Timeline

THE WINDOWS SURVIVED a prolonged fight. Unlike other Harvard buildings erected in the 1970s, the new Littauer Center of Public Administration, the heart of the Kennedy School, has windows that actually open. Harvard’s Planning Office strenuously opposed the design, arguing that it violated fire codes, cut energy efficiency, and that modern air-conditioning and heating systems rendered real, working windows obsolete. The issue was finally settled one steamy summer afternoon at a meeting in the chief planner’s Holyoke Center office — where the temperature climbed toward 90 degrees.

Perhaps windows that open to the world outside nicely symbolize the Kennedy School’s mission, closely tied as it is to the practicalities of an obstinately real world. Moreover, the fenestration fracas resolved itself only after discomfort, perspiration, and an object lesson; hence, it was a kind of microcosm of the process that gave birth to the Kennedy School. “We were trying to implant a foreign object at Harvard,” says government professor Graham Allison, dean from 1977 to 1989. “I was a member of the political science department, where two-thirds of the faculty — including senior people like Ed Banfield and Jim [J.Q.] Wilson — felt strongly that this was a bad idea and shouldn’t happen. The economics department believed that if there was anything important to know about economics and government, ‘We know it and we are already teaching it — we don’t need another entity.’ All this was reinforced by the standard arts-and-sciences view that ‘this [Kennedy School] is just a trade school, and not as intellectually distinguished as Harvard is expected to be.’”

Yet somehow, the vision that Professor Derek Bok, Harvard president from 1970 to 1990, set out in his Annual Report for 1973–74 prevailed. Bok had called for nothing less than a “new profession” of public service. Four Harvard faculties — Design, Education, Public Health, and the Kennedy School of Government — would participate in the teaching and research. Bok felt that a changed world demanded a new species of professional. By the mid-1970s, the public sector had come to represent a third of the U.S. gross national product, and “Since government had gotten so much more complicated, you couldn’t just walk in there with a business or law degree,” Bok says. “Yet, excepting a few older professional schools, there wasn’t anything in American higher education comparable to medicine, law, or business schools to prepare people for the public sector. I thought this was a unique opportunity for Harvard to make a distinct contribution.” That opportunity became the centerpiece of Bok’s presidency. Not by accident, Bok has made his academic home at the Kennedy School since stepping down as president in 1990.

Nonetheless, the environment of the 1970s in many ways ran counter to Bok’s ambitions. “It’s one thing to start a school in a boom time like the 1950s and 1960s, with the money rolling in,” he says. “But by the 1970s, the stock market wasn’t going anywhere, and the federal government’s aid had plateaued. Economic times were not favorable for filling in the great missing link in American higher education.” The Kennedy School had no wealthy alumni to tap for donations, and many people of means actually felt a general antipathy toward government. Quite a few Americans were less concerned with the quality of their government than its quantity. Citizens fretted about the “burden” of big government; after one fundraising speech for the school, an audience member asked, “Why should I give my money to make the government better at screwing me?”

Furthermore, in the mid 1970s, the Kennedy School had severe financial problems, running an annual deficit of $200,000 from 1974 to 1977. After Bok’s seminal 1973–74 report, he and Kennedy School Dean Don Price launched a $21 million capital campaign. The campaign flopped. Three years later, it had raised only $1 million. Whether measured by budget, faculty size, enrollment, or activity, the Kennedy School was by far the smallest of Harvard’s nine professional schools. By 1977, its core faculty counted only 12 professors, who offered special courses for only half of the 200 students. “It was so small that when I went to my first faculty meeting, all the professors were sitting around a single table,” Bok recalls. “They passed out a sheet of paper with committee assignments, and it seemed that all the professors were on all the committees — they just had different chairs.”

Still, this intrepid group wasn’t starting from scratch — the school’s roots went back four decades. Perhaps the biggest event of Harvard’s Tercentenary in 1936 was the announcement of a $2 million gift (then the largest single gift the university had received from an individual donor) from Lucius N. Littauer. Littauer, a wealthy glove manufacturer, had been a college friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Littauer rowed on the varsity crew and had been Harvard’s first football coach. His gift created the Graduate School of Public Administration (GSPA), whose goal was to draw from several of Harvard’s faculties to train public servants of the first water. He added an additional $250,000 to help fund the construction of the original Littauer Center of Public Administration, north of Harvard Yard, which became the longtime home of the economics and government departments. In fact, for decades, the economics and government departments dominated the GSPA’s faculty, to the point where the school never established a clear identity of its own. When James Bryant Conant retired as president of Harvard in 1953, in his final annual report he labeled the GSPA an “adjunct” of the economics and government departments and called it his “greatest disappointment as far as the collaboration of several faculties is concerned.”

In 1966, after consulting with the Kennedy family, President Nathan Pusey announced that Harvard would rename the GSPA: it became the John F. Kennedy School of Government. (This move deeply dismayed the Littauer Foundation and in particular its president, Harry Starr, a graduate of Harvard University and longtime friend and secretary to Lucius Littauer. Nearly a decade later, Allison, as Kennedy School dean, mended fences with Starr, and today many components of the school bear the Littauer name.)

Another 1966 start-up was the Institute of Politics (IOP), which was sheltered by the “little yellow house” at 78 Mt. Auburn Street and directed by distinguished professor of government Richard Neustadt, who arrived from Columbia University. “The IOP’s idea was to bring real, live political animals to campus in the hope that it would inspire students to take an interest in politics — just as John F. Kennedy had been a student here at Harvard, and somehow his imagination had been stirred to think of politics and government,” says Allison. “Nothing like it [the IOP] had existed before, anywhere.” Simultaneously, the Kennedy School launched its Public Policy Program, a precareer program for people interested in government and policy, with Neustadt as the main entrepreneur.

Thus, when Bok asked Allison to lead the Kennedy School in 1976, the job came with a certain institutional patrimony. However, the deanship was not an easy sell. “Derek had been trying to get me to be dean for a year, and I had been trying not to do the job,” Allison recalls. “I felt I was too young [he was 36], and I wanted to go to Washington to work in the government. Fundraising was a big part of the dean’s job, and I thought John Dunlop would be much better than I at that. I wrote Derek a long letter explaining why Dunlop should be dean.” Dunlop, who had been both dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Secretary of Labor in the Ford administration, “was not interested at that stage in his career in taking on an administrative assignment.” Bok explains. Eventually, “Derek told me, ‘Harvard has been very good to you. You have to stay here — this is your duty,’” Allison recalls. “Well, duty is a big word for me.”

Allison accepted the decanal appointment for two years, with conditions. “Derek said, ‘OK — you’ll do this, but you’ll have no responsibility for fundraising.’ As a very naïve young man, I accepted this without knowing what it meant.” Bok explains: “We had discussions about what the corporation could do to shore up the school’s finances — but none of those guarantees needed to be exercised.” Allison’s deanship, of course, stretched out to 12 years, and he became a highly proficient fundraiser. “Graham was such a successful and enterprising dean,” Bok says. “Very few could have done what he did.” When Allison finally stepped down in 1989, Bok observed that “I can’t think of anything in Harvard’s history that is comparable to the extent of growth and development that has taken place under one brief span of a single dean’s leadership.”

When he came on board in 1977, Allison, at 37, was Harvard’s youngest dean. But he had served as associate dean of the Kennedy School, and as he recalls, “It seemed to me that there was no vision or mission, no strategy for building the school. We were waiting for something to happen. The first task was to formulate some coherent vision for the school.” Taking his lead from the “canonical objectives” that Bok laid out in his 1973–74 report, Allison set two major goals for the Kennedy School. The first was to become a substantial professional school of government — one that would serve society’s demands for excellence in government in many of the ways that Harvard’s schools of business, law, and medicine serve analogous demands in their respective private professions. The second big goal was for the Kennedy School to become the “hub” of the university — the central place for education and research in public policy and management.These were ambitious tasks. There were no existing models for this, in the United States or anywhere else. And, as already noted, the Kennedy School was the runt of Harvard’s litter, smaller than even the education and divinity schools. “We wanted to be in the big leagues,” Allison says.

At the visiting committee meeting where his appointment was announced, Allison invoked the British historian Lord Acton’s image of a “remote and ideal objective” that can captivate and move people in ways that more pragmatic goals do not. Today he draws a provocative analogy to medicine. “Harvard started a medical school in the 18th century, when there was no certification of doctors and almost nothing was known about medicine,” he says. “It was an era when George Washington got sick and doctors put leeches on him and he died. At what point in the history of treatments for various diseases, did the prevailing treatment actually become therapeutic? For most diseases, it wasn’t until the 20th century that you were better off being treated by a doctor. By that time, Harvard had been training doctors for 150 years! Now ask: When, in the treatment of various maladies suffered by the body politic, will the prevailing treatment become positive?”

Having formulated a goal to strive for, the next task was to build a place in which to do the striving. The economics and government departments had taken over most of the offices in the original Littauer Center. “In order to grow we would have had to steal offices from them, and nothing is more contentious in faculty politics than space. So we were set up for a struggle. Derek’s authorization to construct a new building allowed us to escape this turf warfare. The new building was a statement — a new identity for the school.”

“There was this piece of land,” Bok recalls, referring to the school’s current site, which was long considered the likeliest place to build the John F. Kennedy Library, which ultimately settled at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “It was controversial because studies indicated that if the library were built there, it would have serious impact on congestion in Harvard Square. It took awhile to get it worked out.” Since the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority had already agreed to relinquish this site and extend the Red Line to Alewife, Harvard had an opportunity. With Harvard’s financial vice president, Hale Champion, taking a lead role, strategy was developed by which Harvard bought the parcel of land. “We paid book value — it was a bargain — and sold the ‘hotel’ piece to a developer [Richard Friedman, who built the Charles Hotel and Residences],” Allison recalls. “The proceeds from the sale went into an escrow account for the construction and maintenance of JFK Park, which is not maintained by the Metropolitan District Commission, but by a separate, endowed fund.”

To plan the building itself, Allison walked around Harvard Yard with the architects, looking for distinctive features common to Harvard buildings constructed over three centuries. Such elements included red brick, chimneys, slate roofs, and gabled ends of buildings. To make a strong statement of Harvard identity, the design incorporated modern versions of these elements. Another feature looked much further back into history. In late-night conversations, Allison and Associate Dean Ira Jackson MPA 1976, who managed the construction project, mulled over ancient architecture. Jackson admired the Roman forum, and Allison spoke of the Greek agora, an open marketplace alive with both commerce and politics. They visited New England town meeting halls for more inspiration. The upshot was the new building’s most distinctive feature, the ARCO Public Affairs Forum, which was underwritten by Atlantic Richfield Corporation, at the urging of Frank Stanton, a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers and the ARCO board.

“We built every square foot we could pay for, and a few more,” Allison recalls. To Jackson’s credit, the project was completed on time and under budget. In the fall of 1978, the new 100,000-square-foot Littauer Center of Public Administration had its dedication ceremony, with many members of the Kennedy family in attendance and Arthur Fiedler conducting the Harvard Band. Chanting protesters, who opposed Harvard’s investments in apartheid South Africa, focused attention on Charles W. Englehart, a major donor on the dais who had made a fortune in Africa. “Students were chanting so loudly that I couldn’t hear myself speak over the audience,” Bok recalls. “An African-American student grabbed the microphone and gave an impromptu speech which seemed to me, even by the standards of those kinds of speeches, acutely harsh.”

Yet the doors opened, and “I must say the faculty behaved magnificently,” says Bok. “To spend so much time working on committees, and not just writing their own books but creating an academic program.” Twenty-five years later, the school “has exceeded my expectations,” he declares. “Certainly it is a larger, more powerful school than I would have thought was possible when we first began.

“One thing that has clearly surprised me is the number of senior people from other countries who have come here. I thought the Kennedy School would be more culture-bound,” Bok continues. “In medicine, the similarities of health problems around the world vastly outweigh the differences, so you would expect physicians to come to the United States for education. But since government is much more specific to our own traditions and history, one might question whether people from other countries would think it worthwhile to come here. I was sufficiently doubtful about this that before I left office, I had a survey done of international Kennedy School graduates who had been back in their home countries for from two to five years. I was quite surprised by the degree of enthusiasm expressed about the value of what they had learned here.”

The career paths of Kennedy School graduates are another indicator of the school’s impact. “Look at the number of alumni who have served in responsible positions,” says Bok, who also points to the mayors, congressional representatives, and members of the Russian Duma who have flocked to the Kennedy School over the years. “Opinions are a dime a dozen, but if people are willing to spend their time and money to come here when they are well advanced in their careers, they must feel there is something valuable to learn here.”

Regarding the school’s ongoing challenges, perhaps the most crucial point is the “whole area of perspective — the additional knowledge you need to turn an efficient technocrat into a statesperson. We are much better at teaching those technical skills than we are at teaching people how to use those skills with wisdom and insight. Yet I think the school has ended up doing — far more than the old Littauer — the kinds of things that Lucius Littauer wanted to support. His idea was to improve government. The Kennedy School has no particular underlying position about the size of government — we don’t believe more is better than less. But we do believe that whatever government we have ought to be conducted at the highest level of excellence.”

Craig Lambert is deputy editor of Harvard Magazine.

Illustration: Bill Jaynes