We are preparing preliminary budget estimates and will be prepared to present
them at the meeting on April 24.
We have given considerable thought to the three options offered in the
attachment to your memorandum of April 17.2 We
have developed
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a fourth option
which may also deserve consideration, since it too would address a real need
and would relate directly to Senator Humphrey’s life-long interest in public service. This option
offers one-year specialized training in disciplines directly related to
public administration, development economics and similar skills to young men
and women who have already committed themselves to a career in these fields
in the underdeveloped world. We believe there would be merit in linking such
a program, directly and in important part, to the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute in Public
Administration3 now being founded. A somewhat more detailed development
of this concept is attached.
I hope the enclosed paper can be circulated to the other participants before
Monday afternoon’s meeting.4
Enclosure
Paper Prepared in the International Communication
Agency5
Option #4: Specialized Education for the Public
Service
We take it as given that our purposes (as articulated in the April 17
memo) are to help educate a core group of a new generation of developing
world leaders, to provide a compelling symbol of
US interest in the developing world,
to narrow the educational gap between industrialized and developing
countries, and to provide an American education to the talented poor in
these countries. These useful purposes could be served by a direct focus
on those who by their own career choice have already indicated that they
can respond to our objectives.
We can provide an opportunity to those who will be able to enhance their
ability to contribute to public service in their own country, who will
be able to provide mature and thoughtful perspectives to the Americans
with whom they will come into contact in the course of the program, and
who will constitute a growing infrastructure of human resources which
could contribute to continuing cooperation among governments.
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To meet this need we can look to those American educational institutions
which offer appealing programs for young professionals, age 25–35, who
have dedicated their careers to public service in government or
quasi-governmental organizations. There is no reason why foreign
professionals should not participate more fully—indeed, there is much to
be gained by the institutions and the American participants, as well as
the foreign students, from interaction with foreign grantees. The
disciplines which such courses could cover include (but need not be
limited to) public administration, development economics, public health
administration, communication and journalism, social work and
educational administration.
Participants in these programs would qualify as “poor”—they certainly
could not afford this type of “topping-off” education on their own. It
will not be difficult to select the outstanding among them since their
decision to participate in public service will already have served to
select them from the average.
A number of American universities and colleges now offer relevant
programs and others could be included. Among those are: a course in
development economics at Williams College; a course in management
responsibility offered through the Sloan Fellows Program at MIT; the industrial development program at
the Georgia Institute of Technology; the professional studies in
international development at Cornell; the Nieman journalism courses at
Harvard; and the courses in international economic development at North
Carolina A and T at Greensboro. To the extent that we involve
communication officials, some long-range contributions might be made
toward solving the problems of North-South communications interaction
which permeated the discussions at the UNESCO General Conference at Nairobi in 1976 and would
improve our posture as we look to the next session this fall.6
This option has several advantages:
(a) The direct address to those already in public service honors the late
Senator Humphrey’s lifelong
interest and achievement in this field;
(b) It addresses the real, present need for skills in the public sector
of developing countries, links the US to
present and future “influentials”—and thus serves demonstrable mutual
interests;
(c) The broad range of disciplines and subject matter can be tailored to
meet the needs of a large number of developing countries;
(d) The course can be completed in one academic year thereby reducing
both the cost and the likelihood of non-return;
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(e) The experience will give participants, educated in the US, a competitive—and welcome—advantage
over peers in foreign governmental structures;
(f) There presently exist mechanisms in the US Government and associated entities (binational
Commissions and experienced contract agencies) to administer this
program.
