79 JFK AND BEYOND

Richard Neustadt as Teacher
by Francis Bator

Below are remarks made at the dedication of the Neustadt classroom on October 6, 2004, by Francis Bator, Kennedy School emeritus professor.

Thank you, David Rubenstein, for this marvelous classroom: it makes me want to become un-emeritus. Though perhaps daunted by the fancy machinery, Dick would have loved it.

In Jerry Bruner’s book of essays, In Search of Mind, there is a chapter about a Cambridge supper club Bruner belonged to. He described the members as people all hugely generous in giving of themselves. He called the chapter “Extravagant People.”

Dick Neustadt was, in that sense, an extravagant man, not least in his “triple play” as scholar, teacher, and creator of this school.1

As teacher — unlike many fine teacher-lecturers — Dick’s focus was not on himself as performer, producer of pearls for their own sake. I think he thought of his role as director-
impresario: prodding his students to learn and think about how people in institutions concerned with governance, politics, and policy interact, how they do business — how they should do business so as to do good in the world.

Unlike many would-be Socrates who don’t listen, Dick was not only a creative, conversational talker, but a creative listener. He knew how to let you know when you talked nonsense — a slight frown, that quizzical, slightly distant look — but also had a way of reading sense into what you said even when there wasn’t any there. He intervened not to score points or just to be heard, but to share insight, or, often, for a hearty laugh — he loved to laugh.

Dick Neustadt cared deeply for his students — and they knew it. But being a Mr. Chips wasn’t what he was about. His goal was to induce them to become effective public servants in the widest sense, perhaps even what he called policy officials. It is where he himself started before drifting into academics after Ike beat Stevenson in 1952. The driving impulse, I suspect, was how to make the government at the policy level work better.

Dick’s aim in creating this place — and make no mistake, he was the behind-the-scenes impresario — was all of a piece: to leverage and institutionalize what he did in the classroom, and in the Oval Office too.

When he first spoke about the need for a brand new flagship program within the school to train talented students for public service and would I chair it, my self-serving first reaction was why? I had come back from Washington to re-immerse myself and teach technical economics; the IOP stuff on the side was mostly cheerful play.2

What turned me was Dick’s vision of the kind of students we would recruit. Fill a class of about 25 students with a mix of young Bob McNamaras, Harry Hopkinses, Roger Joneses, and Franklin Roosevelts. Lock them in a classroom together. Teach to weakness. Not, God save us, try to turn the FDRs into McNamaras or vice versa. But to get each to understand why they would need each other, their respective strengths and limitations, and to learn how to use each other. By osmosis, to teach each other. Design the content accordingly, ranging from serious quant stuff to a lot of case-study learning of institutional politics and management, with lots of team exercises in policy design and implementation.

For most, I suspect it turned out to be the most intense learning and teaching experience of our lives. Bloody hard work, but enormous fun. (It turned out not to be easily scalable — I suspect that’s a problem to this day. I hope the school will keep trying.)

Dick Neustadt loved the business of governance. Government was not a necessary evil. And it wasn’t just for night-watchman functions. He understood and valued the great decentralizing efficacy of private markets, prices and all that. But a civilized society needed active government. It was the means for institutionalizing our “collective aspirations” or if you will, our individual aspirations for intrinsically collective stuff, and for “justice as fairness.” And that took a lot of classy people. He would motivate and train them, and, for scale, create an institution to that end. He did. It was quite a show.

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1 For Dick as scholar-writer, suffice it to urge you all to read — Dick loved it — Charles Jones’s marvelous essay, “Richard E. Neustadt: Public Servant as Scholar” (Annual Review of Political Science, 2003). And because it tells you a lot about Dick as a writer, I’ll steal Mark Twain’s maxim from Ernie May’s Memorial Church talk: for Dick Neustadt “the difference between the right word and the almost right word was the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

2 I understood why law school wasn’t quite right: all about bright lines or fuzzy limits, not mainly about choices and trade-offs. But — I remember saying — what about a PhD in economics? Of course, economic theory ignored institutions, but if you had institutional sense, you didn’t need courses, and if you were tone-deaf, courses wouldn’t help you. That was mostly nonsense. For one thing, it ignored motivation/socialization.