REVIVING THE GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT

Although the Founding Fathers may not have anticipated it, political parties and pressure groups are today the very life of the American governmental process. To attempt to study our system without studying its parties and pressures is to try to make an omelet when you haven't any egg.

Yet such is the lamentable situation in which the Harvard Department of Government finds itself. Most ironical of all, that Department has among its members E. Pendleton Herring, one of the country's stand-outs in the party-pressure field. In previous years he has taught an excellent undergraduate course on this subject, but his recent appointments as Secretary of the Littauer School and Departmental Examiner have left him time for little else. Mr. Herring's interests and abilities are first and foremost as scholar and teacher, yet his new administrative duties prevent him from following these natural inclinations. Here is a manifest example of wasted resources.

Instead of bringing someone from outside Harvard to lecture on parties, as now seems intended, the Department should indulge in a little judicious juggling of present assignments. In this way Mr. Herring could be freed to teach Government 12 once again.

The gap in the political parties field, while the most immediate, is only one of several approaching breaches in the Governmental wall. Assuming that present decisions about the assistant professors are carried through, a number of other subjects as basic and important as party government, will also become untended.

If the choice of John Sly as lecturer on local government is any criterion, the Department seems to plan to make temporary appointments until faculty instructors are ready to take over the various vacated fields. Such a solution can only be frowned upon. Special lecturers, while they may cope with the teaching problem, can never be adequate tutors; they are simply not familiar enough with the lay of the land.

Inexorably one returns to the "frozen" associate professorships as the only satisfactory answer. By extending these appointments to the key men among its departing assistant professors, the Government Department can prevent the appearance of any further gaps in its teaching and tutoring program. By juggling its assignments, the Department can have each member doing the work for which he is temperamentally and technically best fitted. A king could wish no more.