Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
NOV
Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies Rosedale Road Po
Post Office Box 2820
Program In International Affairs Princeton, New Jersey 08540
609-921-1141
Harlan Cleveland
Director
June 18 , 1980
Z
go-
Dear Colleagues and Friends:
This will be the last general mailing from the Aspen
Institute's Program in International Affairs. As you already
know, I have been appointed (effective August 1st, 1980) the
first full-time Director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute
of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Lois and
I will move to the Twin Cities in August. Our new addresses
there are:
(Office) Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of
Public Affairs
909 Social Sciences
267 19th Avenue South
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 373-2653
(Home)
STAT
What follows is a review of the work of the Program in
International Affairs, which was started on September 1, 1974.
My six years with the Aspen Institute -- a lifetime record
for length of tenure in one position -- have been an incomparable
opportunity to think hard, write much, and try to serve as a
"center of initiative" on a wide variety of international policy
issues. With the full backing of Chairman Bob Anderson and his
increasingly international Board of Trustees, in close
collaboration with that extraordinary intellectual entrepreneur
Joe Slater, the Program in International Affairs has probed
and analyzed and written and published along five different
lines of inquiry.
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
? ?' 4`
In the process, we have convened 84 workshops with a total
of 2404 participants from a broad spectrum of professions and
disciplines and every part of the world, using all the Aspen
Institute seminar facilities (Aspen and Baca, Colorado; the Wye
Plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; West Berlin; and
Punalu'u, Hawaii) and also meeting in Princeton, NJ; New York;
Washington; Dedham and Cambridge, MA; Houston and Austin, TX;
Wingspread (Racine, Wisconsin); La Jolla, CA; Tokyo, Japan
(International House);- Cairo, Egypt; Gajereh, Iran; Ajijic,
Mexico; and Nairobi, Kenya.
This activity has been designed to raise questions of public
policy before governments and intergovernmental organizations
get around to them -- in John Gardner's phrase, to be among "the
first birds off the telephone wire." As he has written: "Very
few -- almost no -- major policy innovations are enacted at the
federal level that are not preceded by years (say, 3 to 10 years)
of national discussion and debate. The national dialogue is an
untidy but impressive process. Ideas that will eventually become
the basis for some major innovation in federal policy are first
put into circulation by individuals and small groups. . . ."
As one of those "individuals and small groups," I have
taken as an operating principle that we should tackle only
issues which are nascent, emerging, even premature -- that is,
issues on which our work would be at least two years ahead of
the government's necessarily ponderous policy-making. Meeting
this test has turned out not to be all that difficult.
In this mode our "center of initiative" has focussed on
five kinds of international policy issues:
1. Arms Control
We organized and for five years managed the Aspen Arms
Control Consortium, the nation's "first team" of academic research
units on arms limitation and national security policy.
Funded mostly by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Consortium
initially comprised Cornell, Harvard and Stanford Universities,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Aspen Institute.
That circle has now been enlarged to include the Brookings Institution,
the RAND Corporation and the University of California at Los
Angeles; a number of research houses around the world, most of
them assisted by the Ford Foundation, are active correspondents and
sometime participants or even co-sponsors in the Consortium's
three or four major workshops each year.
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
? ?
Consortium discussions on nuclear proliferation, European
security, Pacific security, strategic arms control, conventional
arms sales policy, U.N. disarmament processes, new military
technologies and the defense budget have often presaged notable
shifts in the postures and policies of governments.
A full substantive report on Aspen Consortium activity
during its first four years is available from the Aspen Institute
or The Rockefeller Foundation. The leadership of this continuing
enterprise has now been taken on by Paul Doty, Director of the
Aspen Institute's Program on Science, Technology and Humanism,
which is colocated at Harvard with the JFK School's Center for
Science and International Affairs.
2. The Planetary Bargain
Our first project, starting in the autumn of 1974, was The
Planetary Bargain, an ambitious effort by a widely representative
group of experts to look at all the elements of a "new international
order" as a many-faceted bargain, and suggest both policies and
institutional innovations for a pluralistic world community.
The result was a very different picture of the future from those
produced by computerized world order models or by the kind of
"architectural" thinking which so influenced earlier theories
of world government and produced the "structures of peace"
called the League of Nations and the U.N.
It may be useful to recall the framework of this thinking,
taken from the original Aspen consensus paper and carried over
into the'book I wrote for the INTERdependence project, Philadelphia's
imaginative contribution to the 1976 Bicentennial:
"The complexity of the issues and the congestion
of interest-groups involved (159 nation-states, a hundred
major transnational corporations, dozens of nonprofit
multinationals, all meeting in 700 nongovernmental
conferences and more than 3,000 international association
meetings a year) make nonsense of the notion that with
one great political act a New International Economic
Order might be created. The process, if it works, will
be more like a global bazaar, in which negotiators are
continuously engaged in parallel negotiations about
strategically related but tactically separable matters.
Yet the environment for constructive bargaining has to
be created by a shared sense that bargains can be struck
which advance the interests of all, that a political
consensus can be formed by widespread realization that
peoples of, every race and nation are in dangerous passage
together in a world of finite resources, ultimate weapons
and unmet requirements."
-The Planetary Bargain, (1975)
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
i ?
... "There is thus a long agenda of creative effort
just ahead. Somehow the community of nations -- or at
least of those most concerned -- will need to create
a food reserve, assure energy supplies, depress fertility
rates, stabilize commodity markets, protect the global
environment, manage the ocean and its deep seabed, control
the modification of weather at human command, rewrite the
rules of trade and investment, reform the monetary system,
mediate disputes, reduce the cost of military stalemate,
control conflict in a world of proliferating weapons,
keep the peace when it is threatened and restore the peace
when it is broken."
"It is this impressive agenda, taken as a whole,
that will amount to a third try at world order. It will
not, this time, feature the creation of some new over-
arching world organization. Rather, it will be a variety
of bargains, systems, and arrangements which reflect the
paradox of world order -- that there is no consensus
to entrust any nation or race or creed or group with
general responsibility for world governance, yet there is
an urgent need to tackle problems which will yield only
to world-scale solutions."
-The Third Try at World Order (1977)
An important part of this conceptual effort was our attempt
to define and project "basic human needs." We commissioned in
1974 the seminal work by John and Magda McHale on Human Require-
ments, Supply Levels and Outer Bounds,'which concluded that
despite the then-current gloom about growth limits it is possible
to "meet basic human requirements. in terms of resource adequacy
and without transgressing the carrying capacity of the planet."
Mustafa Tolba, Executive Director of the U.N. Environment
Programme (UNEP) then asked the McHales and the Aspen institute
to develop a fuller analysis, which was published in the McHale's
Basic Human Needs: A Framework for Action (Transaction Books,
1978) with an Introduction in which I suggested that an "inter-
national poverty line" was in the making, and traced the "three
years of sudden conceptual change, from 1974 to 1977," in which
"national development strategies, international negotiations
and global organizations have begun to be deeply affected by
the simple notion that the purpose of economic development and
international cooperation is to meet the human requirements of
people, and especially the minimum needs of the neediest."
The work on The Planetary Bargain proved to be so fruitful
an approach to the world's palsied North-South dialogue that it
gave rise to much further exploration of growth policy and
resource systems (see below), and led us quite directly into
projects on related issues. One was a series of consultations
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
?
-5- ?
on the role of multinational corporations in development, under-
taken jointly with the Council on Religion and International
Affairs. Another was a major Cairo Conference on Energy Futures
of Developing Countries, which has resulted in a book with the
same title, published by the Aspen Institute and Praeger
Publishers this year.
Yet another related project started with a request from the
U.N. Conference on Science and Technology for Development to
produce some "general theory" about that complex tangle of
policy issues; the result was Dynamism and Development (1979),
a substantial essay by I. H. Abdel Rahman of Egypt and myself,
which has been widely circulated by the U.N. in six languages
and republished this year in the Mexican journal Ciencia y
Desarrollo and the international journal World Development.
A further piece of fallout from The Planetary Bargain was
a conference I organized in Austin, Texas, while I served as
the Tom Slick Visiting Professor of World Peace at the LBJ
School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, in the Spring
of 1979. The conference, titled "Modernization vs. Equity vs.
Tradition: The Explosive Triple Collision," was one of the
earliest efforts to draw lessons of global relevance from
the sudden turn of events in Iran. (My own comments on that
subject were published by the LBJ School in a Pamphlet called
"The Triple Collision of Modernization.")
3. Growth Policy and Resource Systems
Another fruitful collaboration with John and Magda McHale
took the form of an inquiry into the nature and use of renewable
(biological) resources, and information considered as a resource.
A ground-breaking international conference on Bio-Resource
Potentials for Development was held in the fall of 1978 at the
McHales' Center for Integrative Studies (then at the University
of Houston) with the co-sponsorship of IFIAS, the Bio-Energy
Council, the World Academy of Art and Science and this Program.
The interesting scientific papers presented at this meeting are
being published by Pergamon Press in a book edited by Alexander
King and myself. An introduction by the editors, "The Renewable
Way of Life," has also been published in the. April 1980 issue of
The Futurist. It suggests that the inherent characteristics
of the bioresource (it is alive; a ubiquitous, continuous store-
house; resilient, versatile and renewable; self-balancing, full
of feedback mechanisms; bulky, limited by natural cycles, variable
and finite; interconnected; and essential to human survival)
have far-reaching implications for future beliefs, concepts,
plans, institutions, power structures and international relations.
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
A related line of work in this area resulted from an Aspen
Institute international seminar we organized on "Growth, Values
and the Quality of Life." For two weeks in Aspen during the
summer of 1977, 45 people from eight countries and 33 professions
probed the "growth ethic" and tried to determine what its successor
as an organizing principle for the future might be. Drawing
on these discussions, Thomas W. Wilson, Jr. and I wrote a long
essay (published by the Aspen Institute as a short book entitled
Humangrowth) which tried to describe "the transition we are in"
as people grope for new attitudes toward growth that stress
quality as well as quantity.
This line of thinking intersected with developments in the
Woodlands Conferences on Growth Policy, an ambitious ten-year
inquiry conceived and funded by George Mitchell and undertaken
in cooperation with the University of Houston. Two earlier
Woodlands Conferences had focussed on resource limits and
"alternatives to growth." A partnership among the Aspen
Institute, Mitchell Energy & Development Corp., the University
of Houston and its Center for Integrative Studies was formed
in 1978 to provide the intellectual framework for the 1979
conference on "The Management of Sustainable Growth." Eighteen
months of consultations and writings ensued. Eight preliminary
workshops were held during 1978 and 1979 -- one each in Berlin,
Tokyo and Ajijic, Mexico, four in,Houston and one in Aspen --
on topics as diverse as "Information as a Resource," "A Dialogue
Between Economists and Futurists," and "The Limits to Government."
Ten papers were commissioned from outstanding thinkers in the
public, private and academic sectors, and an open competition
was held for Mitchell Prize papers on growth policy. I have
edited one of the resulting books, on The Management of Sustainable
Growth (to be published in late 1980 by Pergamon Press) with
chapters by Daniel Yankelovich (with Bernard Lefkowitz), William
Lee Miller, Robert Hamrin, Eric Zausner, Willard Wirtz,. James
O'Toole, Walter Orr Roberts (with Lloyd Slater), Lincoln Gordon,
Thomas W. Wilson, Jr., William Sneath, Murray Weidenbaum,
Theodore Gordon, and Maurice Strong.
4. Issues of Governance
A longtime personal interest in the puzzle of how to wrap
"appropriate institutions" around new technologies led to requests
that I chair two national commissions on seemingly technical
issues. In both instances the really tough questions turned
out not to be technical in nature, but institutional -- that is,
issues of governance: what institutions should be built to
contain, channel and control new technologies so that they meet
human needs and serve human purposes?
The Committee on Remote Sensing for Development of the National
Academy of Sciences was charged with examining this new technology
for its potential value to developing countries and to suggest
U.S. policies on developmental and institutional issues to which
the technology gave rise. In the Committee's final report --
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
? ?
Resource Sensing from Space: Prospects for Developing Countries* --
a number o recommendations are made about how the U.S. government
can share this made-in-America technology with others in ways that
will keep it from becoming a source of international conflict
and make it a major assist to meeting human needs through devel-
opment.
The Weather Modification Advisory Board of which Secretary
of Commerce Juanita Kreps made me Chairman in 1977 was to evaluate
the state of scientific knowledge on weather modification in order
"to develop a comprehensive and coordinated national weather.
modification policy and a national program of weather modification
research and development." The Board held 12 public hearings
throughout the United States and organized international consult-
ations with experts from Canada, Mexico, Israel and a number of
Western European nations. Our report in two volumes provides,
the definitive analysis of the "state of the art," recommends
a major national commitment to research and development and
suggests the beginnings of an international regime in this field.
Senator Adlai Stevenson sponsored a bill to carry many of our
thoughts into action; his bill has just been approved by the
Senate.
In my letter of transmittal to Secretary of Commerce
Juanita Kreps I underlined the need for creative institution
building concurrent with the development of an underdeveloped
technology:
"The history of our time is sprinkled with instances
of new technologies running ahead of the social,
economic, environmental, international and institutional
thinking that should accompany them. Precisely because
the science and technology of weather resources manage-
ment are still at such an early stage, there is an
excellent chance in this field to do things right --
that is, for policy to be made and institutions to
be built in parallel with the scientific discoveries
and technological innovations."
The interaction of global technologies and global risks has
given rise to what Tom Wilson calls "planetary politics." No
major project has yet been built around these issues of govern-
ance which are by nature global in reach, but some Aspen Institute
projects such as "The Assessment and Alert of Major Hazards"
(a workshop organized by Elmore Jackson for the United Nations
Environment Programme) are beginning to cope with pieces of
the problem. And a growing volume of comment in the writings
*The report is available in English and in French from the
National Academy of Sciences -- National Research Council.
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
from this Program has tried to clarify the conceptual shift
that is underway. As I wrote in The Christian Science Monitor
at the end of 1978, "future trends in international politics
are obviously hard to predict. . .but many of the present signals
(among others the sudden awareness of global risk and the demand
for a global fairness revolution) do seem to be pointing in
the same direction: toward the spreading concept of the 'common
heritage of mankind'." Concepts first applied to the non-land
environments -- for example in the Antarctic Treaty, in the
Outer Space treaties, and in the Law of the Sea negotiations --
seem to be leaking back onto the land and its resources, both
natural and man-made.
Last summer in Aspen, the Program in International Affairs
with the help of a number of special consultants laid plans
for a major project to tackle The Future of International Governance.
Work has already begun on two reviews of what regional institutions
can and can't do, in the Western Hemisphere and in the Pacific
Basin area. (The latter project has now become a cooperative
venture of the Aspen Institute and the Humphrey Institute.) Work
along these lines will be a continuing concern of the Aspen
Institute, and will also find expression in the Humphrey Institute's
policy research activity.
5. Coping with Interdependence
Although much of our Program's effort has focussed on world
affairs, a continuing theme has been how to help U.S. institutions
adapt their aims and workways to rapid change in a world where
nations and functions are becoming more and more interdependent.
In 1974 a National Commission on Coping with Interdependence was
formed at the invitation of Robert 0. Anderson, Chairman of the
Aspen Institute's Board of Trustees, who served as the Commission's
chairman. The Program in International Affairs served as its
secretariat.
The Commission's task was "to assess the capacity of Americans
to cope with interdependence and consider what might be done to
enhance that capacity." The Commission held three meetings,
commissioned and published five major pamphlets, and issued a
challenging final report.* That report said it in a nutshell:
*The five papers in the Interdependence Series were: No. 1,
Michael W. Moynihan, "Attitudes of Americans on Coping with
Interdependence;" No. 2, Abraham M. Sirkin, "Living with Inter-
dependence: The Decades Ahead in America;" No. 3, Ward Morehouse,
"A New Civic Literacy: American Education and Global Interdependence;"
No. 4, Ralph L. Ketcham, "From Independence to Interdependence;"
No. 5, Adam Yarmolinsky, "Organizing for Interdependence."
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
? .
"We have learned that interdependence is not
something to be for or against, but a fact to be lived
with now and reckoned with in the future. . .The most
important adjustment of all will be to blur, then
erase, the psychic frontier between 'domestic affairs'
and 'international affairs'."
The Commission's legacy went well beyond its published work.
It led us directly into a number of assignments with the govern-
ment, corporations, trade unions and non-profit organizations
on how to organize for a more interdependent future. Among
the most interesting of these were a request by the Government
agency ACTION to think hard about the future of the Peace Corps*;
a role as a founding vice chairman of a new organization --
Global Perspectives in Education, Inc. -- that took on the
formidable challenge of infusing the K-12 curriculum with a global
perspective; a report to a Presidential Commission on the
administration of multilateral diplomacy; an invitation to discuss
the implications of interdependence with the governing board
of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; and an assignment
with the national leadership of the YMCA which helped them develop
an international twist to all their programming right down to the
community "Y".
And, of course, I have continued to try to explore in my
writings the complex implications of the deceptively simple notion
that the line between "domestic" and "international" is
irretrievably blurred. My article for the March 1979 volume of
the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
defines the reciprocal riddle of "the internationalization of
domestic affairs and the domestication of international affairs"
and calls special attention to the constructive role nongovern-
mental organizations can play in helping develop policies that
reflect this new reality.
Is there unity to be found in this diversity? Those of us
who have been working together on these disparate subjects think
so. The prism which is common to all Aspen International projects
has been a continuing interest in the development of workable
institutions -- international but also national and subnational
and multinational institutions that together comprise this century's
"third try at world order."
*The Future of the Peace Corps, an Aspen Institute Policy
Paper published in February 1977.
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
? ?
What is a "center of initiative"? We are not a "think-tank",
which implies a sizeable permanent staff doing basic research
or policy research or both; examples are Brookings or RAND and a
host of smaller. enterprises, some inside but many outside the
research universities. Our style has also been quite different
from the special-interest nonprof its which concentrate on action
to influence an important but narrow range of public policy --
environment policy, defense policy, the Mideast peace process,
Southern Africa, human rights, the taming or unleashing of multi-
national corporations.
The Aspen Institute is in a position to do something different:
to select the policy issues that are soon going to be important
(whether "urgent" or not); organize a process of catalytic analysis
using the basic research of others; use the Aspen Institute's
quite remarkable power to convene around hexagonal tables persons
from many professions and sectors of society and different cultures,
traditions and nations; try in this manner to clarify the issues
and identify who should be doing what about them; and deliver the
results in understandable form both to policy-makers (often by
involving them in the workshops and consultations) and to the
wider publics whose comprehension and support are necessary to
effective action by the action agencies.
We have tried to avoid a parti pris, a doctrinaire view-
point, a predictable stance. But we have wasted no time or
credibility in claims of neutrality, which is so often another
word for ineffectual hand-wringing. I have been guided, I
suppose, by the slogan that was tacked up on the corkboard
behind my desk when, years ago, I was.publisher of The Reporter,
a national magazine of facts and ideas: "Always Objective but
Never Impartial."
Our "center of initiative" has been nothing if not lean.
One Assistant Director, Judy Himes, doing double duty as policy
analyst and general manager. One secretary, Dottie Birch, cheerful
and indefatigable. Occasional help for a special project for example, two scientists and an extra secretary while I was chairing
the U.S. Weather Modification Advisory Board. Occasionally a
special associate or Fellow: this year, Michael Hirschfeld, a
young New Zealand businessman, joined us to learn more about
global interdependence and help develop the Pacific Basin project.
Beyond the core staff (no one with tenure), everything else
is handled by contracting out, commissioning papers, convening
meetings, hiring consultants, and lots of talking and writing.
The key tools for such an enterprise are a large phone bill, a
sizeable personal professional library and subject file, a happy
travel agency, and Xerox charges out of this world. Space and
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
? ?
services have been rented from our congenial landlord, the
Educational Testing Service in Princeton.
It has been an active, versatile and (we think) productive
litte think-shop, trying to make good on the Aspen Institute's
pretension to concentrate on "thought leading to action."
In this mode of operation, much depends on "networking" --
keeping in contact with the many relevant circles of consultation
which provide a constant source of stimulation, an almost over-
powering flow of other people's research and analysis, and a
ready market for one's own ideas and writings. My basic network
today consists of the 3,300 people to whom this letter is being
sent.
Reviewing my "outside" activities as part of planning for my
present transition, I have been struck with how few of them are
in any real sense "extracurricular" to the Aspen Institute I
have been trying to describe. They arise from the very process
of "networking." I find, to my mild astonishment, that I am a
more or less active participant -- Board member, committee-sitter,
consultant, adviser -- in 52 "outside" organizations: nonprofit
organizations, educational institutions, government agencies,
corporations, international organizations, professional associations.
Each of these relationships thus becomes part of the Aspen
Institute's network, and vice versa. And whatever contribution I
make to these interactive circles is directly attributable to
what I have been thinking and writing as the core of my responsibility
to the Aspen Institute.
It's a peculiar job, especially to a person whose professional
life has been mostly the exercise of executive leadership. It
requires an unusual degree of personal initiative -- unlike
executive responsibility in a large organization, where the momentum
is built in, actions are mostly reactive to the antecedent
actions of others, and the executive's task is very often not
to drive but to steer. But that is of course what has made it
such an attractively liberating way to make a living -- because
I have been encouraged to make my own agenda (and of course raise
money to carry it out), because I am expected to write and publish
on a wide variety of (to me) interesting subjects, and because
the "Aspen Institute family" consists of such bright, supportive
and congenial colleagues.
I am especially grateful to Joe Slater who has resisted the
normal temptation to bureaucratize, who illustrates in his own
day-to-day thinking that everything is related to everything else,
who understands that freedom often resides in ambiguity and
constructive looseness is the way to unleash administrative and
entrepreneurial energies. What Lao Tzu said of ruling a big
country also applies in our time to the management of a complex
organization of any size -- that it is like cooking a small fish,
too much handling will spoil it.
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
0 ?
I am therefore delighted to have been invited to remain a
part of the Aspen Institute family from my new base in Minneapolis,
serving as a Special Adviser on international programs and
continuing as a member of the Aspen Institute Program Council.
My new work with the University of Minnesota is thoroughly
compatible with this continuing relationship; conversion of the
Pacific Basin project to a joint venture is a current and choice
illustration.
A word, in conclusion, about my new institution building
task. In addition to its regular legislative support, the
University of Minnesota's new Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of
Public Affairs starts with an endowment of $13.5 million and a
fund-raising strategy designed to bring that total to $20 million.
Plans are also afoot to fund and erect a special Institute building
on the University's Minneapolis campus in honor of Hubert Humphrey.
During the coming years the Humphrey Institute will consequently
be one of those rarities in American higher education of the 1980s --
a growth enterprise.
It will, in fact, be three enterprises. What is already
in place comprises a dozen Institute faculty members, two dozen
adjunct faculty members drawn from other parts of the University
and 125 graduate students in master's degree programs focussed
on planning and on public affairs and administration.
We are proposing to add a battery of offerings aimed at men
and women in mid-career who are graduating from successful
specialists to general managers in public and private enterprise
and other career lines (legislators, top journalists, research
administrators, non-profit entrepreneurs) which seem to demand
the skills, understandings and attitudes of the situation-as-a-
whole person.
We will also have, and can attract, the resources to function
as a research-and-analysis institute focussing on public-policy
issues and the advanced study of governance -- local, state,
national and international. Hubert Humphrey was quite capable
of addressing with equal vigor a single family's problem one
minute and advocating nuclear arms control or food for peace the
next. The Institute built in his honor will try to be equally
versatile, and if possible equally vigorous.
In accepting the University of Minnesota Regents' invitation
to direct the Humphrey Institute, I defined the mandate as "education
for reflective leadership," and suggested that the Institute would
need "to work across the University with every discipline and
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6
0 0
profession, and outside the University with diverse local,
national and international communities that are trying to clarify
the purposes and develop the techniques for getting things done
in the public interest.".
This mailing includes the text of what I said to the Board
of Regents that day along with a descriptive brochure of the
Humphrey Institute. Also enclosed.in addition to the piece
mentioned earlier -- "The Renewable Way of Life" -- is a center-
fold published in The Christian Science Monitor on December 27,
1979 reviewing the decade of the seventies. Another enclosure is
an example of public responsibility in action: an address by
William Sneath, Board Chairman of Union Carbide, at our Woodlands
Conference on Growth Policy. I am also enclosing for your
convenience a list of my recent writings during the past three
years.
Our Princeton office will self-destruct on August 1, 1980.
Thereafter I can be reached at the Minnesota addresses given on
the first page of this letter. The major writings listed in the
enclosure, and other published works from the Aspen Institute's
Program in International Affairs from 1974 to 1980, can be procured
from the following address: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies,
Publications Office, Wye Plantation, P.O. Box 150, Queenstown, MD
21658.
Do not suppose that my professional and geographical shift
will make it harder to keep in touch. My mailing list, from
which it is quite difficult to escape, travels with me to
Minneapolis. If you visit that -lively community, Lois and I
hope that you will let us know. In any event, I look forward
to hearing from you, and communicating with you, as time and
energy and the rising cost of postage permit.
Approved For Release 2009/08/17: CIA-RDP05T00644R000200690011-6