The Academy Lobby

...and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with telegrams and letters of rapturous support for the Academy bill...

...To a gimmick-conscious Administration, the proposed Academy seems to be the answer to all its diplomatic problems...

...While it is useful for teaching languages and the art of visa-stamping, a government-financed and government-staffed Academy in the heart of Washington appears to be a uniquely unpromising place for the dispassionate exploration of foreign policy...

...Or do they imagine that the Administration's "sweetener"— a big chunk of money for the Academy to conduct research into the "methods of global Communism"—will end up in their own coffers...

...The trouble with the Institute is not the size of its budget, but that it simply reflects the administrative inertia and intellectual timidity that foreign service officers face every day on their jobs...

...The Academy Lobby By James Donaghue Long used to the assaults of lobbyists, Washington during the past few weeks has been treated to an onslaught by the most prest'gious group ever to lead a charge up Capitol Hill...

...Perhaps some of them just bought it on approval with the recommendation of its energetic sponsor...

...It would incorporate the present Foreign Service Institute, a neglected offshoot of the State Department now buried in the bowels of an apartment building in suburban Arlington, and would be open to all government employes involved in foreign affairs...

...Trooping out its parade of witnesses, the Administration tried to make the Academy sound like the best thing to hit the Foreign Service since the demise of Senator McCarthy...

...Why, it's enough to raise visions of a university-foundation complex...

...In Senator Pell's words: "One can foresee what would be the fate of an unfortunate professor who wrote an article in a learned journal expressing a foreign policy view at variance with that of the Administration then in power...

...What has been particularly galling to Congressmen is the lobbying campaign being conducted by the "citizens' committee" under the prodding of James Perkins, the man who headed the President's advisory panel which recommended the establishment of the Academy...

...Beyond this, what the Congress has to ask—even if the 77 academic lobbyists are unwilling to—is whether it is desirable to compound the chief failing of the present Foreign Service Institute—which is that it confuses training in administrative techniques with education in the field of foreign policy —by transforming it into a fullscale government-financed university...

...The Academy, which would cost some $17 million to build and about $6 million a year to operate, would have a faculty of 100 professors training some 1,000 students in such areas of diplomacy as conversational Urdu and anti-guerrilla warfare...

...The Academy would be headed by a chancellor appointed by the President, and would be embellished by a board of regents headed by the Secretary of State and including a gaggle of government officials and private citizens named by the President...

...I believe we can do the job of better preparing those who represent us abroad," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "by better utilizing the existing facilities in our great universities and by better utilizing and expanding the facilities of the Foreign Service Institute...

...Since the Administration's bill proposes very little that the State Department cannot already do if it could get Congress to cough up the money, it seems that this is one of those ritualistic games that are endemic to Washington: Pin a new label on an old horse to glamorize it for a Congress that has a passion for new programs and a boredom with old nags...

...It appears to be more than simple coincidence that James Perkins, who rounded up the signatures of so many other foundation officials and university presidents, just happens to be former vice-president of the Carnegie Corporation and now president-elect of Cornell University...

...Perkins' "citizens' committee," the way to correct the faults of the Foreign Service Institute may simply be by improving its quality—not merely expanding its enrollment on the assumption that "training" has anything to do with "education...

...A skeptic might even wonder whether some of these 77 distinguished citizens have not been sold a bill of goods that they never even really perused...

...Endowing it with a new title and a research program whose utility the Administration has had a hard time explaining is not likely to accomplish the wonders its advocates imagine...

...It is worth asking, too, whether the university presidents who have so zealously supported the Administration bill have seriously considered the impact on their own campuses of a Federal government raid that might do to the social sciences what NASA has already done to the physical sciences...

...It is not so much their support that has raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill, but the fact that these distinguished figures—a good many of them university presidents—should happen to phrase their telegrams in virtually identical language...

...What our foreign service officers could use is the chance to get out of Washington once in a while and spend a year at one of the scores of colleges or universities better equipped to educate them than the grandiose Academy the Administration is pushing with such misplaced vigor...

...Undersecretary of State George Ball described it as a "link—a two-way bridge— between government and the academic community...

...While Congress managed to suppress its enthusiasm for the "proximity of operations and operating officials of government," whatever that may mean, it openly wondered whether the top-flight men the Academy hopes to siphon off from the universities would be able to enjoy the academic freedom they enjoy on their campuses—and indeed what would happen to them if they tried to assert it...

...Have they examined the role that politics might play in the appointment of the Academy's chancellor and his faculty...

...In today's Washington, that covers just about everything but the Fish and Wildlife Service...

...James Donaghue is a freelance journalist living in Washington...

...But to a good many Congressmen, including some Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee, which recently held hearings on the bill, it sounds more like a one-way suction pump which would drain some of the best university talent into the maw of official Washington...

...One academic witness told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it would provide "a marriage of the freedom of a university with the excitement of proximity of operations and operating officials of government...

...His task must also have been lightened by the fact that two of the leading supporters of the bill are Presidential aide McGeorge Bundy, former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, and Dean Rusk, president of the Rockefeller Foundation before he moved into the State Department...

...a former foreign service officer himself and usually a reliable Administration supporter, attacked the Academy plan as a bad way to improve training for government employes...

...The Academy bill, which Administration officials imagined would have clear sailing, has now run into a sea of troubles...

...Over in the House of Representatives, Wayne Hays (D.-Ohio), a powerful figure on the Foreign Affairs Committee, echoed these objections by calling the Academy "an untried gimmick...

...Some Congressmen have asked, if there is not to be full academic freedom, is the Academy likely to attract a staff worth hiring...

...University presidents, foundation executives, magazine publishers, retired admirals— some 77 in all—together form one of those remarkably "spontaneous" citizens' committees that are forever springing up like mushrooms on the Capitol lawn...

...Displaying a unanimity usually associated with such unacademic groups as the textile lobby or the sugar beet growers, the 77 distinguished members of Dr...

...This particular one is the advance guard of the Administration's new bill for a National Foreign Affairs Academy—a project that seems dearer to its heart than Medicare and tax cuts rolled into one...

...Perkins' committee have been bombarding Senator J. William Fulbright (D.-Ark...

...Despite the entreaties of Dr...

...Senator Claiborne Pell (D.-R.I...