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Harvard...foreign forays include li



Boston Globe
Harvard: The Cost of Excellence
The sun never sets on Harvard's empire
But foreign forays include links with repressive regimes

"[Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID)] was being
criticized by human rights advocates because one of its program officers,
former Massachusetts state Representative Thomas Vallely, was working on a
UN project in Burma at a time when the free-Burma lobby wanted to further
isolate the military regime in Rangoon. Vallely, an outspoken advocate of
''constructive engagement'' with Burma, was already running a successful
program in Vietnam. He acknowledges he wanted to ''grow the Vietnam
program'' by extending it to Burma....

 ...Vallely was attacked by free-Burma advocates after he publicly called
Suu Kyi's position on sanctions ''wrong'' and spoke supportively of the
ruling junta. Back at HIID, staff members moved to bar Vallely from
operating in Burma under HIID auspices."

By John Yemma and Daniel Golden, Globe Staff
June 1, 1998

Second of four parts

On a windswept Saturday last fall, as Cambridge streets teemed with
demonstrators, Chinese President Jiang Zemin stepped to the podium in
Sanders Theatre, smiled thinly and delivered a major foreign policy address
to Harvard students, faculty, and administrators.

For an institution accustomed to foreign visitors and global influence, the
speech - Jiang's only talk at an American university - still represented an
academic coup, evidence of Harvard's extraordinary standing in world affairs.

In China, Harvard is the most widely known and respected university in the
world. And Harvard is equally impressed with China. Next week, Harvard's
president, Neil Rudenstine, leaves for his second trip to China in three
months.

Quoting Winston Churchill, Rudenstine speaks of a bold effort to use the
university to create ''empires of the mind'' in an ''increasingly
internationalized, competitive, and demanding new world.''

Given the breadth of its involvement in so many different arenas in so many
countries - plus the large number of Harvard graduates in influential
positions in Washington and abroad - the university is now functioning as a
seedbed for the global leadership class.

But Harvard itself is being altered by its growing globalism, as its
president acknowledges. The university is making an unprecedented push into
international waters, opening a series of research offices in Asia, Europe,
and Latin America, hosting top-flight Chinese and Russian military and
intelligence officers in Cambridge, advising developing nations from Kenya
to Vietnam on economic reform, and prospecting for faculty and students
around the world.

At times, internationalism has blown up in Harvard's face. Critics say
Harvard faculty members have become too cozy with oppressive regimes such
as China and Burma, and too easily corrupted in graft-filled societies like
Russia, where last year the Moscow office of the $40 million-a-year Harvard
Institute for International Development was embroiled in scandal.

And documents obtained by the Globe show that around 1994, the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences received $1 million from Nigeria, a military
dictatorship, as part of a ''nucleus fund'' for the current fund-raising
campaign. Harvard officials said they were unaware of the gift.

But such is the give and take of an international university, says
Rudenstine: ''The reality is the world infringing on the university and the
university trying to study the reality of the world. It's there. It's
crucial.''

It's also controversial. Students last fall howled when Harvard made
concessions to Jiang that it would never make for an American politician.
Faculty members critical of China's human rights record say they were
excluded from the event. Whether they were or not, bad feelings clearly
remain among the many faculty members involved in east-Asian affairs.

For the question-and-answer session at the end of Jiang's speech, Harvard
officials replaced the open microphone - a tradition at a university where
students and faculty are expected to challenge those in authority - with
prescreened questions delivered by polite faculty led by Ezra Vogel of
Harvard's Fairbank Center for Asian Research.

''Vogel gave in on various Beijing demands and ended up with a format like
Jiang gets in China,'' says Ross Terrill, a China scholar long associated
with the Fairbank Center and currently teaching at the University of Texas
at Austin. ''The Harvard visit cost tens of thousands of dollars to please
Jiang Zemin, but as an intellectual occasion it was utterly banal.''

Vogel, however, points out that several of the questions had been supplied
by Chinese dissidents and were pointed on the issue of human rights. In the
end, Jiang took one question from the floor. Vogel also defends the
educational value of the Jiang speech, pointing out that it has sparked
dialogue between Chinese and Tibetan students on campus.

''This is what Harvard is about,'' he says.

China's hand in Harvard affairs was not limited to the Sanders Theater
speech, however. Beforehand, over a Chinese community e-mail network,
pro-Jiang operatives organized a massive turnout of supporters outside the
theater, busing them in and providing them with Chinese and American flags.
Pro-Jiang Chinese far outnumbered anti-Jiang Chinese on the streets of
Cambridge.

In the end, they achieved their goal: impressing the audience back home.
''If ordinary Chinese see people protesting against the president, they
think these are bad American ways,'' explained Xiaojing Hu, a Harvard PhD
candidate in sociology who cheered Jiang's motorcade. ''In China we are
still trying to learn that if there is a protest it doesn't mean you are
going to overthrow the government.''

Chinese media dubbed Jiang's speech a triumph. Chinese tourists now trek to
Sanders Theater, which they have taken to calling ''Jiang Zemin Speech Hall.''

Harvard name goes far in China

Although the United States and China have patched together their
relationship since the dark days of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, it
remains controversial - as President Clinton's trip to Beijing later this
month shows. The Harvard-Beijing relationship, meanwhile, is downright cozy.

When he visited China in March, Harvard's president was received by Jiang
in the Communist Party leadership compound of Zhongnanhai. Chinese
television and newspapers gave the visit prominent coverage. A Rudenstine
lecture at Beijing University was jam-packed. The audience was eager to
hear him, Rudenstine says, ''not because they know me, but they know
Harvard and they know the United States.''

Harvard is called ''Ha Fo'' in China - literally ''laughing Buddha'' - and
Chinese scholars say it is one of the most widely recognized American names
in their country. As the oldest university in the United States, with
Adamses, Roosevelts, and Kennedys among its alumni, Harvard has always had
an advantage in international affairs. Today, foreign students are
commonplace on American campuses and most big universities are strong in
international studies, but none rivals Harvard for its extensive hands-on
involvement in the day-to-day affairs of other countries. Its name
recognition and global clout elicit envy from other universities and make
world leaders want it in their corner.

Harvard professors, led by economist Jeffrey Sachs, have played roles in
the remaking of a dozen economies - from Bolivia to Poland, Mongolia to
Russia. Harvard alumni sit in cabinet meetings in Seoul and Singapore. A
''Harvard speech,'' a ''Harvard adviser,'' a ''Harvard study'' confer
credibility from Rangoon to Rabat - so much so that the university has
begun to crack down on tenuously connected academics who appropriate the
name in order to boost their standing in the United States and abroad. In
the spring, Harvard announced new rules for attaching its name to a report
or project.

''Everywhere you look in the world, you find somebody with a Harvard
connection,'' says John Galvin, dean of Tufts University's Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy and former supreme allied commander of NATO. ''That
happens with Harvard and no place else.''

Harvard's business school is so well known and so keen to exploit its
academic advantage in the Far East that in September it will open an
Asian-Pacific research center in Hong Kong, the first of at least six that
will be opened around the globe in the next few years. Centers in Latin
America and Europe will be up and running by the end of next year. The
centers will serve Harvard business school researchers and act as a
regional base for executive education.

More than a quarter of the Harvard Business School's student population is
international, and more than half of its 100 alumni clubs are located
overseas. The Harvard Business Review has subscribers in 187 countries.
''In most of the world, Harvard Business School is what's well-known about
Harvard,'' says John McArthur, former dean of the business school.

In the past few years, Harvard has developed a new tool to win friends and
influence abroad: an array of executive programs for working professionals,
especially at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of
Government.

Executive education programs are short, intensive courses - usually lasting
two to nine weeks - taught by Harvard faculty using the case-study method
and capped with the ceremonial presentation of a Harvard certificate. A few
weeks of attending Harvard seminars is all it takes to make a military
officer in Ukraine or a deputy finance minister in Malaysia into a
''Harvard product.'' Executive programs have helped the university forge
extensive ties with ruling elites around the world, especially in Russia
and China.

''Our stakes in those two systems are so great that we will do anything to
get a front-line conversation with key people,'' says Peter Zimmerman, who
runs executive education programs for 2,200 people a year at the Kennedy
School.

In the past six years, virtually all senior Russian military officers have
become Harvard products, says Galvin, who has participated in the program
and taken the Russians on daylong tours of Wakefield, the suburb north of
Boston billed as an average American community. In the past year, more than
100 senior Chinese civil servants - including several dozen colonels and
intelligence officers - have gone through a similar program funded by Hong
Kong businesswoman Nina Kung.

Scholars program came at the `perfect time'

It was in May of 1996 that Kung, a petite woman who wears her hair in
pigtails, arrived unbidden in Harvard Yard. She had what Robert D.
Blackwill, who runs the Russia and China programs for the Kennedy School,
describes as ''an idea about Harvard helping interaction between American
and Chinese elites.'' Rudenstine's office immediately referred her to
Joseph S. Nye, dean of the Kennedy School. Kung walked over to the Kennedy
School and laid out her plan.

With $3.3 billion in assets, Kung is one of the richest women in the world.
She has high-level contacts in Beijing and has cultivated ties with
President Clinton. She also has become mixed up in the Clinton campaign
fund-raising imbroglio. Republicans in Congress questioned a $50,000
donation she made to Clinton's birthplace foundation in Hope, Ark.

With Kung contributing $7 million, a Kung scholars program quickly took
shape at the Kennedy School and won ''startlingly rapid'' approval from top
brass of the People's Liberation Army, says Blackwill. By January 1997, the
first Chinese were arriving in Cambridge.

''We are not dealing with twenty-somethings here. These are senior Chinese
military officers and civil servants,'' says Blackwill. ''They are very
serious people. They do nothing casually.''

The program came along at what Blackwill says was ''the perfect time'' -
after the 1996 Taiwan missile crisis, a time of US-China brinksmanship that
caused military and political leaders in both nations to look urgently for
ways to improve relations. It is now the largest program of academic
interaction with Chinese elites in the world. It is not without critics,
however, among them professors and students who question whether it makes
sense for Harvard to accommodate Chinese military and intelligence operatives.

''Some of the Russian generals are Neanderthals, but it is probably a good
thing for them to have the experience. I think the China program is subject
to more questions,'' says Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's
Davis Center for Russia Studies. ''Almost all the Chinese are intelligence
people.''

When students at the Kennedy School tried to organize a protest resolution
over Jiang's visit last fall, they ran into stiff resistance from Kung
scholars and other Chinese government officials in residence at the school.

''I find it hard to believe that those Chinese scholars all acted all on
their own,'' says Naheed Nenshi, a Canadian masters student at the school
who was caught up in the debate. ''We all saw the e-mails from Chinese
agents saying `Come out, there will be flags and lunch.' I'm sure this was
organized.''

And when Nenshi and other students invited Chinese dissident Wei Jengsheng
to speak at the school, they ran into more opposition - this time from
administrators. A Kennedy School faculty member, Nenshi says, told him the
school did not want to be seen ''taking the side of dissidents.'' After
students threatened to make that comment public, the school relented.

When Wei spoke on May 6, he praised the anti-Jiang protests at Harvard for
helping put pressure on Beijing to lighten up on political prisoners. He
criticized Americans who, in their zeal to win friends in Beijing, ''lack a
sense of urgency'' about human rights. Wei pointed out that in China, where
he was still imprisoned until last November, only ''the welcoming part'' of
the Jiang visit to Cambridge played on Chinese TV - a point not lost on
other dissidents.

''It would be nice to think that exposing Chinese officials to the western
system will change them forever,'' says Lobsang Sangay, a Harvard law
student who is active in the free-Tibet movement. ''But I fear they learn
the jargon of human rights and use it against human rights.''

Think tank is victim of `hostile takeover'

They could also learn from Harvard about academic infighting.

This summer, Harvard maintenance workers will set up ladders in the lobby
of One Eliot Place, which opens onto the courtyard of the Kennedy School
complex, and begin scraping the letters HIID off the portal. One Eliot is
now owned by the Kennedy School. Workers at the Harvard Institute for
International Development will be scattered around Harvard Square - above
Tweeter Etc. on Mt. Auburn Street, in the old Architects Collaborative
building on Story Street.

HIID's headquarters was lost in what insiders describe as a ''hostile
takeover'' engineered by Nye, dean of the Kennedy School, on behalf of an
administration worried about the loosely supervised activities of the
influential think tank.

Former HIID director Dwight Perkins, who ran the institute for 15 years, is
more circumspect. He talks of a compromise between a Kennedy School
takeover and an ''informal relationship.'' Whatever the case, HIID real
estate, money, and key personnel are now under Nye's umbrella. HIID will
remain in Harvard Square, but in a much less visible form.

HIID is an odd duck, even at a school that prides itself on its autonomous
''tubs.'' It is, in effect, a global consulting service operated by Harvard
since the 1960s. Harvard faculty - mostly economists and social scientists
- work for HIID, which subcontracts with organizations such as the US
Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the United
Nations. The institute runs projects in 60 countries - from a feasibility
study for a 25-mile bridge in Argentina to a reform plan for the Bank of
Zambia.

The institute has 55 resident advisers in the field and sends 200
consultants abroad a year. Some are straight from Harvard Yard, others
rarely see Cambridge. Most of HIID's work earns high praise. But in such a
far-flung operation, something occasionally goes wrong.

Last year, things went horribly wrong in Russia, where HIID had been
managing a $57 million USAID project on economic reform. Following an
audit, the agency accused the two main HIID officers in Moscow - Harvard
economics professor Andrei Shleifer and legal expert Jonathan Hay - of
letting their staff provide services for investment projects run by
Shleifer's wife and Hay's girlfriend.

USAID alleged that Shleifer and Hay had ''gained influence'' over the
Russian capital markets that they were helping to set up and had sought
''personal gain.'' Neither would comment for this article, but the scandal
revealed a wide circle of loosely monitored operations in Moscow with
tenuous Harvard affiliations and tied to a clan-like power structure run by
former deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais, a leading Russian reformer.

Along with a Russian counterpart, Hay had ''ultimate control over the
entire privatization effort in Russia,'' Veniamin Sokolov, head of the
Russian government's auditing agency, the Chamber of Accounts, said last
week in an interview with the Globe. ''This route to privatization led to a
disaster for Russia.''

And it was the Harvard name that opened doors for Hay.

''Here were people saying they were connected with Harvard. In this part of
the world, that put stars in people's eyes,'' says Janine Wedel, a research
professor at George Washington University who raised early questions about
the HIID Moscow operation.

Shleifer and Hay were dismissed from their HIID jobs and the Moscow office
was shut down after USAID canceled the final $14 million of its contract.

''The Russia thing was a big deal for us,'' says HIID head Sachs, an
economist intimately involved in Russian economic reform. ''Russia was
damaging to HIID's name because it was a high-profile event. It caused us
all to take a breath.''

At the same time, HIID was being criticized by human rights advocates
because one of its program officers, former Massachusetts state
Representative Thomas Vallely, was working on a UN project in Burma at a
time when the free-Burma lobby wanted to further isolate the military
regime in Rangoon. Vallely, an outspoken advocate of ''constructive
engagement'' with Burma, was already running a successful program in
Vietnam. He acknowledges he wanted to ''grow the Vietnam program'' by
extending it to Burma.

But Burma is different from Vietnam, say human rights activists. In 1990,
Burmese generals refused to yield power to democratically elected forces
led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Burmese peasants are subjected to
forced labor.

Vallely was attacked by free-Burma advocates after he publicly called Suu
Kyi's position on sanctions ''wrong'' and spoke supportively of the ruling
junta. Back at HIID, staff members moved to bar Vallely from operating in
Burma under HIID auspices. Last year, after what one official called ''a
shootout at the O.K. Corral,'' all HIID work on Burma was transferred to
economist Robert Rotberg.

''HIID will not work with the present government of Burma in any way,
shape, and form,'' says Rotberg.

Maureen Aung-Thwin, director of the Burma Project for the Open Society
Institute, a New York-based human rights group that was critical of
Vallely, says ''HIID is wise not to go into Burma under the present
conditions. Being involved in the country now would tarnish its image while
burnishing the junta's.''

Vallely and colleague David Dapice are still involved in Burma, but say
they are working on their own time for the UN Development Agency. Though
Dapice and Vallely have offices side-by-side at HIID's Mt. Auburn Street
office, a recent report they produced on Burma was published on Tufts
University letterhead, where Dapice is a professor of economics.

''I put my foot in the water with Burma,'' says Vallely. ''The water was
(expletive) cold, OK? It hurt me so that I don't want to put my foot in the
water again.''

Agency has its wings clipped

There are rarely real casualties in academic warfare - not by the standards
of broader society, where disputes can cost real jobs and real lives.
Shleifer remains a tenured professor at Harvard. He is back from Moscow,
has an office in the Littauer Building and is teaching economics. And
though Vallely got burned on Burma, he is still running a widely praised
program in Vietnam.

But HIID has had its wings clipped. Harvey Fineberg, the Harvard provost to
whom HIID reports, acknowledges that university officials had been
''concerned about'' HIID for some time. Though he and other university
officials characterize what has happened with HIID as coincidence, insiders
see it differently.

''It was a hostile takeover,'' says Vallely.

Last fall, Nye, the Kennedy School dean, told Harvard's top administrators
that he had an unnamed donor who wanted to give him the money to purchase
HIID headquarters for the Kennedy School next door. One Eliot Place was
owned by the central administration, not HIID, and in Harvard's arcane
''every tub on its own bottom'' system, the Kennedy School was forced to
buy the building from the administration.

Nye borrowed against the donor's promise and bought the building for an
undisclosed amount. Sachs and other HIID people could remain on the top
three floors, but not as HIID. They would be part of a new operation called
the Center for International Development. Sachs, who will head the center,
calls it a joint venture between HIID and the Kennedy School. HIID is
contributing $10 million - half its reserves - to endow the center, a
significant amount for an institute that operates without an endowment.

The center will be ''within the Kennedy School,'' says Nye, who will be the
Harvard officer in charge. The tie to the Kennedy School will make the
center ''woven more into the academic fabric'' of Harvard than HIID has
been, says Fineberg.

Nye's squeeze play on HIID shows how ascendent the Kennedy School is at
Harvard. The university has an archipelago of world-class foreign affairs
operations - the Fairbank Center for Asian Research, the Davis Center for
Russian Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the
Gunzberg Center for European Studies, the David Rockefeller Center for
Latin American Studies. But the rising power in foreign affairs is clearly
the Kennedy School.

Long associated with domestic policy - temporary home to out-of-work
politicians ranging from former Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis
to former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson - the Kennedy School has been
pushing aggressively into the international arena under the leadership of
the even-tempered Nye, a former assistant secretary of defense.

Nye has long been world-minded. In 1990, when he was associate dean in the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Nye wrote an influential report for former
president Derek Bok on how Harvard should internationalize itself. Though
the Kennedy School already had groups conducting international security
studies, Nye has moved it much further in an international direction and is
now ''showcasing the international component,'' says Kay King, director of
the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs.

Thirty-six percent of the student body is now international, up from 28
percent five years ago. Fifty percent of the new cases written for the
school's case-study program now deal with international issues or have
international protagonists. Since Kennedy School cases are used at more
than 500 other colleges and universities around the world, the new
international push is significant.

Besides the programs for Russian and Chinese ruling elites and assorted
fellowships for mid-career bureaucrats from areas as far afield as Upper
Volta, the Kennedy School has usurped the role of Radcliffe, Harvard's
sister college, by developing two internationally oriented programs
involving women in public policy.

In May, the Kennedy School held a summit of eight women world leaders,
including former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, former Turkish
prime minister Tansu Ciller, former Polish prime minister Hanna Suchocka,
and former Nicaraguan president Violeta de Chamorro. And Swanee Hunt,
former US ambassador to Austria, is running a program on women and public
policy that focuses on women at lower tiers of government.

''I want to be the place that trains women for leadership positions around
the world,'' says Nye.

Nye's strategy has been to broaden the scope of his school - moving it from
its traditional liberal Democratic base and decreasing its domestic-policy
focus while boosting academic courses that emphasize the private sector and
non-profit organizations. These are elements of the ''soft power'' -
economic and cultural influence as opposed to military muscle - that he
believes the United States must learn to wield in the post-Cold War world.

Nye recognizes that there will be controversy along the way, but says that
is the price of global clout. Not many of those Saudi, Nigerian, Chinese,
and Burmese officials who come into contact with Harvard, for instance,
will leave as Jeffersonian democrats, but their exposure to Western ideas
is beneficial, he says. The powerful and corrupt need to understand
democracy and human rights at least as much as the good and the just do.

''There is always a risk that somebody you have is not going to be perfect,
but what is the alternative?'' Nye asks. ''If you insist on clean hands you
are not going to get anything done.''

Globe correspondent Ted Plafker contributed to this story from Beijing.

Tomorrow: Tenure troubles

Wednesday: Is it worth the money? Globe Online This series is available on
the Globe Online at

http://www.boston.com Use the keyword: Harvard.

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 06/01/98. Copyright 1998
Globe Newspaper Company.

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