Dukakis'Type of Place

By Margaret Carlson/ Cambridge

Harvard University has given the country five Presidents, and Michael Dukakis might make six. After his humiliating 1978 defeat for a second term as Governor, Dukakis fled to the sanctuary offered by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the university's newest professional school. When he regained the governorship four years later, he proclaimed that his second term would be a "test of what I have learned and what we try to teach at the school."

And so too would be a Dukakis presidency. The cool, detached Dukakis style is very much the Kennedy School style: both have been criticized for + emphasizing management and competence at the expense of feeling and ideological ardor.

From the start, the Kennedy School's mission -- to create a "public policy profession," in Harvard President Derek Bok's words -- has been controversial. To the tweedy professors at the university who like their professions traditional and their academics pure, the new training ground smacks of a trade school for bloodless bureaucrats. To those who think governing emanates as much from the heart as the brain, the Kennedy School is, like Dukakis, too systematic and process-oriented. It is politics for non- emoters comfortable with decision trees and regression analyses.

The Kennedy School acquired its name and much of its endowment in 1966 from a bequest by the late President's family. But its greatest growth has come since 1977, when Graham Allison, an academic with a flair for salesmanship, became dean. Since then, the faculty has increased from 12 to 85 and the student body from 200 to 700 degree students, along with 600 nondegree students. The school's modern red brick complex on the banks of the Charles River contains nine research centers, ranging from the Center for Science and International Affairs to the Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior and Policy. A new center for press, politics and public policy is headed by former Newsman Marvin Kalb.

Allison's mandate from Bok was to make the school the financial and academic equal of Harvard's other graduate schools. He has succeeded at the former. In ten years he has increased the endowment from $20 million to $450 million. But compared with the older schools at the university, says Harvard Vice President John Shattuck, it "is still the new kid on the block working to define its mission." Its efforts to be taken seriously academically are hampered by its high visibility as a kind of Betty Ford clinic for recovering politicians: Geraldine Ferraro, David Stockman, David Gergen and former Senator John Culver have had stints there. The rigorous Mid-Career Public Administration program has come to be known as the "mid-life crisis program." The school is also suspect as a relatively painless way to give a Harvard gloss to an undergraduate degree from a land-grant college and for its networking possibilities. Says a participant: "Where else can a former mayor from Waco, Texas, sit around and chat with former Governors and Senators and attend classes taught by Presidential Scholar Richard Neustadt?" Even government officials seek the school's cachet: a staffer jokes that he heard of a visitor who spoke at a lunch and immediately added "Lecturer, Harvard University, Fall Semester" to his resume.

Allison has been faulted for being more interested in expanding the Kennedy School than in deepening it, selling the Harvard name in the process. In one particularly creative fund-raising effort last year, the dean appeared to be offering an oil-rich Texas couple positions as officers of the university in exchange for a $500,000 gift. The plan was quickly nixed by Bok, and Allison insisted that the proposal was only a draft he had not fully read. The school also incurred the wrath of the rest of the university in 1986, when Allison awarded a Kennedy School medal to Attorney General Edwin Meese III for "distinguished public service." Allison says the medal was just a token of appreciation to Meese for speaking during the school's 50th-birthday activities.

But much of the criticism of Allison comes because he is not traditional enough for some Harvard tastes. Old-line Harvard professors do not like open admissions, even to nondegree programs, especially if it means government bureaucrats will be wandering the hallowed halls. Like the school he heads, Allison is more at Harvard than of Harvard. Although recruited by Harvard for football, he attended North Carolina's Davidson College for two years and then transferred to Harvard.

Despite his reputation as a fund raiser, Allison is well regarded as an academic for his highly respected work on policy-making, Essence of Decision. Therein lies another irony. Allison's book stresses the human dimensions and intangible factors involved in governmental decisions. The school, however, in its efforts to cloak itself in academic rigor, tries to treat public policy as a science. It emphasizes the study of value-free analytic tools designed to make public officials more professional and competent. Allison, for example, has served as a one-day-a-week consultant to former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger yet is actively supporting Dukakis for President.

Dukakis, who once taught Institutional Leadership and the Agency Manager at the Kennedy School, has seemed similarly infected with a tendency to emphasize the process of policymaking rather than its content. But just as Dukakis has sought to add emotion and vision to his message, so too has Allison been working to shift the emphasis of the Kennedy School away from courses such as Strategies and Tactics for Managing Information Systems and toward an emphasis on elective politics and more offerings such as Political Leadership. In an observation about the Kennedy School that applies just as well to the school's candidate for President, Allison says, "It's harder to teach vision and leadership and the visceral elements of politics. But we have to do more of it, and we will."