Improve Foster Care
While improving the adoption process for foster children is admirable, and it’s pretty scary to realize that such simple things as improving phone contacts are needed, I wish the researchers had broadened their scope to look at the problems of foster care and alternatives other than adoption (in response to the article "The Waiting Game" by Lory Hough, spring 2005 Bulletin. Many children go into foster care beyond the age when they are candidates for adoption, even children without special needs, and many of them have been traumatized to the point they cannot adjust to even good foster homes, let alone the bad foster homes in which they’re more apt to find themselves.

As a current guardian ad litem volunteer, and as an orphaned 14-year-old who spent time in a good foster home and in a home for girls run by nuns back in the 1950s, I urge research into improvements in foster care and the reintroduction of orphanages. I have known many foster children and state wards and would not characterize our experiences as “horrible” just because we didn’t have an intact family. And I don’t think we’re the resilient survivors who lucked out.

Read more in my recently published childhood memoir, Me May Mary.

Mary Cameron Kilgour MPA 1973,
PhD 1982
Gainesville, Florida

Dick Neustadt
As a member of the first class of the MPP program (1969-70), I have been following with interest the tributes to Richard Neustadt in the Bulletin. Simply put, Dick was the most inspiring teacher of my academic career, and that first year of the MPP program was by far the most challenging and involving I ever experienced.

When I came to Cambridge as a naive freshman in the fall of 1960, I expected a Harvard education to be like strolling though the grove with Socrates. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed. The 1969-70 MPP year was the nearest thing to my ideal imaginable. It was a true community, faculty and students working together to forge
a new way of learning. It was in effect a

one-room school with 10 teachers and 15 students. All our classes were in the same room at Littauer, the students staying put while the faculty rotated through four core seminars. The communication was multidimensional; it was an amazingly equalitarian environment. Senior faculty like Dick Neustadt and Tom Schelling, junior faculty like Dick Zeckhauser and Graham Allison, shared ideas and public policy war stories across the table with the students. Conversations over Elsie’s roast beef sandwiches at the IOP further enriched the experience. And the students were an amazing group — Denis Hayes KSGP 1970, Harvey Fineberg MPP 1972, Mark Moore MPP 1971, and Mark Rosenberg MPP 1972, just to name a few.

A key part of the experience was the interaction between the worlds of academe and politics, as most of the faculty had extensive government experience, Dick Neustadt foremost among them. And in the spring of 1970, the real world burst in upon the program with a vengeance. Three students left Cambridge to help launch the first Earth Day with Senator Gaylord Nelson. The Cambodia invasion brought tear gas to Cambridge and the unexpected phenomenon of senior MPP faculty going outside the insider system to lodge a public protest with their former colleague Henry Kissinger. I’ve wondered if the intimate and informal relationship these men had with their MPP students affected their decision to take this unexpected step.

I too left the MPP program at the end of the academic year, returning to West Virginia to work for the reform movement in the United Mine Workers union. I’m still in West Virginia, but look back with fondness at that extraordinary moment in educational history, the first year of the Program in Public Policy, and remember with gratitude that extraordinary man who brought it all together, Dick Neustadt.

Gibbs Kinderman MPP 1970
Dunmore, West Virginia

Let’s Hear from You
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