$35 Million for Princeton

A small band of men with a passion for anonymity and public service last week slipped $35 million to a tiny branch of Princeton University: the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which has a graduate student body of only 30. It was probably the biggest anonymous gift in the history of U.S. higher education. It was certainly the biggest gift in Princeton's 215-year history, and bigger than the total endowments of all but some 30 U.S. colleges.

The aim is "a new and unparalleled professional school" for Government policymakers. Founded in 1930, the Wood-row Wilson School follows its namesake's dictum that "the school must be of the nation." Offering the first U.S. interdepartmental program (economics, history, politics, sociology), the school has boasted a unique flair for practicality. Students range from sharp new college graduates to seasoned foreign businessmen and rising Army colonels. To earn Wilson's degree of Master of Public Affairs, they spend hours in seminars, work summers in Government agencies. The goal is a graduate trained to use academic tools on ticklish public problems--from birth-control legislation in Connecticut to cannibalism in the Congo. Just that sort of activist Wilson alumnus is now hard at work at the middle levels of U.S. policy and diplomacy all over the world.

Last week's huge gift is supposed to make Wilson comparable in quality "to the country's best schools of medicine and law." With $35 million to spread around, enrollment will probably triple; field projects may expand abroad. Along with gifted young recruits for government, the school will intellectually refuel veteran officials in "mid-career." A key effort: aiding scientists who run big federal projects but have too little knowledge of history and politics. The school's executive secretary, Dr. Robert van de Velde, defines its mission this way: "To unspecialize the specialist, and show the wide-eyed college graduate the hard challenge that confronts him."

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