corps.

John D. Rockefeller IV ’61 was selected, prior to his graduation, to serve on a 33-member Peace Corps advisory council, where his colleagues included calypso singer Harry Belafonte and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

And other students demonstrated their interest in the Peace Corps’ ultimate definition by creating campus committees such as the Harvard-Radcliffe Committee for a Youth Service Program, which aimed to raise interest in youth service abroad and explore the prospect of setting up a national program.

A CULT OF PUBLIC SERVICE

Many attribute the excitement and fervor surrounding the development of the Peace Corps and the Harvard African Teaching Prospect to Kennedy himself.

At a National Conference on Youth Service Abroad meeting in D.C. on March 29, 1961, Kennedy praised the country’s youth for their initial enthusiasm for the Peace Corps, challenging them to pursue “a new era of American pioneering” by carving out a space in service.

Steven V. Roberts ’64 recently wrote a review of Stanley Meisler’s “When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years,” in which he characterized the Peace Corps as a symbol of Kennedy that impacted even non-volunteers in its call for service.

Roberts—now a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University—recalls his time at Harvard as being defined and shaped by Kennedy, whose inauguration and assassination bookended his time on campus.

What Roberts calls “the cult of public service” was a value system that profoundly impacted his collegiate life and those of his peers, many of whom went into public service careers.

“I knew hardly anybody who was interested in going to Wall Street, making money, going into business or anything like that,” he says. “The values that were most honored, the peer pressure that was most tangible, the goals that were most admired in that place at that time were to in some way or another be part of the public policy and political process.”

But Kennedy was not single-handedly responsible for the public service fervor at the time. The energy of the civil rights movement and the international focus in the wake of World War II also shaped and inspired the nation to which Kennedy spoke.

“It was JFK who had the vision and courage to call for the Peace Corps,” writes Craig K. Comstock ’61, a former Crimson news editor who helped organize the Harvard-Radcliffe Committee for a Youth Service Program, in an email. But “the Peace Corps did not spring out of nothing.”

THE REALITY ABROAD

But in the decades after Kennedy, this enthusiasm for public service would fade.

Peace Corps sign-ups at Harvard had dropped 20 percent between 1964 and 1965—in the Class of 1964, 125 students entered the Peace Corps, but the number of applicants dropped to 97 in 1965.

In fact, the number of organization members abroad peaked just five years after the Corps’ inception with 15,556 volunteers.

“The spirit of Kennedy which burned so brightly in that time has for a variety of reasons faded,” Roberts explains, citing the disillusionment of young people with their government after the progression of the Vietnam War and, later, the Watergate scandal.

President Nixon opposed funding the project further, and subsequent presidents did little to ensure its success.

Controversy surrounding the enrollment in the Peace Corps as a potential method of draft dodging and threats of communist influences also cast a shadow over Kennedy’s original vision.

Dissatisfaction with volunteer experiences abroad was a factor too, especially for volunteers in less-established programs in areas such as Central America.

Clapp, who taught English in a secondary school in a remote town in northern Nigeria, says that “the Peace Corps was very much finding its way at this point.”

“We were expected to live like our host-country counterparts,” explains Clapp, who lived the life of a normal civil servant in Nigeria, occupying faculty housing, hiring servants, and enjoying recreational games of tennis and snooker.

THE PEACE CORPS TODAY

Now in its 50th year, the Peace Corps is getting as much media attention for its failures as for its successes. The Corps sent 7,671 volunteers abroad in 2009, about half the number of those it sent abroad in 1966. Of late, the program has been weighed down by accusations of dealing insufficiently with instances of rape of female volunteers.

A 1961 Crimson editorial laments that the Peace Corps serves only undeveloped countries in lieu of suffering individuals in the United States.

“The institution that I think exists today that in many ways has tapped into the idealism of the Peace Corps is Teach for America,” says Roberts, remarking that many more of his students apply to TFA than to the Peace Corps. He credits TFA’s higher interest on college campuses to TFA’s youth, its effective recruiting, and its unique appeal.

“I also think in a larger sense that to students looking out at the world and saying we’re going to make a difference, teaching in Oakland or Houston seems a more possible place for now than Tanzania or Botswana,” Roberts says.

Despite its imperfections, Roberts sees the Peace Corps as “a critical example of doing it right,” serving both those in need and those who volunteer with the organization.

—Staff writer Michelle B. Timmerman can be reached at mtimmerman@college.harvard.edu.