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Institute Important to UndergraduatesTo the editors:
I was more than a little dismayed by comments in your editorial, "A Difference of Nomenclature" (Editorial, Oct. 4). Applauding the closure of the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), you questioned the opening of the new Center for International Development (CID) under not-so-new management. I can't comment on the effectiveness or propriety of either organization, as I'm a new arrival to the school. However, new or not, I do feel qualified to respond to your short-sighted comment, "We wonder how much good such organizations do for us in the first place."
This is an institution that exists solely to promote the development of health, literacy, wealth and education in the poorest two-thirds of our world. They tackle debt-relief and malaria while the rest of us navel-gaze our way through the status quo. So in my mind it doesn't matter if Harvard academics now have an opportunity through the center to communicate their ideas to and explore new solutions with Third World leaders. It doesn't matter that hundreds of students work with, research for and attend workshops given by the center. It doesn't really matter if organizations like this do any good for us in the first place. They exist here precisely because, in the wealthiest university in the wealthiest country in the world, we don't need them.
Christopher J. Blattman
Oct. 5, 2000
The writer is a graduate student at the Kennedy School of Government.
•
CID Brings Harvard to the World
As an alumnus of the College and a former employee of the HIID, I found lamentable The Crimson's editorial "A Difference of Nomenclature" (Editorial, Oct. 4). It demonstrated not only a profound misunderstanding of basic facts but terribly misguided reasoning.
Contrary to your claim, research at HIID was, in fact, "directly passed to graduate [and] undergraduate students." For years, virtually all of the courses taught on development issues throughout the University (including the economics department, the Kennedy School of Government, and the School of Public Health) have been taught by staff of either HIID or CID.
Similarly, CID is an excellent student resource, as many will attest--including its graduate student fellows, members of the undergraduate International Development Club and the 120 students in the new master's degree program in Public Administration in International Development launched last year at the Kennedy School, largely under CID's initiative.
Worse than simply misunderstanding the facts, you misread the role and value of both organizations. HIID served as a link between Harvard and the world, transferring some of its enormous expertise to billions of people living in developing countries, and in turn providing researchers and students throughout the University with real-world information and real-life experience.
For its part, CID operates, along with countless other centers at the University, at the crucial points of intersect between teaching, research and policy. In this context, your protest against University "institutions that...have a distinctly non-academic purpose" seems to imply that you believe Harvard should strive to be more of an ivory tower. A novel position, certainly.
In this age when Harvard is able to earn a 30 percent return on its $19 billion endowment in a single year, while something like one quarter of the world's population tries to survive on less than a dollar a day, organizations like these represent the only thing standing between this University and a complete abrogation of its responsibilities to humanity.
You wonder "How much good such organizations do for us in the first place." I suppose it depends who you mean by "us."
Amar Hamoudi '96
Oct. 4, 2000
The writer is a graduate student at the Kennedy School of Government.
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