Interview with Harlan Cleveland

Introduction by Richard Farson

It is a special pleasure and unique challenge introducing Harlan Cleveland. Recalling from memory his important positions in such a range of activities, his distinction as a leading public executive and his many contributions to the betterment of this world simply makes one's mind swim. Beginning as a Princeton graduate and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Harlan has headed aid programs in China and Italy, working with the Marshall plan, edited and published the highly regarded Reporter magazine, served as dean of the Maxwell School of Politics at Syracuse University, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations and then US Ambassador to NATO in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, president of the University of Hawaii, head of international programs for the Aspen Institute, professor at the University of Minnesota and head of its Hubert Humphrey Institute of World Affairs, president of the World Academy of Art and Science--have I forgotten any--probably. Add to all this his several books, and articles beyond counting, most recently his book describing the twilight of hierarchy, Nobody in Charge. We are very fortunate to have him as a long time faculty member at WBSI and now an ILF Fellow. His experiences are so rich and his expertise so broad that this interview could take a variety of directions. So, welcome Harlan and thanks for being willing to submit to our questions.

Participant
There are so many doors I could open with this first question, but let me start with a biographical one. What about your younger years might have led you to choose the life of service that your distinguished resume outlines?

Participant
Harlan, I should enjoy hearing your answer to Dick's question, but if you are not fed up with talking yet again about what appears to me to be a central question of world civilization, I would be grateful for your views on the best way to deal with the rehabilitation of Iraq.

I remember the discussions held here prior to the Iraq war, in which the wisdom/morality/justification for a preemptive strike against a demonstrably oppressive regime with proven expansionist tendencies and a total disregard for international discipline, were thoroughly aired.

That conflict was won with remarkable speed and efficiency, and with a considerable degree of domestic support from the population of United States. It has become obvious since then, that the application of overwhelming superior force leading to the rapid collapse of formal resistance, is unable to redirect itself to the job of rebuilding a stable and peaceful society in that conquered country, much less to fostering support for democratic individualism.

These are early days yet, and Rome, they say, was not built in a day, it took a lot longer.

We tend in modern democracies to desire instant satisfaction. We seem to forget the lessons of the past, or to realize how long it took to establish the freedoms we now take for granted.

As a Scotsman descended from a tribal society, I realize there were many steps in the long procession of change, from the paramount priority of the group, to an enhanced priority for the individual.

In your previous experience with a defeated Germany, in spite of the devastation you encountered, you were rehabilitating a non tribal society. It still took a long time, but at least in the western side, the result was a viable democracy.

I would be most interested to hear your views on how you think the United States should act to ensure that the victory of the war is not lost in the the aftermath of the reconstruction of Iraq.

Harlan Cleveland
Dick: I suppose the honest answer to any variant of "How did you get this way?" is "I don't really know." I'll just provide some clues and let you speculate.

My father was an Episcopal student chaplain -- at Princeton, then in Madison at the University of Wisconsin. But just before that he had been an Army chaplain, and died when I was 8 of the aftereffects of being gassed by the Germans in World War I. So I hardly knew him, and was raised (with two brothers and a sister) by my mother, an altogether remarkable woman. My father died while running a church-related school cum sisterhood cum parish outside of Cincinnati, and my mother promptly decided to take her four children to live in France -- where she had grown up bilingual (she probably thought that would be good for us, too) because her father was a longtime Consul General there in Nice.

We were in France for a year and in the French part of Switzerland for two more (from age 9 to 12, in my case). That experience made me an international-affairs buff for life; whenever there was a chance to go abroad, I always tried to make it come true.

While I was at Princeton I spent two of my three summers on scholarship opportunities abroad, one to Europe and one to Japan and China. I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship because it was abroad. During World War II, I couldn't serve in the military (one eye was permanently injured in a childhood accident), but I got a chance to be (as a civilian) part of the military government of Italy, stayed there for a year after the war with the UN's huge "relief and rehabilitation" program, then stayed with UNRRA for another year to manage its program in China.

I won't string out the story (it's summarized in my Nobody in Charge book), but my lifelong interest in how people work together despite different cultures and languages and prejudices has expressed itself in action and in writings for more than half a century. Somehow this primary interest didn't lead to a career in law or business, though I suppose it could have. It led me first into government, then journalism, then academia, then alternating among those early kinds of opportunities.

If it's been a "life of service," the service has been pretty miscellaneous. I always took whatever "next job" seemed to offer the most excitement, and found as I went along that the best new jobs required me to do what I didn't already know how to do. In the end, I suppose, I became a generalist -- and later, perhaps in consequence, defined leadership as "the get-it-all-together profession."

That's a long answer to a short question. (It could have been much longer, but dinner was waiting.) I'll tackle tomorrow Sandy's question about Iraq, which he defines as "a central question of world civilization."

Participant
Dear Harlan, Your experiences in Hawaii, University of Minnesota, and the World Futures Society lead me to ask you a question about our institutions and future thinking. This last weekend I attended a meeting of architects and educators in Sante Fe. They were there to explore the future of architectural education. Stewart Brand was one of the speakers and he encouraged the group to slow down in order to make wiser decisions about the future. Can we really afford to slow down? Can we get wisdom and speed working together in the future? My hope is that you might have an agenda for us that combines speed, wisdom, and hope. Do you have such a vision?

Harlan Cleveland
Sandy's question about postwar policy in Iraq requires me to back up and "review the bidding." Some of our puzzlement today stem from what our own government has done, and how it was done.

1. I thought it was a wise and relevant decision, in response to 9/11, to go after al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. It could and should have been done with a broader coalition, since we surely knew that both a broader coalition and UN sponsorship would be essential in dealing with the aftermath. After the partial military success ("partial" because we didn't disable al Qaeda or capture Osama bin Laden), the U.S. treated Afghanistan as a lower priority, presumably because the Bush Administration was already aiming at Iraq. So we won the military battle but haven't won even that war.

2. The Bush Administration's determination to invade Iraq and knock off Saddam Hussein was evidently so strong that it (a) trumped the U.S. diplomatic effort to build a coalition and secure a UN mandate comparable to the one built by Bush I a decade ago, and (b) led to a succession of rationales that made prospective allies more and more reluctant and many Americans more and more uncomfortable.

3. In the narrowest military terms, the invasion of Iraq was successful, with one glaring exception: the planning for what should happen next. Here I'm influenced by my own youthful experience, in WWII, as the (civilian) executive director of the economic section of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) in Italy. There the military planners knew that "civil affairs" (the "G-5" military function) had to be part of the invasion from the very start. Indeed, before I went to Rome in 1944, I was already helping to calculate the need for food rations in Sicily and Southern Italy. And as the Allies (US and British) pushed up through Italy, the military government (the ACC) was literally right alongside the fighting troops -- organizing local governments, making sure that police were on duty, getting the lights back on, making sure enough food rations (e.g., 300 grams of pasta per day per person) were immediately available, and facilitating the rapid development of a new government, a coalition of the "partigiani" (partisan parties) that had helped get rid of Mussolini's Fascist regime. [When the German troops withdrew from Florence, members of my staff who were art and architecture experts actually went in AHEAD of the Allied troops, to plaster the artistic artifacts with "Off Limits" signs in a successful effort to reduce the temptation -- of incoming troops and local vandals -- to collect souvenirs.]

4. Planners for the Iraq invasion evidently thought, despite much prior U.S. military experience, that "civil affairs" was something to be done AFTER the war was won. The military civil-affairs unit remained cooped up in Kuwait until much too late. An urgent need for people who knew how to fix electricity systems was only belatedly realized. When a new civilian administrator was put in place, he mistakenly disbanded the Iraqi army and police units that would be needed to discourage looting and maintain a semblance of order.

Even the strictly military planning obviously fell short -- in not anticipating the backlash against the occupation and its local helpers, in not anticipating that Iraq (especially the Baghdad area) would become a Mecca for foreign terrorists, in apparently assuming that Iraqis would see the occupiers as liberators.

So much for background, in admittedly sketchy summary. We don't merely need to "go on from here." We need to recover from a whole series of poor planning decisions. In a second message, later today or tonight, I'll address more directly Sandy’s question: "the best way to deal with the rehabilitation of Iraq." But I thought it would first be useful to remind ourselves how we helped dig the hole that both the Iraqis and we Americans are now in.

Participant
Harlan, your description of our getting into this difficult situation seems to assume, quite explicitly with respect to Afghanistan, and implicitly with Iraq, that these two military ventures were appropriate responses to 9/11, but just poorly organized and planned. I think, quite apart from the failures you mention, our invasion of Afghanistan legitimized and precipitated Sharon's invasion of Gaza and the West Bank and the bombing of Syria, and turned world opinion even more dangerously against us, that negative opinion only to be further exacerbated by our "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq. You seem only to be interested in the planning mechanisms, not in the foreign policy. That surprises me.

Harlan Cleveland
Dick, we may just have to agree to disagree about Afghanistan. I think it was right to go after al Qaeda and its non-responsive protectors, the Taliban. That we didn't do it effectively, and didn't (apparently) intend to stay around for the "nation-building," is to be faulted. But I think 9/11 justified a major response. To go from there to an invasion of Iraq was a serious foreign-policy error, and to do it almost alone (just with the British) made the aftermath worse.

Harlan Cleveland
How "to deal with the rehabilitation of Iraq?"

My last extended stay in Iraq was two weeks in Basra in 1939, so I won't testify as an expert on the terrain. But I have flailed at "relief and rehabilitation" in Italy, China, and (more briefly) in parts of Asia and Africa -- never in Latin America, I'm afraid. What have I learned?

Lesson No. 1 was once succinctly expressed by Paul Hoffman, the man who converted the Marshall Plan into $13 billion (1948 dollars) of useful aid to more than a dozen countries in Western Europe. "Technical assistance," he said, "cannot be exported. It can only be imported."

Iraq is fortunate to have a large number of people who have been exposed to modern technology -- not only doctors and engineers, but (judging from recent reports) a good many people who are unusually willing to use modern information technologies such as cell phones, satellite TV, and computers.

It won't be like Western Europe: reconstituting what had already been industrial, or partly industrialized, societies. But it also won't be like starting "development" in the Congo, or Chad, or Tanzania, or Burma, or indeed most other Arab countries in the Middle East. In a generation a democratic Iraq, given its oil resources, could outstrip every one of its Arab neighbors in economic growth and in taking advantage of "informatization" -- if Iraqis don't waste too much time and human energy fighting among themselves.

Lesson No. 2 is education, education, education. All the Arab countries have been held back by educating too small a proportion of their populations in science and technology (even in mathematics, in which Arabs were once world-class), and in critical thinking. Religious education seems often to have been done at the expense of learning about the real world -- in contrast to the real-world relevance, for instance, of the schools, colleges, and universities developed by Roman Catholics (especially the Jesuits) and a number of Protestant and Jewish faiths, which have made such a contribution to the development of the U.S. during the past two centuries. If Iraq can invest enough in modern education, whether it's sponsored by secular or religious authorities, they'll find it will pay off handsomely in the "information century" just ahead of all of us.

This emphasis on education should pervade not only the rebuilding of schools and the development of first-rate higher education. Education of Iraqis should be a central purpose of every form of US and international aid. I don't know whether Halliburton or Bechtel have education-and-training of Iraqis as a main purpose in their contracts, but it should be. The purpose of technical aid in agriculture should be to leave behind Iraqi agricultural colleges, an Iraqi extension service, and Iraqi farmers who can make the most of their kinds of soils and the large amounts of fresh water that flow down through the country. And above all, the education of Iraqis in the myriad uses of information technologies should be front and center in Iraq's development strategy.

I'll stop with these two lessons; there are more, but these two seem the most important.

What I've said doesn't address the question "Who should be helping in the rehabilitation of Iraq?" Here I feel strongly that we should move rapidly to put the UN to work in Iraq. Most people seem to feel that the UN is mostly a talk-shop. But I have been personally involved in UNRRA, which after World War II played a major role in Italy, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, China, and elsewhere in very large programs. In China, UNRRA organized and financed the gigantic task of putting the Yellow River back into its old bed (it had wandered all over North China during World War II). That was an earth-moving job comparable to building the Panama Canal -- and is thus tied for second in world history (the Great Wall is clearly No. 1 in this category), the engineer in charge of it told me in 1947.

With our leadership and the wide support Kofi Annan and we could attract to the venture, the UN could take on the major responsibility of "rehabilitation" of Iraq -- if we can bring ourselves to stop thinking that nothing will be done right unless Americans do it and American taxpayers pay for it. Actually, many Americans would be natural recruits for an UNRRA-type mission in Iraq over the next five years or more. But the framework would be international. And that would make it (a) less controversial, (b) more attractive to experts from around the world, and (c) less expensive to the American people. We would have to pony up our considerable share of the cost, but that's a far cry from the cost of doing it all by ourselves.

I still haven't touched the security problem -- maybe both the most worrisome near-term issue and the most sensitive long-term issue. But I don't want to pretend to a military or police expertise I obviously can't claim -- and that gives me a chance to end this comment right here.

Participant
Harlan, thank you for that wise and thoughtful double response. I find myself in complete agreement with everything you have said both with regard to mistakes made by the military in the aftermath of victory, and in the long term needs for technical assistance and education. If those two requirements are properly organized and financed, perhaps in a generation, we may see progress towards individualism and democracy. I agree with you also on the need to work under the auspices of the UN, and to bolster its involvement in any way we can in order to dilute the anger presently building against the United States and also because an international effort will be more acceptable than anything an army of occupation can do.

It's past midnight, but I didn't want to go to bed without expressing my appreciation for your replies, on which I would like to comment further, after a good sleep.

Participant
Harlan: Your lessons 1 and 2 lured me into asking myself how many of the Iraq shortcomings (especially in lesson 2) could apply to us. If we understood our own recent declines in education, international understanding, and Religious Right behavior we might be wiser in managing our Iraq problems.

I wonder if my perspective as stated above makes me part of a minority or a majority of citizens? Or for that matter, here among my colleagues in the ILF?

Participant
Harlan, in light of Don's comment, do you think that the US is the best country to export education, or might Iraq be better off taking models from Europe or the Far East? We don't seem to be doing all that well in educating for critical thinking.

Participant
Here is my after sleep comment, not that sleep necessarily improves it!

Harlan hasn't touched on the security problem, for very understandable reasons, and yet the ability to institute the long term solutions that he identifies, will probably depend on how well the security problems are resolved.

I admit to having very little experience in military or police expertise either, but as Honorary Lt. Colonel of a Reserve Regiment in Edmonton, I find myself, at least mentally, struggling with the question of how our under-funded armed forces in Canada can make a useful contribution on the world stage.

The regular army, particularly in it's senior ranks, appears to be in favor of projecting the maximum battle efficiency it can squeeze out of a defense budget that is well below the percentage of GNP most NATO Allies allocate for that purpose. The Canadian Public, as well as many of the more junior ranks, appear to believe that Canad's role should be that of rehabilitation after the conflict has ended, with emphasis on deploying only in situations where the majority of both antagonists welcome their presence.

That is not to say that the armed forces should lose the ability to defend themselves if attacked, only that the emphasis changes from destruction to construction.

Returning to the Iraq situation. I have heard that the country is filled with arms and ammunition, and we have been made aware that the lack of security for the general public, particularly in urban areas, means that those who attack occupying forces are able to do so with impunity and with a large degree of public support. No guerrilla operation can succeed without public support.

Historically, invading armies have always faced the problem of subduing the remnants of resistance. Usually they have done so by spreading fear and despair among the conquered. The Romans were unrelenting in their treatment of newly conquered peoples. Only when thy had established complete control, did they extend the benefits of their civilization.

Ghengis Khan, gave those with whom he warred the opportunity to surrender, but if they did not, he cut off one hand of those he did not kill outright, and sent them across the land "pour encourages les autres". His custom was to kill those who ruled the defeated enemy , and to install the second in command, with orders to wring tribute from his own people. If the result was not satisfactory Ghengis Khan would repeat the process.

The British colonial system often deposed defeated rulers, and exiled, rather than killing them, but the principal was the same. When dealing with tribes, you must replace antagonistic or ineffective tribal leaders, with those who are effectively compliant, and you must give them the support they need to remove internal threats to their rule.

It is becoming clear, as it should have been from the beginning, that Iraqis must deal with Iraqis, or the put it more specifically, each tribal unity, whether ethnic or religious, must be dealt with through a change of leadership, to one that will cooperate with the United States.

There must be more incentives to give up arms than to retain them. Probably the late King Hussein of Jordan did this most effectively in recent times when, after the Palestinian uprising of Black September, he announced that he intended to search every house in Amman for weapons, and that if as much as a smell of gun oil or a single round of ammunition was discovered, the house containing it would be bulldozed to the ground After the destruction of about a hundred houses there was a remarkable rush to give up hidden arms.

I suppose what I am questioning is that, while historical precedent seems to indicate that a certain ruthlessness is necessary if one is to establish the stability that new policies require, can this be done, given the power of a competitive media on the emotions of a generally compassionate international public?

That, it seems to me is the battle that continues. It is for the hearts and minds of Iraqis, but it is being fought in the hearts and minds of the world.

Harlan Cleveland
James: I'm interested, and surprised, to learn that Brand thinks it's necessary to slow down in order to "make wiser decisions about the future." My experience has been, if anything, the opposite -- that is, flashes of useful intuition have come when I am most heavily engaged, most focused on a crisis situation.

I remember, for example, a moment during the Cuba Missile Crisis when we were awaiting a next message from Khrushchev. It was already after midnight, but I couldn't go home and I equally couldn't sit down at my desk and plow through the in-box. What I did instead was clear the desk, get out a blank writing pad (we didn't yet think at a computer keyboard, the way I do now), and wrote down the lessons I had learned, in this crisis and others, about crisis diplomacy. It wasn't long before those notes became an article in Foreign Affairs, and later a chapter in a book of mine (The Obligations of Power, Harper & Row, 1966), with remarkably few editorial changes from that first midnight draft. Being immersed in a crisis seemed to clarify my ideas and sharpen my capacity to write them down clearly.

I don't think, and I gather you don't either, that slowing down is the road to wisdom. For me, at least, the need to think hard and fast generates a greater capacity for integrative thinking, puts to work more effectively the mind's ability to combine rational thinking with intuitive insight -- and to come up, sometimes quite suddenly, with the wisdom that comes from stirring together rational and non-rational thought.

I like your vision: to "combine speed, wisdom, and hope." Don't believe it when people tell you to slow down in order to think. That may work for others, I don't know. But as Josiah Royce said, "Thinking is like loving and dying; each of us must do it for himself."

Participant
Harlan, I appreciate so much this thoughtful response from you and I'm sharing it here in Atlanta and Chicago with the Design Futures Council. Thanks for this perspective. The great insights that you provide reminds me to to put your most recent book, Nobody in Charge: Essays on the Future of Leadership in my briefcase for this next airplane read.

Harlan Cleveland
Sandy and James: Many thanks for your appreciative remarks. I've found this process very valuable in concentrating my mind. In the two-burst reply to Participant on Iraq, I organized on paper for the first time quite a collection of reactions to the news of the last couple of years. And in addressing the good question about "wisdom and speed," I found that I had not written down, as clearly as I tried to do in that reply (7:14), some thoughts that I had developed mostly "on the hoof" -- that is, as a practitioner, not as a theorist. So I'm at least as grateful to you as you said you were to me.

Harlan Cleveland
In their comments 7:10 and 7:11, Don Strauss and Dick Farson tossed off questions somewhat veiled as statements. It would certainly be better for the wisdom of our own foreign policy if we Americans better understood our own shortcomings. But Don, isn't it also true that focusing too heavily on our own shortcomings risks paralyzing us in dealing with shortcomings of others? Our human-rights escutcheon is too often blotched by failure to practice what we preach. But that surely doesn't mean we should shut up about international human rights until we're perfect.

On Dick's question about exporting education, I could (and maybe should) write a book-length essay. But for now, I'll boil my reaction down to a few sentences:

Yes, our education system and performance are far from perfect, far from a universal model. But even our K-12 schools develop more capacity for critical thinking than the rote-based practices found in many other countries -- including many in Europe and East Asia which Dick cites as better models. As you go up toward higher education, U.S. colleges and universities are very widely preferred by students from abroad -- which has been very good for "global perspectives" in our own educational systems. And admission to U.S. graduate schools is eagerly sought by some of the world's best graduate students from all over the world -- except when we stiff-arm them as we've been doing recently with students from the Middle East.

I shouldn't think we'd want to "sell" a U.S. "model" to Iraq or anywhere else. Sometimes it does make sense to amalgamate educational wisdom from two or more foreign systems. (In 1959,when I was dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse, I went with Sir Noel Hall of Britain's Administrative Staff College to invent, at Pakistan's invitation, the large Administrative Staff College in Lahore -- a plan that drew lessons not only from the UK and the US but also from the pre-existing government-service college at Hyderabad, India. The Lahore College is still the main mid-career schooling required for Pakistani civil servants; army officers come up through another system, so I won't take any responsibility for General Musharraf.)

When I was circulating during the '70s in the international club of university presidents, I learned enough about other higher education systems to be impressed with our comparative excellence. At the same time, I was full of criticisms of American practice -- especially with our sluggish discovery of the need to squash the vertical disciplines together to achieve wisdom. One of my themes in those days was a complaint that no university in the world was bold enough to offer a doctoral degree in "getting it all together."

So in short -- and it hasn't been, I'm afraid -- I don't think we need to opt out of any opportunity to help develop schools elsewhere, including in Iraq. (But I do think it would work out much better if the civil-affairs function for Iraq, including schools, became an international commitment expressed in an international organization like UNRRA.)

Participant
Harlan, thanks for that most thoughtful response. I agree with you about the desirability of US higher education throughout the world. Having been a dean myself, at a brand new institution, I know the advantages of starting something from scratch. And I know the difference between what we know is a better way to educate, and what we generally are able to accomplish. But maybe we would do a better job of exporting education than we are conducting it. At least we would be trying to apply our most recent advances. But our educational programs in elementary and secondary schools are so far from perfect that we should look at them very carefully before exporting that model.

Participant
Harlan: I surely agree that we shouldn't "shut up" about human rights, and it was just clumsy writing if that seemed my message. But I do think that our earlier insistence that we should be the only "teacher" of of the good and wise conduct of a "reborn" Iraq was clumsy at best, and our effort now to get others to help is not getting many offers.

I also agree that our best universities are highly regarded around the world. But a visit to any of the top campuses reveals that enthusiasm for their excellence draws as many foreign students as Americans. I do not think (and I hope you will give us more of your perspective on this) that we are turning out current cohorts of graduates that are as well trained as several generations ago.

I especially applaud the following sentence of yours: "One of my themes in those days was a complaint that no university in the world was bold enough to offer a doctoral degree in "getting it all together." The College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, gives a masters degree in HUMAN ECOLOGY. There are many definitions of that degree, but mine is "THE NEW SPECIALTY OF BEING A GENERALIST. The medical profession has pioneered in this by their new specialty of FAMILY DOCTOR. Training for that specialty is as long as for surgeons or internists, and its goal is to produce doctors who see their patients as an integrated human, not as a bosom, a heart, or a eye. The family doctor will send his/her patients to another doctor with special skills, but will keep track of the treatment as it effects the whole person. I hope one day this will be a theme for another book authored by you.

Harlan Cleveland
Dick, I hope we won't even think of our K-16 schooling experience as a "model." But there are, of course, many examples of good concepts and good performance, not only in the private sector (I was exposed to one, Phillips Academy Andover), but in some of the charter schools and other public-education experiments in many of the States. So if we can carefully pick and choose what to "export," we have something to teach even about pre-university education.

But it depends of course on who is picking and choosing. If General Boykin and his protectors in the Bush Administration are deciding what to export,.....

Participant
I'm sure we agree on this. You have such a better way of phrasing the issues.

To change the subject. Let me see, how can I say this? In the twenty years or so that I've known you, I have always been impressed that you do not seem frustrated by your inability so far to fix the world. You have had positions of high status, and what would seem to others, great power (I realize powerful people seldom feel powerful because their reach often exceeds their grasp), you have written well received books and countless articles, you've published an influential magazine, reconstructed Italy, guided NATO. I'm of course mad at you--Rhodes scholar, tall and handsome and smart and well positioned -- the consummate insider. I thought you were going to fix everything, and it's still a mess. But you don't seem frustrated by that. You seem to be comfortable with your role. How do you do that?

Harlan Cleveland
It's a little late -- even with my unusual metabolism -- to tackle your wonderful question tonight. For a start I'll remind you of a phrase I've used in describing qualities of leadership: "unwarranted optimism." Further comment will follow tomorrow, in the interstices of my mandatory viewer-ship of two favorite football teams, the Washington Redskins and the Minnesota Vikings.

Harlan Cleveland
Dick, I'm late in answering your question -- too many medical appointments intervened.

But also, the more I thought about your 7:22, the more difficult, because fanciful, the question seemed to be. Does anybody really grow up thinking that he/she will "fix" the world? Even Alexander the Great can't have thought he would, and certainly didn't. (I remember a conversation in Iran many years ago in which Lois mentioned Alexander the Great, and a Persian woman with her said gently, "My dear, around here we just call him Alexander.")

Once I got into executive jobs and got to know other ranking executives, I was constantly struck by the contrast: people watching from the outside thought I was somehow "powerful," while I was much more likely to be focusing on all the events I couldn't control, all the influential people who wouldn't follow my lead, all the circumstances in which my "powers" seemed miniscule by comparison with the problems that needed solving. And the more "important" people I got to know, the more I observed that the wisest of them were similarly baffled by the general impression that they were all-powerful, by contrast to their own feeling of reach always outrunning grasp, by a country mile.

This feeling of comparative impotence has fortunately been often offset, in my experience, by learning (usually by accident) about individuals I encountered who remembered something I had said or written (even if it was a quote from someone else) that had created a clarifying moment in their lives and set them off on a new course that had proved just right for them. I came more and more to believe in the power of personal contact, less and less to believe in the power of organizations -- except those in which many people were acting together because they believed in a vision that someone (often not the "top" person) had helped them think was their own idea.

Isn't that a reasonable (or at least intuitive) way to achieve a generalized feeling of what I've been calling "unwarranted optimism"?

Anyhow, that's how I came to the notion that "Nobody in Charge," which was hard to formulate (let alone sell) as a general prescription for society, was nevertheless an accurate way to describe most of the activities of groups, small and large, that were getting where they really wanted to go -- that is, organizations that "worked."

Participant
Dear Harlan, can't resist coming in with "spot on" to your last message. Your comfort with the "nobody in charge" concept that you presented years ago has certainly made my life less stressful! Unwarranted optimism is a great help!! Thank you, Doug Strain

Participant
Beautifully said, Harlan. I guess all of us find those moments when something we said or did seems to make a difference. For example, I just learned that the German parliament is seriously considering a move to extend the vote to children, with parents as proxies before age twelve (to help families that are losing out to the voting power of the elderly). I read a report from a German who has been working in that movement for decades, and traces its impetus to the German translation of a book on children's rights I wrote in 1974. Made me smile.

I couldn't agree more with you about the power and importance of personal engagement--a surprisingly neglected management process. But I wonder if, by not going in opposite directions at once (which I think is necessary in almost all human affairs), you are overlooking the continuing power of organization. In almost all human affairs, form rules. Form is almost always victorious over content. And not always in a negative way. A round table creates a much more participative, informal and effective meeting than an oblong one. Hierarchy can and does effectively coexist with participation. The organization theorists I respect most, such as Mary Douglas and Elliott Jaques, whom you know, make a very strong case for hierarchy, stability, boundaries, etc.--showing how that can be more humane and effective structure than a fuzzier one. The newer management gurus would by and large agree with you, but they tend not to embrace the coexistence of opposites, as Mary and Elliott do. I think all agree that the new organizations, largely because of the effect of the Internet, will need to be as disorderly as life itself. But the power of form will persist, I'm sure. Design is the creation of form. I think that the best of the future leaders will combine an interest in both personal engagement and design.

Might we not find both personal engagement and organization design (social architecture) growing together? Indeed, isn't facilitative form necessary for personal engagement?

Raymond Alden
Dick says: "I guess all of us find those moments when something we said or did seems to make a difference."

I'm looking; I'm looking. <g>

Then: "the power of form will persist, I'm sure. Design is the creation of form."

I like that; I like that! The best designed form, I suspect, keeps itself in the background. It must exist, be perceived, but not dominate.

Participant
Harlan, I just want to say you are wonderful! You are clear, smart, and on the point. I cannot tell you how much I admire you.

All the best, Hallock

Harlan Cleveland
Doug, I very much appreciate your words. Coming from you, they are suffused with a warm glow. Makes it hard, at least for a few minutes, to feel modest.

Hallock, what nice things to say -- and "on the record," besides!

Ray, count me among those who have found "Aha" moments in your way of thinking. We probably number in the thousands.

Dick, as you know from other contexts, I am quite comfortable with the Janus-like posture, looking in two (or more) directions at the same time. The essays in my "Nobody in Charge" book are full of examples of paradox and contradiction as useful and usable ways of thinking. I certainly didn't mean to imply a put-down of organizations in what I said about the morale effect of learning that someone else had actually listened to, or thoughtfully read, something I had said or written.

After all, I've spent my life working with individual people to build organizations to get done what they and I thought was useful to get done. But I guess I always felt so acutely aware that organizations consist of people interacting with each other, that I had trouble thinking of them as disembodied or impersonal in the way some writers on organization development (any ILF Fellows excepted, of course!) make them sound.

Participant
Excellent way to put it, Harlan.

Much of your life, Harlan, has been directing programs in higher education. Professorships, a couple of dean-ships, president of a major university, the Aspen Institute. While our higher education in the US is the most desired in the world, I'm sure you found much that you would change if you could. Care to mention any of those things?

Harlan Cleveland
Dick, you're asking for a book, or at least the chapter of my memoirs (on my time at the University of Hawaii) that isn't written. But, when I'm fresher than I feel right now, I'll try to collect and get on paper some thoughts on higher education -- which I'll admit I have thought quite a lot about.

Harlan Cleveland
I have written a good deal about what's right and wrong in American higher education, and I'm really baffled by the request to bring it all into a screen-full, or even several screens full. The risk is to produce such a degree of oversimplication that it would distort beyond recognition the reality I would be trying to describe.

In the last 24 hours, I've surveyed my own writings on this subject, and have come up with one text which best expresses my point of view on higher education. I re-used parts of it in the last two chapters of my "Nobody in Charge" essay-book, of which anyone who reads this comment is likely to have a copy -- since the publisher, Jossey-Bass, kindly sent copies to all ILF Fellows a couple of years ago.

The full text, for those most diligently interested, is in "Conflict, Retrenchment, and Reappraisal: The Administration of Higher Education," the David D. Henry Lectures 1972-78, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1979. (My lecture in that series was presented in 1977; the published version includes the rather long, and I think interesting, Q & A session following my lecture.

The essence of that lecture, and of my way of thinking about higher education, was (and is) that we should be trying to prepare many more "situation-as-a-whole people" whose responsibility will increase in direct ratio to their ignorance of ever-expanding reality. (That should be paradoxical enough even for Dick Farson.) I'll quote just one overlong sentence from a long text:

"To be a situation-as-a-whole person is not a profession; it's an attitude toward all professions, a propensity to interest oneself especially in the interconnections among the traditional jurisdictions into which we have divided the life of the mind, a willingness to view every problem in global perspective, and one thing more -- the presumption to feel personally responsible for the whole outcome of which any individual's efforts can only be a small part." (reprinted in "Nobody in Charge, p. 200)

I've tried hard to make clear that espousing this pro-generalist view DOESN'T imply a bias against specialized expertise. Indeed, I have argued that the leader, who has to be a generalist, had better at some time of his/her life have known what it was like to be a first-rate specialist. As a leader in various contexts, I spent much of my time questioning experts about subjects they knew far better than I did; it was important to be able to judge whether they were getting to the bottom of their subjects.

What organizations do has to be a creative amalgam of specialized and situation-as-a-whole perspectives. But the tradition of higher education is mostly to produce good specialists -- and the high you go in graduate education, the more true that is. My argument has been that we should work equally hard to hone those parts of our students' minds and spirits that will enable them, earlier or later in life, to "get it all together."

Participant
Dear Harlan, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. I came across your writings while I was in Sweden in the early 1980s. From Sweden I requested some of your papers which you kindly sent me. I still have two of them.

Higher education: I am from Bangladesh. I was a university student and lecturer in physics at Dhaka during 1965-72. We had many US guest lecturers, especially in summertime. I was fascinated by them. We used the USIS library and their scientific films. These useful programs were discontinued because of Vietnam. US should export theit education system. It would be a great service to the under developed world.

UN involvement in Iraq: I think it is a bit late for UN involvement. Third world countries perceive UN as an agent of the US. They feel justified in assuming this for various reasons e.g. Israel, Iraq etc. Unilateralism, not signing important international agreement increases their suspicion of US good will. Neo-conservative ideology of the present administration is not a help either. Many people, not only Iraqis, are happy the a brutal dictator was removed. But the Iraqis want to rule themselves. US will have to leave Iraq soon. After a few years of anarchy, Iraq might emerge as a democratic country or fall apart in three parts which were put together by the British.

Participant
I love your answer to the education question. Apparently, CEOs schooled in the humanities do better than those with MBAs. The way you describe "getting it all together" implies that one has rich experience across many disciplines and in many informative situations. I wonder, however, if many dimensions of the wisdom necessary for generalist thinking cannot be learned at a young age, by simple exposure to great ideas. To what extent is baptism of fire, or prolonged experience on the front lines, necessary? When I think of all the people who have had lots of experience, and remain unwise and incompetent, I doubt the rationale that experience is the best teacher. Only if it's examined, and that practically never happens. You are an exception. In the middle of the Cuban missile crisis, you stop to write, to make sense of what you are experiencing. So would you argue for some kind of lifelong education, wedding experience with ideas, rather than, or in addition to, the kind of college education we now countenance? Or perhaps you are arguing for starting very early encouraging children to explore a wide range of experiences, analyzing and understanding them, keeping journals, etc. How does one "get it all together"?

Participant
For some years I have been associated with a small college that has been trying to practice what Harlan is suggesting. It is the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME. It gives a degree in Human Ecology. There have been many attempts to describe itself, (my attempt is "specializing at generalizing)) but none have been as good as those that Harlan has given. I will not attempt to say how successful it has been. But some of you may want to see its rather amateurish web page at: http://www.coa.edu

Participant
One of my personal "wise sayings", not fully appreciated by others, of course, is: "Ignorance won't hurt you nearly as much as knowing what isn't so."

I suspect that teachers suffer from the same affliction as do civil servants, typically -- that of thinking that what they believe must surely be the certain truth.

A broad education is essential. So, also, is a healthy skepticism about what one has learned thus far -- it is certainly incomplete, and it may even be wrong!

Participant
Raymond, your wise saying is wise, indeed. Having spent most of my life doing what I fondly believed was "education," my only trouble about your wisdom is that I never found out how to get either the students at the doctoral level (let alone in public schools, let alone the teachers) to adopt your recommended "healthy skepticism."

I hope Harlan will tell us how to do it. As they say, the US is a "Christian country." That in itseslf may be the instrument that cancels the aim to get skeptical.

Participant
I think we could develop some critical thinking (skepticism, if you like) by studying history. But it would be very difficult to teach it using contemporary examples. Even history textbook writers like Harvey Wasserman, who try to develop alternative books, citing the genocide of the Indians, the transgressions of the robber barons, the struggles of the labor movement, the real motives for wars, the dark side of religious history, the centralization or distribution of power, etc., entertain people who question the system, but their books are never adopted. If a teacher today were to try to get students to analyze the speeches of George Bush, or to evaluate the claims of advertisers, or to question our invasion of Iraq, or to assess the arguments of environmentalists, he or she wouldn't last long. One of the things our education system teaches, and it teaches it very well to both teachers and students, is not to ask certain questions. I have a high regard for teachers. I don't know how they show up for work everyday. But I don't kid myself about the total failure of our education system to prepare responsible citizens. When three times as many Americans believe in angels or the virgin birth than believe in evolution, we are in a sad state. It isn't the fault of the teachers. That's why I'd be interested in Harlan's approach to education directed at "getting it all together".

Harlan Cleveland
Some loose ends that induce additional comments:

I have also been fond, Ray, of the unattributed crack that prefers ignorance to knowing what isn't so. The paradoxical crux, I suppose, is that those who know what isn't so are so sure of their false knowledge -- whereas people who are ignorant are more inclined to be unsure, and therefore willing to learn.

The only way I've found to maintain "a healthy skepticism" is constantly to look for the question not being answered by what is being said/written. Hallock (7:36) has found most doctoral students, and teachers, reluctant to be healthily skeptical. In my experience, some students (a treasured minority) and some teachers do manage to maintain, and even express out loud a healthy skepticism. Personally, I always have tried to encourage such unorthodox behavior -- like questioning scientists who describe the Big Bang about what happened just _before_ the Big Bang, or whose idea it was, and why. I'll admit that such questions usually produce a blank stare, implying that the questioner is ignorant without quite wanting to say so.

But I've also observed that some of the best scientists reach such questions themselves, and are drawn by their puzzlement to reach for answers that can only be acts of faith -- not necessarily faith in a particular Organized Religion, but faith in a conviction that a Supreme Being exists whose non-rational ways of thinking and acting have to be acknowledged, even if they can't be explained by what's learned in graduate school, or in scripture for that matter.

Participant
Well, Harlan, you sure know how to go out on an inspirational note. Thanks so much for staying with us well past the week I asked you for. I don't have to tell you how much your words have meant to all of us. We'll all be looking forward to our next encounter with you. Meanwhile, you have our deepest gratitude.

Harlan Cleveland
Wait a moment, Dick, I haven't quite finished:

"Harlan's approach to education directed at 'getting it all together'." I guess I have to swing at that fastball before this game is over.

Let me start at the end. I DON'T think that education for "getting it all together" can be concentrated mostly in the parts of formal education that are delivered in the first couple of decades of "school." Like pitching a baseball or anything else that's really useful, it can't be learned just by being "taught." Much of the getting-it-all-together art/skill has to be learned on the hoof.

What can be taught to (or, better, encouraged in) youngsters is to be curious about everything, and therefore to be especially interested in the interconnections among the vertical slices of knowledge to which they are increasingly exposed.

This is not an unnatural mindset; indeed, I think it's the natural mindset of every baby that comes into this world. It (he/she) looks up from its crib at an incredible complexity of fuzzy heads, hears all sorts of sounds without context, and must wonder what the world is all about. Everything it perceives must relate to everything else -- otherwise, why would it be there?

Eventually, the baby begins to catch on: it has a special relationship with that being that pays the most attention to me, actually picks me up and even provides nourishment. How do all those other moving figures relate to that special person, to me, and to each other? (Any adult who spends a week or two in a hospital room faces similar bafflements, sometimes without many more clues.)

As the baby grows up, it discovers all sorts of useful clues -- its gender, its family, its environment, its religion, its nationality....

Trouble is, most of its education is chopped into categories that inhibit relating the categories to each other, "getting it all together." If the baby gets to a Ph.D., it may find "getting it all together" a hopeless or irrelevant ambition. (I can say this with less constraint than most educators, since my Oxford D.Phil. was aborted by Hitler's march into Poland on September 1, 1939.)

How do we (whoever "we" will be) offset the conditions that prevail -- the structure of education that requires narrower specialization for higher credentials? The specialization is crucially necessary. But we should build alongside a ladder of generalist learning -- starting with global perspectives in elementary education (a pattern has been developed by the American Forum on Global Education, of which I was chairman long ago); stressing interdisciplinary learning at each level of formal education (which will especially attract the leadership cadres, but will also stretch the imagination of those scientists and other specialists who later find their excellence promoting them into leadership positions), and providing in undergraduate and graduate education all kinds of "internships" in non-academic settings (to illustrate how closely connected book-learning and practice can and should be).

These comments illustrate how difficult it will be, but also (I hope) how important it will be, to make "getting it all together" a central theme in the process of developing Americans for the 21st Century -- both through "formal education" and through lifelong learning.

Harlan Cleveland
This Interview segment seems to have come down the the home stretch. For me, your questions-disguised-as-comments, and your comments-disguised-as-questions, have required quite a stretch. Thanks for the opportunity -- and the stretching exercise!...... .....Harlan.

Participant
Thanks, Harlan for your most rewarding insights! Especially enjoyed your emphasis on "curiosity" as a key facilitator on "getting it all together"!

Participant
Harlan, please forgive me for commenting perhaps more than I should, but I really wanted to draw you out on some of these issues, and your comments were worth whatever it took. Forgive me too for jumping the gun on my adjournment of the interview. I thought surely that spiritual call was your apotheosis. I'm glad you went ahead anyway.

I know you are to be away from your computer today and for the next few days, but I want to say again what I know others feel, that we appreciate the way you dug deep to answer our questions. Thanks again.