Groping for Institutional Independence, 1948–1966

The first serious proposal to split the School of Government surfaced in 1948 when its new dean, Arthur E. Burns, pointed out the anomaly of lumping overgrown business and accounting programs with a small but sturdy program in international affairs. The business faculty, he told the Administration, had a separate mission and should be consigned to a separate school, freeing the School of Government to focus exclusively on “Foreign Affairs.” Whatever the compelling logic of Burns proposals their obvious appeal to the policy faculty’s they were too radical for their time. Still, the Administration did not ignore the policy faculty’s growing dissatisfaction. Accordingly, in 1956 the Trustees appointed Eugene Zuckert, a former dean of the Harvard Business School, to chair a study of the School's structure and programs⁴. The policy faculty, suspecting that Zuckert’s committee would come down in favor of the status quo, promptly formed its own committee headed by Wolfgang Kraus, a respected member of the political science department. Their worst suspicions were borne out when the Zuckert Report reaffirmed the curricular relatedness of government and business but added, curiously, that “foreign affairs programs do not belong in [this] kind of School.” Whether foreign affairs should be turned back to Columbian College or made the nucleus of a new entity, the Zuckert group left for further study. For the immediate future, however, it admonished the policy faculty to stop “agitating” for a division and make one more go of it. Business professors were enjoined to be more “international;” and international affairs faculty urged to orient themselves more toward “business.”

For its part, the Kraus committee managed to persuade the Board to make some changes, which were largely cosmetic. In October 1960, the Trustees renamed the School of Government the School of Government, Business, and International Affairs (SGBIA). And to showcase an element of parity, they split its administration into divisions, one of Public and International Affairs, the other of Business and Public Administration, each division to have its own assistant dean and separate degree programs.

The Kraus-Zuckert patchwork satisfied no one. It gave the policy faculty a measure of liberty and equality, but no hope of genuine fraternity. Though equal in name and status, they were still outvoted in faculty meeting when it came to deciding such quality issues as admissions standards and language requirements. And they grumbled openly that the new dean, Archibald Woodruff, showed greater favor to the professional division than he did to the international affairs program.

In all fairness, however, the professionals could make a good case that their policy colleagues did not have a stake in the enterprise comparable to their own. Those who taught accountancy, business, and public administration were, after all, budgeted directly to SGBIA, from whence came their paychecks and their sense of belonging, whereas the historians, economists, and political scientists who oversaw the public and international affairs programs were budgeted to and owed their allegiance to departments in Columbian College.

Internally, the policy faculty struggled for control of the School's agenda through the early 1960s. As University Bulletins of the era attest, they nearly succeeded in overcoming their minority status by arranging to elect more and more of their Columbian College colleagues to the SGBIA faculty. Succeeding issues of the Bulletin showed a swelling cohort of Columbian College geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and language professors. (The author himself recalls being recruited by colleagues who told him: “We’re putting you up for election. We need your vote.”) To the Administration, the policy faculty's message was increasingly loud and clear. Their numbers within the SGBIA faculty had reached a critical mass nearly 60 of them by 1966 and their solidarity of purpose was unmistakable. They would not rest until they had been gathered together in a separate, self-standing school of public and international affairs.

⁴ Zuckert later served as Secretary of the Air Force.

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