I feel very much at home here tonight -- not because of the number of Democrats in the audience, and not because I find myself surrounded up here by Republicans as I always do in Washington, but because all of us who are sons of Harvard share a common bond even greater than political or sectional loyalties. All of us are immensely proud of our Alma Mater -- so proud that it has recently been said that the world's most excruciating bore is a Harvard man from Texas who just got out of the Marines.
We are asked tonight to answer the question: "What role does the university play in the Government?" I can best answer that question with the answer I have learned since coming to Washington -- It depends.
It depends, first of all, on what kind of university we are talking about, and what kind of education it offers. Dean Smith, as I mentioned at the last commencement, said Oxford was truly a seat of great learning; for all freshmen who entered were required to bring some learning with them in order to meet the standards of admission -- but no senior, when he left the university, ever took any learning away; and thus it steadily accumulated. That, I am afraid, is not the kind of education upon which we can expect the Government to depend.
Nor can we depend upon the kind of education produced by those schools bearing a strong resemblance to the Laputan academy visited by Gulliver in the midst of his many travels. At this academy, as you may recall, one scholar had been working for eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into sealed vials and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. An ingenious architect had contrived a new method for building houses by beginning at the roof and working downwards to the foundation. In the school of languages, the professors were developing a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. In the school of political projectors, Gulliver was dismayed at the impracticality of the ideas taught there -- for example, teaching ministers of state to consult the public good, to reward merit and abilities, and to choose for employments persons qualified to exercise them. Others were concerned with ways and means of raising money without grieving the subjects, suggesting among others that there be taxed those qualities of body and mind for which men chiefly valued themselves, the rate to be more or less according to the degrees of excelling, and the assessment left entirely to their own breast. The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favorites of the other sex, according to the number and natures of favors they have received, for which they are allowed to be their own vouchers. Women were proposed to be taxed according to their beauty and skill in dressing, to be determined by their own judgment. Perhaps the government needs this kind of university assistance -- but I do not think so.
Thus I say the role of the university in government depends in part upon the kind of university we are talking about. Secondly, however, it depends upon the kind of government we are talking about. Some Administrations emphasize the practical over the intellectual. Men who have only met 8 o'clock classes are not regarded as highly as men who have met 8 million dollar payrolls. The universities and the scholars are publicly ignored, although even these empirical governments find it necessary to tap their resources at a distance. Edmund Wilson has thus described the intellectual's fate as being like that of Philoctetes, the Greek warrior, who was forced to live in isolation because of the stench of his wound, but whose comrades kept coming back to him because they needed his magic bow.
What is needed then is a new understanding between universities and the government. Recently, for example, the Foreign Service found that more than two out of three university graduates failed the language test in the Foreign Service exam, and still others were frightened away from applying. The result was to diminish the ranks of men and women of all-around ability available for the Foreign Service -- despite the fact that all Foreign Service inductees required special language training in the Foreign Service Institute anyway! Closer rapport between the universities and the government might have eliminated this problem years ago.
It is in this area of foreign affairs, it seams to me, where the universities can make their greatest contribution and where the need for their assistance has continued to grow. When Thomas Jefferson named James Madison Secretary of State, the entire State Department in Washington consisted of Madison, a chief clerk, seven other clerks and a messenger boy. The Federal Government's total receipts were 13 million dollars and its total expenditures 9 million dollars; and the Executive Branch employed 6,000 Civil Servants. The conduct of foreign policy was largely a matter of personal advice and sometimes political maneuver. Personality disputes, conflicts between the Legislative and Executive Branches, and extraneous issues characterized foreign policy debates in that less complicated age even more than they do today. One hundred one years ago, for example, President John Quincy Adams and his Secretary of State, Henry Clay, nominated envoys to a Congress of the American Nations at Panama. The Senate debate on the issues of the Panama Conference gave way to personal abuse. And the most personally abusive was the half-mad, half-genius Senator John Randolph whom President Adams privately called with old fashioned courtesy "that physical, moral and intellectual fragment of a man, with his mind overspread with stinking weeds." Randolph, on his part, in what is perhaps the most memorable and malignant sentence in the history of personal abuse, denounced the aged mother of the Secretary of State for bringing into the world "this being, so brilliant yet so corrupt, which, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, shines and stinks." These are words which I think might cheer the heart of John Foster Dulles.
But Secretary of State Henry Clay promptly challenged Randolph to a duel. Randolph hesitated at first believing as all of us believe that Senators should never be called to account for anything ever said on the Senate floor. Ultimately he accepted and thereafter occurred one of the strangest episodes in the relations between the State Department and the Senate. The first shots missed. Clay's second shot succeeded only in piercing the Senator's peculiar white wrapper while Randolph fired in the air. They met halfway and shook hands, Randolph saying jocularly, "You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay;" and Clay replying gravely "I am glad the debt is no greater." I am happy to say that most duels between Secretaries and Senators end equally bloodlessly.
Today, however, the conduct of our foreign policy has become too complex and too sensitive to be left to the vicissitudes of personal jealousies and political struggles. And thus it is appropriate today that we call increasingly upon our universities to assist us in the reexamination and reformulation of these policies. This year, the major foreign policy issue before the Congress is the matter of our foreign aid program -- and I think it highly significant that three of the major studies of this program conducted at the request of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were conducted by three of the nation's leading universities -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia and the University of Chicago.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution these studies made -- and it is the type of contribution a university can frequently make better than any political group -- was to give us in Congress a better understanding of what we are talking about when we refer loosely to foreign aid; and to help us realize that effective, long range economy in foreign aid is a difficult and selective process.
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