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There is a feeling throughout much of the world that governments are too large and expensive. In the United States this feeling has been present and growing stronger every year. President Clinton and the U.S. Congress have reached an agreement that the national budget must be balanced within seven years. Budget cuts have become the order of the day in most branches of the U.S. government.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Information Service (USIS) in India has not been exempt from such downsizing.

During the last few months USIS India has regretfully had to implement a reduction in force that necessitated our losing several job slots, affecting both Indian and American staff.

The budget cuts will also affect American Center libraries in New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras.

Beginning January I, 1996, the libraries will henceforth be asking their members to pay an annual enrollment fee of Rs. 200. In addition, they will be charging a daily admission fee of Rs. 10 for nonmembers. The funds from these charges will enable us to maintain the quality of our library service.

The U.S. government budgetary cuts will also affect this magazine. Next year SPAN will become a bimonthly, beginning with the February/March 1996 issue.

This is the bad news. The good news is that the new SPAN will contain more pages in every issue. The magazine will also carry more extensive coverage of business, economics, management-especially in terms ofIndo-U.S. joint business ventures. The "new look" is apparent in this issue, which features an interview with the prominent Calcutta businessman Avijit Mazumdar, whose photo also appears on the cover. Our "management article" for the December SPAN is a report by the elder statesman of management consultants, Peter F. Drucker, on how the techniques used in corporate restructuring can also be used to make government more efficient.

But to return again to these unfortunate budget cuts, I want to assure you that in my role as director of USIS India I will maintain the same high quality of programming that we have been providing to patrons and guests who visit our American Centers and our programs in other venues. Similarly, as publisher of SPAN, I shall maintain the quality of this magazine. USIS India has been publishing SPAN for35 years. I know that there are Indians who have been reading it that long-devotees who are aware of its history as a "pioneer" and an "institution" in high-quality magazine journalism in this country. Let me assure you that SPAN will continue to serve as the information, education, cultural, and business "bridge" between our two nations.

2 6

Making Money Is Dangerous

by Judith Anne Gunther

"I Have Faith in the Indian People" An Interview With Avijit Mazumdar by Karuna Singh

11

Really Reinventing Government

16

How Many People Can the Earth Support?

byPeterF

Drucker

byJoelE. Cohen

20

The Fourth World-Native New Museum byJoseph Bruchac

21

This Path We Travel

30

A Celebration of Life

32

America's Best Universities and Colleges

33 35

The Methodology

38 40

Reunion!

American Art in a

by Frank LaPena

byRobertJ.

The Consulting Game

Morse

byAlvinP

Sanoff

byJacquelinSingh

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Remembered

by Vatsala Vedantam

44

On the Lighter Side

46

A Tiger in the Grass

by Curry Kirkpatrick

Front cover: Avijit Mazumdar, chairman and managing director of TIL, formerly Tractors India Limited, envisions India emerging as a major player in the global economy.

Publisher. E. Ashley Wills; Editor. Stephen Espie Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Associate Editors. Arun Bhanot, Prakash Chandra; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rashmi Goel, AshokKumar; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Contributing Designers, Gopi Gajwani, Suhas Nimbalkar; Staff Designer, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services, USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services, USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover-Vivek Das. 2-Los Angeles Times Syndicate. 3-eourtesy u.s. News & World Report. 6-9-Vivek Das. 2l-23-Walter Bigbee. 24-28-David Heald. 2l-28-all courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. 3D-Walter Bigbee. 38-R.K. Sharma. 4D-M.S. Venkatachalam.

46-Dan Helms. 47-0NYX. Published by the United States Infonnation Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 11000 I (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad,

I-1aryana. The opinions expressed

in this magazine do not necessarily

reflect the views or

policies of the U.S. Govemment. No part a/this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to¡the Editor. Price a/magazine. one year subscription (12 issues) Rs. 120 (Rs. 110 for students); single copy, Rs. 12.

Making Money Dan etous With the aid of some high-tech, difficult-to-duplicate tricks, the U.S. Department of Treasury hopes to win the war against the world's master counterfeiters.

It seemed like a quick and easy way to double the value of his Christmas fund. But when the 14-year-old boy slipped a crisp $50 bill onto his school's new computer scanner, it eventually earned him a stern lecture from the U.S. Secret Service.

Nabbing a dollar-duping teen at a Scottsdale, Arizona, middle school in April 1994 might seem excessive. But the incident highlights the skyrocketing number of individuals across the United States who are using high-resolution copiers and printers to make bogus bucks. In fact, the output offorged bills by these "casual counterfeiters" has doubled every year since 1989. In 1992 alone, according to the National Research Council (NRC), as much as $8 million worth of phony money made on printers and copiers wormed its way into circulation.

If the problem is becoming apparent within the United States, it is becoming obvious abroad. The dollar has become, says one government official, "a de facto world currency" because of its stability.

In fact, roughly two-thirds of the U.S. $350,000 million in circulation are held in foreign countries, according to the U.S. Treasury. The combination of unfamiliarity and acceptance abroad makes the dollar an easy target. According to officials at the Secret Service, more than $120 million in counterfeit U.S. dollars was seized in foreign countries in 1993; in comparison, $44 million in fake dollars was discovered domestically.

Alarmed by the burgeoning fake-bill free- for-all, the Treasury Department announced in the summer of 1994 the most radical redesign of U.S. currency since 1929. The new bills, which should be rolling from the Treasury's printers in 1996, may incorporate such innovative counterfeit-deterrence features as colorchanging inks, tiny iridescent disks, and intricate patterns that become distorted when digitally scanned. Covert changes will likely bemade as well.

These difficult-to-duplicate features won't arrive a minute too soon. By the end of the year, approximately 4.9 million color printers will be linked to per-

computer hackers looking for a new antisocial technological triumph.

Ever since the end of the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln established the Secret Service to hunt down forgery operations, the Treasury has relied on a handful of strategies to keep counterfeiters at bay. One of the most effective has been the substrate-the

sonal computers in the United States, each of them capable of making a realistic-looking piece of "currency."

That, coupled with the availability of color copiers, may be too much temptation for, say, white-collar employees looking for quick pocket money, bored teenagers passing time at a mall's copy center, or

paper-which is made of cotton and linen, giving it a distinctive "feel."Tiny red and blue fibers, scattered randomly like lint on ajacket, further authenticate paper money.

The black design on the front and the green image on the back are intaglio printed-a form of embossing combined with a viscous ink. "The intaglio process

Combatting counterfeiting T9 prevent counterfeiting.

the government

Current security features

has included a number of security features in U.S. currency.

Federal Reserve seal The code lelter IS the same as tile first leller in the serial number.

Mlcroprlnllng "The UOIled States of America- is printed repeatedly on the Sides of the portrait. TIle lellers are too small to read without a magnifier or for d stinct copier reprodUCllon.

Serial numbers The senal number appears in two places and is distinctively styled and evenly spaced. with ink the same color as the Treasury seal. No two notes of the same series and denomination have the same serial number.

Security thread Polyester strips. which cannot be reproduced In the reflected figl'lt of copiers. have been embedded in 510. 520.

550 and 5100 notes.

Treasury seal • The saw·toothed points are sharp. distinct and unbroken. The sears color is the same as !llat of the two serial numbers.

Border The border's fine hnes and lacy. wcbhke design arc distinct and unbroken.

Fe~tures under consideration

Paper and fibers Callan and linen rag paper has a swong. pliable feel with no watermarks; tiny red and blue fibers arc embedded III the paper.

Portrait The portraIt ISdistmct from the screcnhke background.

Larger, . off·center portrait

Color·shlftlng Inks These inks change color when viewed from different angles. An nk that may appear gOlelwhen viewed dlreclly. for example. may change to green wilen viewed Obliquely.

localized, portrait watermark TIlis image is visible when held against a figl'lt source. It does not copy on color printers.

The new bills may incorporate such innovative counterfeit-deterrence features as color-changing inks, tiny iridescent disks, and intricate patterns that become distorted when digitally scanned. provides a very clear, sharp image," says Thomas Ferguson, assistant director of research and development at the Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

"Whatever the engraver designs, it reproduces exactly." (By contrast, conventional commercial printing via lithography creates a close approximation of images using dots.)

Intaglio printing begins with an engraver, who carves the design in a soft steel plate; then, thick ink is smeared on. Next, the plate is wiped to remove all ink except that which lies in the grooves. Then, at pressures reaching 15,000 psi (pounds per square inch), the plate is pressed against paper. The process leaves an image raised about 20 microns off the paper substrate.

By¡ making the etched lines wider or deepe;: the engraver can precisely control the lightness or darkness of each shade of ink. The res.ult, with a master engraver's work, has a three-dimensional effect that othetprinting techniques can't duplicate.

The" 1994 announcement wasn't the first time the Treasury has tried to stay ahead of imaging technology. In 1983, the Treasury began" sponsoring studies to combat the mountJng threat of reprographic machines.

The oU'come was the security thread, embedded in $1 00, $50, and $20 bills beginning with the 1990 series. This metallized polyester strip, just 1/1Oth of a centimeter wide and ten to !5 microns thick, bears the letters "USA" and the denomination ofthe bill.

The 1990 series bills also wear the phrase "The United States of America" in microprint in a loop around the portrait. Barely readable without a magnifying glass, the letters "are two- to three-thousandths of a centimeter wide-the smallest type the government's intaglio printers can handle.

These two measures, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen told the House Banking Committee on July 13, 1994, "have been very effective. But we would risk eventual

diminishment of confidence in the integrity of our currency if we did not change it to meet the challenges of a new generation of technology." Indeed, the measures may be on the verge of being outdated: Already, the Secret Service reportedly has found fake bills sporting jury-rigged security threads.

And, warns an NRC report, copiers and printers are rapidly reaching levels ofresolution at which they will be able to reproduce images as tiny as microprint.

When it comes to selecting the most effective deterrents, Bentsen told the House Banking Committee, "No single feature alone is sufficient and no single currency design can be absolutely counterfeit-proof over time." Indeed, nearly every new proposed feature can be simulated to some extent. Instead, the Treasury is betting the strategic combination of features will, one way or another, thwart forgers.

One of the most noticeable new changes planned is to enlarge the bill's portrait and shift it to the left. The extra space gained on the right will probably bear a watermark, in an age-old technique that leaves a ghostly image in the paper. Visible only when the bill is illuminated from behind, these pictures are created by variations in the paper's density. Although forgers can't use copiers to reproduce watermarks, they can draw passable imitations by using fatty substances that leave transparent stains on the paper.

Like the 1990 series bills, the redesigned currency will use a security thread, although it may now be positioned at different places on the bill, depending upon its denomination. This should help discourage forgers from converting $5s into $50s.

Planchettes, tiny confetti-like flakes made of paper or plastic, may be sprinkled across the entire bill. These will probably have an iridescent sheen, making them easy to spot under a light, but impossible to photocopy. In addition, microprinted words

could be stamped on each. However, the NRC reports, while nearly impossible to duplicate, iridescent planchettes could be roughly simulated with ease, using widely available light-reflecting inks.

Perhaps the most effective authentication aide in the Treasury's arsenal is colorshifting ink, used by France, Germany, and Thailand, among other countries. "The effect is similar to the color shifts you see with oil on water," explains Michael Morris, an expert in optics at the University of Rochester and member of the NRC panel. When the bill is held to the light at one angle, the ink appears shimmery green.

Shift the angle, and the ink looks blue.

This spectral switch is created with millions of tiny flakes-each just one micron thick-made of materials arranged in layers, like a sandwich. Flakes that produce a greento-blue color shift, for instance, are made of two layers of chromium separated by an inner core of aluminum. When light strikes the ink, some light waves reflect off the chromium, while others penetrate through to, then reflect off, the aluminum below.

The visual effect depends upon the position of the observer's eye. At close to a right angle, the reflected light waves from the two layers reinforce one another and the ink looks green. At other angles some of the light waves cancel, and the ink appears blue.

Some of the deterrents under consideration won't be visible-at least until they are run through digital machinery.

The Treasury seems to be favoring one such technique, called moire-inducing lines. A simple way to create a moire pattern yourselfis to place one piece of window screening over another. Move one screen and dancing lines appear.

In the same way, designers can create closely spaced line patterns that, when electronically scanned, trigger the same effect. Essentially, the line-resolution capabilities of the imaging device cannot match that of the original image, and distortions are induced.

"Moire-inducing patterns are hard to get rid of, even with high-frequency scanning," says Morris. "Even if you can manipulate the image and fix the distortions, they can come back when the printer produces the image."

Alternatively, the Treasury could em-

Output From Computer

.

ploy a pattern of dots in two different sizes, one above the resolution of most copiers, the other below. "To your eye," says Morris, "the area looks uniformly one color. But when a copiertries to duplicate it, it only 'sees' the larger dots." The smaller ones disappear on the copied image. If the remaining dots spell out a warning, such as "void," it's unlikely someone will accept the forged note.

But Morris says this won't be an effecti ve deterrent for long. "If you have a high-resolution scanner, and a pretty good computer, you have the ability to change that image pixel by pixel," he says-so you could electronically wipe away the warning sign.

Of all the technologies under review, the most intriguing may be the covert features-detectable only by machines-that verify a bill's authenticity. One example, already in use (albeit not widely known), is the presence of magnetic ink on each bill.

Many automatic money-changing and vending machines rely on this subtle feature to distinguish real money from counterfeit bills.

In the same way, the Treasury could add fibers or microcapsules with unique prop-

erties, such as microprinting, magnetism, iridescence, or reactivity to ultraviolet or infrared light. In fact, the red and blue fibers in today's bills may already carry some kind of hidden characteristic.

A more complicated covert method would be to give each bill a unique fingerprint of sorts, then encode that as information elsewhere on the bill. For example, very fine optical tibers could be mixed into the paper slurry. "Then, if you illuminate the bill from a certain angle, you'd see the reflection of the fiber ends," says Morris.

"Like a snowflake, it'd be 'a random pattern-no other bill would have fibers in the exact same place." The position of those fibers could be converted to a number or symbol that is printed elsewhere on the bill.

Later, to authenticate a bill, a machine would scan the fibers, then compare the result to the printed information.

Yet even that isn't foolproof. "What happens if the fibers break?" he asks. Wear could alter a bill's fingerprint.

No matter which deterrent features the Treasury chooses, the problem of keeping ahead of repro graphic technologies will remain. With that should come a host of new

techniques. Experts predict, for example, that holographic images, now a staple on credit cards, may appear on future bi lis.

Only problems of durabil ity prevent use of holograms now.

Technology can be used to stop forgers in other ways as well. For example, Canon recently unveiled a color copier that identifies-and refuses to duplicate-currency.

It does this by comparing the item to be copied with patterns stored in its memory.

More covert technology in development by copier manufacturers encodes a hidden pattern on each copy made. This pattern, such as a series of yellow dots, can later be decoded by a machine to identify the serial number of that copier. Such information could enable the Secret Service to traccand nail-a forger.

"We recognize that technology isn't standing still," says Ferguson, "and we can't wait another 60 years to change the bills again. When this design moves into production, we will probably start this process all over."

D About the Author: Judith Anne Gunther is an associate editorojPopu]ar Science magazine.

"IHave Faith in the Indian People" AN INTERVIEW WITH AVIJIT MAZUMDAR

by KARUNA SINGH

A prominent Calcutta businessman discusses his vision of India's future and predicts that India could be "an economic world leader right across the board."

Avijit (Bobby) Mazumdar is managing director and chairman ofTIL,formerly Mazumdar

known as Tractors India Limited.

scene-in

was born in Calcutta. At the age of 13 he

went to the United States with his father, who was posted with the Indian Embassy in Washington, D. C. In the he completed

secondary

urbs; he graduatedfrom

to workfor

u.s.

has always

been active on the business

Eastern India, natior

lly, and internationally

because of his global background. In 1982 he was elected president of the Indo-American

Chamber of Commerce. In

1990-91 he was president of the Associated

Chambers of

school in the Washington sub-

Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM). He is currently on

the University of Oklahoma in

the executive

1955 with a BSc in engineering. exploration

Mazumdar

After a year with the oil

industry in America, he returned to Calcutta the Standard Vacuum Oil Company. Hejoined

TIL in 1960, became its managing

director in 1975, its

chairman in 1985.

KARUNA SINGH: Mr. Mazumdar, your company, TIL, recently celebrated its 50th

anniversary. When did the linkup with America begin?

AVIJIT MAZUMDAR: My association with the United States goes back to 1948 when I first went to that country. At that time India was little known to Americans. Many people had no idea where India was. In fact, when I would tell people in Oklahoma that I was an Indian, quite often they would ask: "What tribe?" From that situation where they knew very little ofIndia, over the years,

board of the International

Chamber

Commerce and vice president of the International

of

Bureau

of Chambers of Commerce.

Following

is an interview

with Avijit Mazumdar

by

Karuna Singh, a cultural and programming specialist with USIS in Calcutta.

the United States has emerged as India's largest trading partner, and we now have more joint business ventures with the U.S. than any other country in the world.

Worldwide, which is part of the Hanson Inc. group. Grove Worldwide are the largest crane manufacturers in the world. We have been manufacturing cranes in India since 1961 with a company known as Coles Canyou tell me of the ties that your com- Cranes which some years ago was taken pany has with u.s. companies? over by Grove and is now part of the GlobeOur oldest, the one we are indeed very Hanson combine.

In the days when there were no import proud of, is our association with Caterpillar, who are the largest earth-moving equipment restrictions Caterpillar was the market leader manufacturers in the world. We've had a tie- . for earth-moving equipment in India. Over up with them since 1944. The second big the years things have changed because of association we have is with Grove restrictions on imports and what have you.

But as far as Grove Coles Cranes are concerned, we continue to be the market leaders for the past 30-odd years in our country.

We've also had a number of other American associations. For several years we represented several companies in the Dresser Industries group who are leaders in manufacture and supply of equipment for oil and gas exploration and exploitation.

We've also had a close association with Halliburton, the industry leader in manufacture of oil well cementing units, and, for a brief period, with Mack Trucks. We manufactured some specialty trucks for them which we supplied to various oil exploration industries in India.

What sort of tie-ups are these? Are these licensing or franchise?

These are technology-transfer tie-ups where they have no equity but they provide us technology, particularly Grove Cranes on a continuous basis. As they upgrade their technology, they make it available to us. Of course, it's a very commercial arrangement. They receive upfront fees: For technology, as royalty. We also purchase a lot of our components from them.

Frankly, it's a win-win situation for all of us-our company, our collaborators in the U.S., and for India. It has saved India a lot of foreign exchange because we manufacture the product locally.

In other words, such tie-ups are good for India?

Definitely. Now that India has changed course in its economic policy, the opportunities for U.S. companies are fantastic. I'll define some areas. Number one, many ofthe Indian manufacturing units have obsolete technology. Since India has clearly declared that it wants to be-and I believe it will bea part of the global scenario, there is tremendous need for upgradation of technology right across the board. Heavy engineering, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, transportation equipment.

The second area I see is upgrading manufacturing facilities. A lot of plants are old and not so efficient, not so conducive to making quality products. The third area is new joint ventures, because the need of900 million people in our country is so great that

even though India produces what it needs in steel, power, and other things, we'll have to almost double our present capacity in almost every field every five or six years. So there is a lot of opportunity for American companies to come into new ventures.

In these areas there is not only opportunity for technology-transfer but also for financial participation.

As Indian products become world-class and we're able to contain our prices through international competition, I believe there is scope for exporting goods made in India. And with the marketing linkages of the foreign collaborators, new avenues and new vistas would open up for Indian-made products.

their own state, let alone beyond their own country. I think the message about opportunities opening up in India has to be carried by us to these people. I think marriages between America's medium-size companies and our medium-size to big companies will do more for greater economic cooperation between our two countries than collaborations with FORTUNE500s.

What can be done to get Indian companies involved in more collaborations?

The number one requirement from our side is to get across to the 50 states in the U.S. the message of India's liberalization, and the opportunities and advantages that India offers. Similarly, the U.S. How do joint ventures with foreign comDepartment of Commerce can do a lot in panies come about? Where and how do they mounting missions to India. Normally, get started-at a lunch at the Bengal Club, when missions come to India, they go to or on a golf course in Nevada?

Delhi and Bombay, and maybe Bangalore.

We are basically in heavy engineering and Then they go back. There is more to India.

There are many other economic centers in our tie-ups don't come through such glamorous opportunities! I think the FORTUNE 500 our country and the missions should go to these other centers. companies already know India. They're May I digress because this is really a mesvery big. But if you look at Indian industry, and compare it to American industry our sage for the Americans. Often one asks: Why should I invest in India? Often one biggest companies would be medium-size, and our medium-size would be small. hears comparisons with China. I'm not saying India is a better place. That's for the Beyond the FORTUNE 500, I personally think, you have the FORTUNE2000 or FORTUNE investor to decide. But I would point out the 2500 companies that are in the heart of advantages of India. Number one, India is America-the mid-West or South-West, or the world's largest democracy. India has very clearly defined rules and regulations the North-which have good technologies, and procedures and well established bureaugood manufacturing processes. But they cracy. India has an independent judiciary. By have never really ventured much beyond and large we follow the English law, which is not dissimilar from America's laws.

Secondly, India has the second largest pool of trained manpower in the world. India has a very vibrant capital market. We have 22 stock exchanges, dozens of development banks, and many commercial banks. India has a very large reserve of natural resources.

India has a very large domestic market. And most importantly, English is spoken widely, even at the shopfloor level. India has never reneged in her foreign debt repayment.

There are many advantages to investing in India that are not really known to businessmen in the U.S. Having said this, I would be the first to admit that while we are liberalized, we haven't liberalized fully. There are still some

hassle-factors. There are still some carryons from the old school. While liberalization is very clear at the cabinet level and maybe at the senior bureaucracy level in Delhi, I don't think it has permeated across the board in Delhi. And it certainly hasn't permeated into many states in the country. We are moving in that direction. But in spite of the hassle-factor there are over 15,000 technical collaborations and joint ventures with different countries. There may be a few cases of failure. But by far the majority are a success-for both the Indian party and the foreign collaborating party.

Is there any magic formula for Indians doing business with Americans-for exporting to the u.s.?

Number one, if India wants to export to the U.S., it has to acquire world-class technology. Before liberalization, since we had a protected market, technology and upgradation oftechnology were not so important because we didn't have global competition. Number two, India must improve product quality. Number three, India must bring its prices to world standards. And number four, which I personally think is very important, is we must stick to our commitment.

There has to be a major change in mind-set if we want to be a global player.

Coming down to specifics, you are widely traveled and your company has a long history of collaborations with Americans. Are there some particular traits or quirks you notice while dealing with Americans?

Of course things have changed in India, but pre-I991 India was always accused that the bureaucracy was slow, and it took a long time to take a decision. Let me tell you my experience. The American corporate world is equally bureaucratic, and decisions there are slow as well. There is no doubt about it. This is the experience that many of us had.

You've seen lots of ups and downs in Indo-U.S. relations. A lot of people see the present scene as having a new optimism and an enthusiasm that wasn't there in the past. You have liberalized policies in India, you have American companies seeking more collaborations.

Do you think this

state of bonhomie will continue?

I think businessmen the world over are the same: They are totally apolitical. In spite of the ups and downs in the political scenario between our two countries, I don't think it has bothered either American businessmen or Indian businessmen-certainly not the Indian businessmen. Our political differences will continue from time to time, but business will flourish.

Coming back to the question of dealing with Americans, is it different than dealing with, say, British, Germans, or French?

I'll be very biased about it because I understand Americans perhaps a little better than I understand people of other nationalities. I understand what they say, what's going through their minds. There's no hidden meaning or hidden agenda. But if I am dealing with people who don't speak English, there is a danger of being misunderstood. So I'm far more comfortable with Americans and English-speaking people generally than with non-English speaking people.

You head or headed a number of national and international chambers of commerce and you've been associated with them for a long time. Do you think they really help in developing more collaborations?

A few years ago I was president of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce. We were one of the first to take a delegation to the U.S. As far back as 1980 we recognized that our target was not these FORTUNE500 companies. So we targeted medium-sized cities and medium-sized companies. We called it the Road Show. We hired a Greyhound bus. We woufd start our meetings in the morning in some chamber of commerce. They would invite the local businessmen. Bankers would come. There would be lunch, and one-on-one meetings till about 5 or 5:30. Then a short cocktail break, then we'd pile into our bus and roll on to the next city. This was for two weeks. We covered several cities. We didn't really meet the big boys at all.

At that time our objective was to carry the image of the new India that was emerging.

Since then Indo-American Chamber has mounted several delegations. It's very difficult to gauge how much benefit in dollar

terms accrues from such a visit, but I have no doubt that it creates a better awareness.

Some political parties are against the entry of multinational companies (MNCs) into India. What can be done about this?

I don't think there are any parties which are per se against entry of MNCs. Even the Left Front government of West Bengal is supporting entry of multinationals. The difference among the different parties is which type of multinationals they welcome and which they don't. I think there is no difference of opinion among any party in the country on our basic requirements for heavy engineering, chemicals, petroleum, power, steel. I don't think any party is opposing their entry. The difference is in the area of consumer goods. Personally, I don't support this. When you are liberalizing, you cannot say I'll liberalize only in this area and not liberalize in that area. If you look at any country that is liberalized and has progressed, they have not only allowed the steel companies and petroleum companies and computer companies, but also potato chips and Coca-Cola and the food companies. As someone said: "You can't ask for our computer chips and say no to our potato chips."

Okay, in the process, one fears that the Indian entrepreneur will be hurt. I don't accept that at all. Nowhere in the world has a multinational taken over a country. The days

of the East India Company are gone. If we open our door, there is so much business opportunity. Some of us will get hurt. But when the multinationals come in, many of us will get new opportunities: Supplying to the multinationals, selling products to them, servicing the products-hosts of things.

Overall, the benefit is far greater than protecting the interest of a few.

Some people say that foreign companies manufacturing in India are not makingproducts of the same quality as they make back home. There was an article recently in the Telegraph on Revlon which stated that the lipsticks are of poorer quality than Revlon lipsticks abroad. Do you agree?

Well, I'm from the heavy engineering industry. I can assure you that the products we make, the cranes we manufacture today, are no different from the cranes made in Europe or America. Or the Mack Trucks I referred to-they were the latest technology available at that time.

Although our tie-up for making cranes dates back 33 years, every 18 months we are upgrading our technology.

As far as other products, 1 cannot comment. But I would say, as a businessman, that if that is so, a fair amount of the fault lies with the Indian collaborator for not negotiating the latest technology. There is this talk of obsolete technology. Why are we taking it? At the end of the day there's an Indian partner. Why is he taking it?

Do you think this is because Indian companies don't go in for R&D? They prefer to go infor a technical collaboration even ifit is an older one.

I talked earlier of the opportunity for American companies in the new India. But when you come to R&D, we really haven't done what we could have done. Some of us have R&D. But across the board our R&D is very poor. As a result, we continue to buy technology every year. Take our Japanese friends. In the 1950s and 1960s when Japan was also developing, it went to the same people as we did and bought the same technology as we did. Japan took that technology and-with their ingenuity and hard work-Japanese R&D improved on it. But we continued making the same

product with the same technology. We must accept our failure in not paying enough attention to R&D. Supposing you were the interviewer, are there any questions you might have asked that I left out? Suppose, you frame three questions and answer them?

You got me there! Well, one question I may have asked is: How can we increase economic activity between the U.S. and West Bengal? The second question would be: We hear that a lot of NRIs, particularly from the U.S., are coming back and setting up industries in Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana. But we are not seeing the Bengali NRIs. Why not? The third question: Looking at the development of India in the last 20 years, we see that very little has happened in eastern India. What leadership can West Bengal give to help the greater economic development, particularly with the U.S., in the entire eastern region?

So how would you answer these questions?

First let me ask another question. What is going to happen to all these foreign tie-ups after this Enron business? My answer: Enron is one of the thousands of joint ventures that India is negotiating in many fields. Some people felt that India got a good deal, and some other people came along and said, "No, it's not such a good deal for India." When the Enron controversy blew up, I was not worried. Because all the other power people who are coming into India, and there are about 30,000 megawatts worth ofMoUs (memorandums of understanding) signed up, have come not because Enron has come but they felt that the deal they have negotiated is good for both of them.

Time has shown that perhaps the deal made with Enron was not in the best of interests of India. And Enron has come down. As a result of that, many other power projects have voluntarily renegotiated lower rates. Maybe what has happened is in India's interests.

India is a very large country and doing business with India is not the same as doing business in a banana republic. I think at the end of the day it is good what has happened.

I sincerely hope that Enron comes back and

they get a good deal and make profit out of it and India also benefits.

What about West Bengal? Why are the NRIs not coming back to West Bengal as they are to Maharashtra and Gujarat? Do you think the infrastructure is lacking?

There are several factors. The first is that West Bengal was slow to react to the change in the economic policy. States like Gujarat and Maharashtra--even Haryana, Karnataka, and Kerala--developed their economic policies soon after 1991. West Bengal did it only last year. And there is a dramatic change at the top leadership of West Bengal. Our chiefminister certainly has openly declared that we welcome multinationals and industries. But whatever Jyoti Basu was saying or whatever Somnath Chatterjee [chairman of West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation] was saying was needed. But a lot of other things are needed. There has to be a change in the mind-set of the bureaucracy.

Onejinal question: Imagine you're gazing into a crystal ball. Can you predict that India will be a world technology leader for any product in the way,for example, that Japan is associated with cameras, or the Us. with software and telecommunications?

I don't have to look at a crystal ball. I am very clear in my vision. I have faith in the Indian people. For the first time they have removed their shackles. The fact is that Indians are a great success anywhere they've gone. Today India is not a significant world player. By the year 2000 we will begin to make a mark on the global scene. And by the year 2025 or so, India will emerge as a major supplier of goods and services to much of the world. This is my vision and I have no doubt that this will be achieved.

Could you identifY a particular jield in which India will be a world player?

It could be in engineering products, gems or jewelry, food products, garments, electronics, heavy engineering, chemicals, software, services. In fact it could be an economic world leader right across the board!

India is a big country. IfI am giving a vision ofIndia of the next 35 years I'm not going to narrow it to three or four products or markets.

I think the whole world is India's oyster. 0

The train chugged on to the bridge.

Alec Guinness held his breath.

And then .... cinematic history.

Proud moments in our momentous Record of Construction Deep in the jungles of what was once Ceylon. L& T's Construction engineers built the bridge that is universally remembered as 'The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Helping to create cinematic history is just one of the many achievements which have studded the 50-year record of L& T's Construction Group.

L& T has been involved in major construction projects in India and abroad. We have constructed plants for core sector industries: built roads. highways and bridges using innovative techniques: set up structures that have become public landmarks. Yes. all of them have been milestones on the long road from the Bridge on the River Kwai .

Tomorrow, a new project.

A new landmark.

Really Reinventing GOvernment "Patching" won't work. "Downsizing" won't work. The renowned management guru gives some hard-nosed advice on what really needs to be done to make governments work. ice President Al Gore's promise to "reinvent government," proclaimed with great fanfare in the first year of the Clinton Administration, produced only a nationwide yawn. (The similar promise made in the Republicans' "Contract With America" initially met with no better response.) There has been no lack of publicity about the Gore initiative since. Press release after press release has announced the reinvention of yet another agency or program; big conferences, one chaired by President Bill Clinton himself, have been convened, and any number of TV appearances made. Of all the domestic programs of the Clinton Administration, this is one of the few in which there actually have been results and not just speeches. Yet neither the American public nor the media have shown much interest. And the November 1994 elections were hardly a vote of confidence in the Administration's performance at reinventing government.

There are good reasons for this. In any institution other than the federal government, the changes being trumpeted as reinventions would not even be announced, except perhaps on the bulletin board in the hallway. They are the kinds of things that a hospital expects floor nurses to do on their own; that a bank expects branch managers to do on their own; that even a poorly run manufacturer expects supervisors to do on their own-without getting much praise, let alone any extra rewards. Here are some examples-sadly, fairly typical ones: • In Atlanta, Georgia, six separate welfare programs, each traditionally with its own office and staff, have consolidated their application process to give "one-stop service."

The reinvented program is actually getting

V

phone calls answered, and on the first try.

• In Ogden, Utah, and Oakland, Cal ifornia, among other places, the Internal Revenue Service is also experimenting with treating the taxpayers as customers and with one-stop service, in which each clerk, instead of shuffling taxpayers from one office to another, has the information to answer their questions.

• The U.S. Export-Import Bank has been reinvented. It is now expected to do what it was set up to do all of 60 years ago: Help small businesses get export financing.

• The U.S. Geological Survey office in Denver is supposed to sell maps of the United States to the public. But it is almost impossible to find out what maps to order and how and where to order them, since the catalog is carefully hidden. And the very fact that a map is in demand by the public all but g:.Iarantees that it will be unobtainable.

It cannot be reprinted simply because the public wants to buy it; another government agency must order it for internal use. If the map sells well, it therefore immediately goes out of print. What's more, the warehouse is so poorly lit that when an order for a map in print comes in, the clerks cannot find it. The task force that the Geological Survey created to reinvent all this has succeeded so far in putting more lights in the warehouse and making a few other minor improvements.

For the future, however, more ambitious things are promised: • The Department of Agriculture proposes to trim its agencies from 42 to 30, to close more than 1,000 field offices, and to eliminate 11,000 jobs, for savings of about $3,600 million over five years.

• If all of the 384 recommendations of

ways to reinvent government identified by the Vice President in 1993 are accepted by Congress, they should result in savings of about $12,500 million.

But neither the trimming of the Department of Agriculture nor the Vice President's 384 recommendations are new.

We have long known that a great many agricultural field offices are in cities and suburbs where few if any farmers are left.

Closing them was first proposed in the Eisenhower years. And a good many, perhaps the majority, of Gore's recommendations were made ten years ago, in the Grace Report, under President Ronald Reagan.

Even if all of these proposals were to be enacted, the results would be trivial. The proposed Agriculture Department saving of $3,600 million over five years works out to about $720 million a year--or around one percent of the annual department budget of almost$70,000 million. A savingof$12,500 million looks like a lot of money. But over two years the federal government spends $3 trillion. An annual saving of $6,000 million-and this is many times more than Congress is likely to accept-would thus be a cut of no more than two-tenths of one percent ofthe budget. Surely the only way to describe the results of Gore's efforts so far is with the old Latin tag "The mountains convulsed in labor only to give birth to a ridiculous, teensy-weensy mouse."

RESTRUCTURINC

The reason most often given for this embarrassment of nonresults is "resistance by the bureaucracy." Of course, no one likes to be reinvented by fiat from above. But actually, one positive result of Gore's program has been the enthusiastic support it has re-

ceived from a great many people in the government's employ~especially the lowlevel people who are in daily contact with the public and are thus constantly frustrated by red tape and by such inane rules as the one that prevents their selling the beautiful Geological Survey maps, of which they are justly proud.

Nor is lack of effort the explanation. Some of the most dedicated people in Washington meet week after week to produce these emban'assing nonresults. They include the deputy secretaries of the major government departments. Vice President Gore~an unusually energetic man~pushes and pushes.

And the driving force behind the whole endeavor is the most knowledgeable of all Washington insiders, Alice Rivlin, formerly the director of the Congressional Budget Office, anq now the director ofthe Office of Management and Budget.

These able people are getting nowhere fast because their basic approach is wrong.

They are trying to patch and to spot-weld, here, there, and yonder~and that never accomplishes anything. There will be no results unless there is a radical change in the way the federal government and its agencies are managed and paid. The habit of continuous improvement has to be built into all government agencies, and has to be made self-sustaining.

Continuous improvement is considered a recent Japanese invention~the Japanese call it kaizen. But in fact it was used almost 80 years ago, and in the United States. From World War I until the early 1980s, when it was dissolved, the Bcll Telephone System applied "continuous improvement" to everyone of its activities and processes, whether that was installing a telephone in a home or manufacturing switch gear. For everyone of these acti vities Bell defi ned results, performance, quality, and cost. And for everyone it set an annual improvement goal. Bell managers weren't rewarded for reaching these goals, but those who did not reach them were out of the running and rarely given a second chance.

What is equally needed~and is also an old Bcll Telephone invention~is "benchmarking": Every year comparing the performance of an operation or an agency with thc performances of all others, with the best

Rethinking will not give us the answers, but it might force us to ask the right questions. becoming the standard to be met by all the following year.

Continuous improvement and benchmarking are largely unknown in civilian agencies of the U.S. government. They would require radical changes in policies and practices which the bureaucracy, the federal employees' unions, and Congress would all fiercely resist. They would require every agency~and every bureau within it~to define its performance objective, its quality objective, and its cost objective. They would require defining the results that the agency is supposed to produce. However, continuous improvement and benchmarking need different incentives. An agency that did not improve its performance by a preset minimum would have its budget cut. And a manager whose unit consistently fell below the benchmark set by the best performers would be penalized in terms of compensation or~more effective~in terms of eligibility for promotion. Nonperformers would ultimately be demoted or fired.

But not even such changes, though they would be considered radical by almost anybody in Congress or the federal bureaucracy, would warrant being called a reinvention of government. Things that should not be done at all are always mishandled the worst~and thus here we see the greatest improvements when attempts are made to do better what is already being done.

Any organization, whether biological or social, needs to change its basic structure if it significantly changes its size. Any organization that doubles or triples in size needs to be restructured. Similarly, any organization, whether a business, a nonprofit, or a government agency, needs to rethink itsel f once it is more than 40 or 50 years old.

It has outgrown its policies and its rules of behavior. If it continues in its old ways, it becomes ungovernable, unmanageable, uncontrollable.

The civilian part of the U.S. government has outgrown its size and outlived its poli-

cies. It is now far larger than it was during the Eisenhowcr Administration. Its structure, its policies, and its rules for doing government busincss and for managing people go back even further than that. They were first developed under William McKinley after 1896, and were pretty much completed under Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933.

In fact there is no point in blaming this or that President for the total disarray of our government today. It is the fault neither of the Democrats nor of the Republicans. Government has outgrown the structure, the policies, and the rules designed for it and still in use.

The first reaction in a situation of disarray is always to do what Vice President Gore and his associates are now doing~ patching. It always fails. The next step is to rush into downsizing. Management picks up a meat-ax and lays about itself indiscriminately. This is what the Republicans and President Clinton promise. In the past 15 years one big American company after another has done this~among them IBM, Sears, and GM. Each first announced that laying off 10,000 or 20,000 or even 50,000 people would lead to an immedi?te turnaround. A year latcr there had, of course, been no turnaround, and the company laid off another 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000~ again without results. In many if not most cases, downsizing has turned out to be something that surgeons for centuries have warned against: "Amputation before diagnosis." The result is always a casualty.

But there have been a few organizations~some large companies (GE, for instance) and a few large hospitals (Beth Israel in Boston, for instance)~that, without fanfare, did turn themselves around, by rethinking themselves. They did not start out by downsizing. In fact, they knew that the way to get control of costs is not to start by reducing expenditures but to identify the activities that are productive, that should be strengthcned, promoted, and expanded.

Every agency, every pol icy, every program, every activity, should be confronted with these questions: "What is your mission?"

"Is it still the right mission?" "Is it still worth doing?" "I f we were not already do-

ing this, would we now go into it?" This questioning has been done often enough in all kinds of organizations--businesses, hospitals, churches, and even local governments-that we know it works.

The overall answer is almost never "This is fine as it stands; let's keep on." But in some-indeed, a good many-areas the answer to the last question is "Yes, we would go into this again, but with some changes.

We have learned a few things."

An example might be the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), created in 1970. Safety in the workplace is surely the right mission for OSHA. But safety in the American workplace has not improved greatly in the past 25 years. There may be slightly fewer disabling injuries now than there were in 1960 or 1970, and, to be sure, the workforce has increased tremendously over those years. But considering the steady shift of the labor force from highly unsafe to fairly safe work (for example, from deep-level coal mining to the safer surface strip mining, and especially the shift from inherently dangerous manufacturing jobs to inherently safe office and servicejobs), safety in the American workplace may actually have deteriorated since 1970. Such a result may mean that we have been going about the task in the wrong way. In OSHA's case we actually understand the problem. OSHA runs on the assumption that an unsafe environment is the primary cause of accidents, and it therefore tries to do the impossible-ereate a risk-free universe. Of course eliminating safety hazards is the right thing to do. But it is only one part of safety, and probably the lesser part. In fact, by itselfit achieves next to nothing.

The most effective way to produce safety is to eliminate unsafe behavior. OSHA's definition of an accident-"when someone gets hurt"-is inadequate. To cut down on accidents the definition has to be "a violation of the rules of safe behavior, whether anyone gets hurt or not." This is the definition under which the United States has been running its nuclear submarines. Anyone in a nuclear sub, whether the commanding officer or the most junior seaman, is punished for the slightest violation of the rules of safe behavior, even if no one gets hurt. As a result, the nuclear submarine has a safety record unmatched by any industrial plant or

military installation in the world; and yet a more unsafe environment than a crowded nuclear sub can hardly be imagined.

OSHA's program should, of course, be maintained, and perhaps even expanded.

But it needs to be refocused.

This analysis will consider a number of agencies whose mission is no longer viable, ifit ever was-agencies that we would definitely not start now ifwe had the choice.

The mission may have been accomplished, for instance. An example is that most sacred of cows, the Veterans Administration's (VA) 171 hospitals and 130 nursing homes. When they first became accredited hospitals, around 1930, competent hospitals were scarce in the rural areas and small towns where many veterans lived. Today a competent hospital is easily

accessible to a veteran almost anywhere.

Medically, most VA hospitals are at best mediocre; financially, they are costly to the government. Worst, they are not neighborhood facilities, and thus veteransespecially elderly, chronically ill onessometimes have to travel far from their communities and their families just when they most need community and family support. The VA hospitals and nursing homes long ago accomplished what they were set up to do. They should be closed and the job contracted out to local hospitals and health maintenance organizations.

Or there may be no mission left. For example, would we now establish a separate Department of Agriculture? A good many Americans would answer with a loud no.

Now that farmers are no more than three

percent of the U.S. population, and productive farmers are half that (and "agribusinesses" to boot), a bureau at Commerce or Labor is probably all we need.

Some perfectly respectable activities belong elsewhere. Why, for instance, should d scientific agency like the Geological Survey run a retail business? Surely there are enough businesses around, map stores or book chains, to sell its maps. Or they could be offered in the catalogs offirms that sell outdoor gear.

Continuing with activities that we would not now choose to begin is wasteful. They should be abandoned. One cannot even guess how many government activities would be found to be worth preserving. But my experience with many organizations suggests that the public would vote against continuing something like two-fifths, if not half, of all civilian agencies and programs. And almost none of them would win a vote-that is, be deemed to be properly organized and operating well-by a large margin.

Together the qualified yea votes and nays are likely to be awarded in any organization to some three-fifths or two-thirds of programs and activities. The thorny cases are the programs and activities that are unproductive or counterproductive without our quite knowing what is wrong, let alone how to straighten it out.

Two major and highly cherished U.S. government programs belong in this category. The welfare program is one highly visible example. When it was designed, in the late 1930s, it worked beautifully. But the needs it then tackled were different from those it is supposed to serve todaythe needs of unwed mothers and fatherless children, of people without education, skills, or work experience. Whether it actually does harm is hotly debated. But few claim that it works or that it even alleviates the social ills it is supposed to cure.

And then there is that mainstay of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War years: Military aid. If it is given to an ally who is actually engaged in fighting, military aid can be highly productive: Consider LendLease to Great Britain in 1940-41, and military aid to an embattled Israel. But military

Every agency should be confronted with these questions: "What is your mission?" "Is it still worth doing?" "If we were not already doing this, would we now go into it?" aid is counterproductive if it is given in peacetime to create an ally-a principle that Plutarch and Suetonius accepted as proved. Surely our worst recent foreignpolicy messes-Panama, Iran, Iraq, and Somalia are prime examples-were caused by our giving military aid to create an ally.

Little, if any, military aid since the beginning of the Cold War has actually produced an ally. Indeed, it usually produced an enemy-as did Soviet military aid to Afghanistan.

The favorite prescription for such programs or activities is to reform them. To reform something that malfunctions-let alone something that does harm-without knowing why it does not work can only make things worse. The best thing to do with such programs is to abolish them.

Maybe we should run a few-a very few-controlled experiments. In welfare, for instance, we might try, in some carefully chosen places across the country, to privatize retraining and placing long-term welfare recipients. In health care we might try several different approaches in different states. For example, managed competition in California, home of the strong and experienced health-care wholesaler Kaiser Permanente; single-payer health care on the Canadian model in New Jersey, where there has been support for it; and in Oregon rationing on the basis of medical expectations, which is now being tried for the care of indigents.

But in areas where there are no successes to be tested-for example, military aidwe should not even experiment. There are no hypotheses to test. We should abandon.

Rethinking will result in a list, with activities and programs that should be strengthened atthe top, ones that should be abolished at the bottom, and between them activities that need to be refocused or in which a few hypotheses might be tested. Some activities

and programs should, despite an absence of results, be given a grace period ofa few years before they are put out of their misery.

Welfare may be the prime example.

Rethinking is not primarily concerned with cutting expenses. It leads above all to a tremendous increase in performance, in quality, in service. But substantial cost savings-sometimes as much as 40 percent of the total-always emerge as a by-product.

In fact, rethinking could produce enough savings to eliminate the federal deficit within a few years. The main result, however, would be a change in basic approach.

For where conventional policymaking ranks programs and activities according to their good intentions, rethinking ranks them according to results.

AN EXCEPTION

FOR CRUSADES

Anyone who has read this far will exclaim, "Impossible. Surely no group ofpeopIe will ever agree on what belongs at the top of the list and what at the bottom." But, amazingly enough, wherever rethinking has been done, there has been substantial agreement about the list, whatever the backgrounds or the beliefs of the people involved. The disagreements are rarely over what should be kept or strengthened and what should be abandoned. They are usually over whether a program or activity should be axed right away or put on probation for two or three years. The programs that people do not agree on are the ones concerned not with results but with "moral imperatives."

The best American example is the war on drugs. After many years it has had little effect on substance abuse and addiction, and much of the effect it has had is deleterious.

But it underlies the destruction of our cities in that addicts are prostituting themselves, mugging, robbing, or killing to earn enough for the fix that the war on drugs has made prohibitively expensive. All the war on drugs is actually doing, in other words, is enriching drug dealers and penalizing and terrorizing nonusers, especially in the inner city. But the war on drugs is a crusade. What lies behind it is not logic but outrage.

Stopping it, no matter how beneficial, would be "immoral." The smart thing to do is to exclude such crusades from the rational analy-

sis involved in rethinking. Fortunately, there are never a lot of them. As for the rest-more than 90 percent of all programs and activities-rethinking will in all probability produce substantial agreement.

EFFECTIVE

GOVERNMENT

Surely, it will be argued, even total agreement among highly respected people will be futile. Congress will not accept anything like this. Neither will the bureaucracy. And lobbyists and special interests of a11persuasions will be united in opposition to anything so subversive.

Perfectly true: Action on rethinking is impossible today. But will it be impossible tomorrow? In the last presidential election almost one-fifth of the electorate voted for Ross Perot, the man who promised to get rid of the deficit by slashing government expenditures. A substantial number-perhaps another fifth-agreed with his aims even though they could not bring themselves to vote for him. Just now the federal deficit is declining. But even without health-care reform or welfare reform the deficit will again grow explosively, at the latest by 1997. And then the demand for cutting the deficit may become irresistible and overwhelm Congress, the bureaucracy, and the lobbyists. If no rational rethinking of government performance has yet occurred, we will in all likelihood do what so many large companies have done-apply the meat-ax and downsize. We will then destroy performance, but without decreasing the deficit. In fact, it is predictable that the wrong things will then be cut-the things that perform and should be strengthened.

But if we have a plan that shows how and where the government needs to be rethought, we have a chance. In a crisis one turns to people who have thought through in advance what needs to be done. Of course, no plan, no matter how well thought through, will ever be carried out as written. Even a dictator has to make compromises. But such a plan would serve as the ideal against which the compromises were measured. It might save us from sacrificing things that should be strengthened in order to maintain the obsolete and the unproductive. It would not guarantee that all-or even most-of the unproductive things would be cut, but it might

maintain the productive ones. Within a few years we are likely to face such a crisis, as the federal budget and the federal deficit resume explosive growth while taxpayers grow ever more resistant to tax increases and ever more contemptuous of government and its promises.

In fact, we may already be very close to having to reinvent government. The theory on which all governments in the developed world have operated at least since the Great Depression (Harry Hopkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's adviser, called it "Tax and Tax, Spend and Spend") no longer delivers results. It no longer even delivers votes. The "nanny state"-a lovely English term-is a total failure. Government everywhere-in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the former Soviet Union-has been proved unable to run community and society. And everywhere voters revolt against the nanny state's futility, bureaucracy, and burdens. The landslide in which California's voters enacted Proposition 187, in November 1994, abolishing health care and even free public education for illegal immigrants, is but one example. But the counter-theory that preaches a return to pre-World War I government has also not proved out-the theory that was first formulated in 1944 in Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and that culminated in neoconservatism.

Despite its ascendancy in the 1980s, despite Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the nanny state has not shrunk. On the contrary, it is growing ever faster.

We will have to find out what government programs and activities in community and society do serve a purpose.' What results should be expected of each? What can governments-federal, state, local-do effectively? And what nongovernmental ways are there to do worthwhile things that govemments do not and cannot do effectively?

At the same time, as President Clinton learned in his first two years, government cannot opt out of the wider world and become domestic only, as he so very much wanted it to be. Foreign brush fires-in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in the former Soviet Union-have to be attended to, because they have a nasty habit of spreading. And the growing threat of international terror-

ism, especially if used as a weapon by outlaw governments, will surely require more government involvement in foreign affairs, including military matters, and more international cooperation.

By now it has become clear that a developed country can neither extend big government, as the (so-called) liberals want, nor abolish it and go back to 19th-century innocence, as the (so-called) conservatives want. The government we need will have to transcend both groups. The mega state that this century built is bankrupt, morally as well as financially. It has not delivered. But its successor cannot be "small government." There are far too many tasks, domestically and internationally.

We need effective government-and that is what the voters in all developed countries are actually clamoring for.

For this, however, we need something we do not have: A theory of what government can do. No major political thinkerat least not since Machiavelli, almost 500 years ago-has addressed this question.

All political theory, from Locke on through The Federalist Papers and down to the articles published by today's liberals and conservatives, deals with the process of government: With constitutions, with power and its limitations, with methods and organizations.

None deals with the substance. None asks what the proper functions of government might be and could be. None asks what results government should be held accountable for.

Rethinking government, its programs, its agencies, its activities, would not by itself give us this new political theory. But itwould give us the factual information for it. And so much is already clear: The new political theory we badly need will have to rest on an analysis of what does work rather than on good intentions and promises of what should work because we would like it to. Rethinking will not give us the answers, but it might force us to ask the right questions.

0 About the Author: Peter F Drucker is Clarke Professor of Social Sciences and Management at Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California. He has written widely on political and economic issues. Among his many books are Managing for the Future and Post-

Capitalist Society.

How Many People Can the Support?

The answers depend as much on social, cultural,economic, and political choices as they do on constraints imposed by nature.

n April 25, 1679, in Delft, Holland, the inventor of the microscope, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, wrote down what may be the first estimate of the maximum number ofpeopie the Earth can support. Ifall the habitable land in the world had the same population density as Holland (at that time about 120 people for every square kilometer), he calculated, the Earth could support at most 13.4 billion people-far fewer than the number of spermatozoans his lenses had revealed in the milt ofa cod.

In subsequent centuries, van Leeuwenhoek's estimate has been followed by dozens of similar calculations. Around 1695 a Londoner named Gregory King estimated that the Earth's "Land If fully Peopled would sustain" at most 12.5 billion people. In 1765 a German regimental pastor, Johann Peter Sussmilch, compared his own figure (13.9 billion) with the estimates of van Leeuwenhoek, the French military engineer Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban (5.5 billion), and the English writer and cartographer Thomas Templeman (11.5 billion).

In recent decades estimates of maximum population have appeared thicker and faster than ever before. Under the rubric of "carrying capacity" they crop up routinely in environmental debates, in United Nations reports, and in papers by scholars or academic politicians trained in ecology, economics, sociology, geography, soil science, or agronomy, among other disciplines.

Demographers, however, have been strangely silent. Of the more than 200 symposiums held at the 1992 and 1993 annual meetings of the Population Association of America, not one session dealt

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0021.

with estimating or defining human carrying capacity for any region of the Earth. Instead, professional demographers tend to focus on the composition and growth of populations, restricting their predictions to the near term-generally a few decades into the future-and framing them in conditional terms: If rates of birth, death, and migration (by age, sex, location, marital status, and so on) are such-and-such, then population size and distribution will be so-and-so.

Such conditional predictions, or forecasts, can be powerful tools. Projections by the UN show dramatically that ifhuman populations continued to grow at 1990 rates in each major region of the world, then the population would increase more than l30-fold in ¡160 years, from about 5.3 billion in 1990 to about 694 billion in 2150. Those figures are extremely sensitive to the future level of average fertility. If, hypothetically, from 1990 onward the average couple gradually approached a level offertility just one-tenth of a child more than required to replace themselves, world population would grow from 5.3 billion in 1990 to 12.5 billion in 2050 and 20.8 billion in 2150. In contrast, if(again, hypothetically) starting in 1990 and ever after couples bore exactly the number of children needed to replace themselves, world population would grow from 5.3 billion in 1990 to 7.7 billion in 2050 and would level off at around 8.4 billion by 2150.

The clear message is that people cannot forever continue to have, on average, more children than are required to replace themselves. That is not an ideological slogan; it is a hard fact.

Conventional agriculture cannot grow enough food for 694 billion people; not enough water falls from the skies. The finiteness of the Earth guarantees that ceilings on human numbers do exist.

Where are those ceilings? Some people believe that any limit to

human numbers is so remote that its existence is irrelevant to present concerns. Others declare that the human population has already exceeded what the Earth can support in the long run (how long is usually left unspecified). Still others concede that shortterm limits may exist, but they argue that technologies, institutions, and values will adapt in unpredictable ways to push ceilings progressively higher so that they recede forever. The differences of opinion are buttressed by vast disparities in calculation. In the past century, experts of various stripes have made estimates ofhuman carrying capacity ranging from less than a billion to more than 1,000 billion. Who, ifanybody, is right?

For several years I have been trying to understand the question, "How many people can the Earth support?" and the answer to it. In the process I came to question the question. "How many people can the Earth support?" is not a question in the same sense as "How old are you?"; it cannot be answered by a number or even by a range of numbers. The Earth's capacity to support people is determined partly by processes that the social and natural sciences have yet to understand, partly by choices that we and our descendants have yet to make.

In most of its scientific senses, carrying capacity refers to a population of wild animals within a particular ecosystem. One widely used ecology textbook defines it as follows: "Number of indi viduals in a population that the resources of a habi tat can support; the asymptote, or plateau, of the logistic and other sigmoid equations for population growth." Even within ecology, the concept of carrying capacity has important limitations. It applies best under stable conditions and over relatively short spans of time. In the real world, climates and habitats fluctuate and change; animals adapt to their conditions and eventually evolve into new species.

With each change, the carrying capacity changes, too.

When applied to human beings, the concept becomes vastly more volatile. I have collected 26 definitions of human carrying capacity, all published since 1975. Most of them agree on a few basic points-for instance, that the concept refers to the number of people who can be supported for some period (usually not stated) in some mode oflife considered plausible or desirable. Most of the definitions recognize that ecological concepts of carrying capacity must be extended to allow for the role of technology. Most also agree that culturally and individually variable standards of living, including standards of environmental quality, set limits on population size well before the physical requirements for sheer subsistence start to become an issue.

In other respects, however, the definitions vary widely or even contradict one another. How long must a population be sustainable? Does it make sense to speak oflocal or regional carrying capacity-or do trade and the need for inputs from outside any specified region imply that only a global scale will do? More fundamental, how constraining are constraints? Some definitions deny the existence of any finite carrying capacity altogether, holding that human ingenuity will win out over any natural barriers; others acknowledge that the limits are real but recognize that human choices, now and in the future, will largely decide where those limits fall.

In my opinion, that last point-the interplay of natural con-

straints and human choices-is the key to making sense of human carrying capacity. The deceptively simple question "How many people can the Earth support?" hides a host ofthorny issues: How many people at what average level of material well-being?

The human carrying capacity of the Earth will obviously depend on the typical material level at which people choose to live.

Material well-being includes food (people choose variety and palatability, beyond the constraints imposed by physiological requirements); fiber (people choose cotton, wool, or synthetic fibers for clothing, wood pulp or rag for paper); water (tap water or mineral or the nearest river or mud hole for drinking, washing, cooking, and watering your lawn, if you have one );.housing (Auschwitz barracks, two men to a plank, or Thomas Jefferson's Monticello); manufactured goods; waste removal (for human, agricultural, and industrial wastes); natural-hazard protection (against floods, storms, volcanoes, and earthquakes); health (prevention, cure, and care); and the entire range of amenities such as education, travel, social groups, solitude, the arts, religion, and communion with nature. Not all ofthose features are captured well by standard economic measures.

How many people with what distribution of material well-being?

An ecologist, an economist, and a statistician went bow hunting in the woods and spied a deer. The ecologist shot first, and his arrow landed five meters to the left of the deer. The economist shot next, and her arrow landed five meters to the right of the deer. The statistician looked at both arrows, looked at the deer, and jumped up and down shouting: "We got it! We got it!"

Estimates of human carrying capacity rarely take into account the scatter or distribution of material well-being throughout a population. Yet paying attention to average well-being while ignoring the distribution of well-being is like using an average arrow to kill a deer. People who live in extreme poverty may not know or care that the global average is satisfactory, and the press of present needs may keep them from taking a long-term view. For example, thanks to genetic engineering, any country with a few PhDs in molecular plant biology and a modestly equipped laboratory can insert the genes to create stronger, more disease-resistant, higheryielding plants. If every region has the scientific and technical resources to improve its own crop plants, the Earth can support more people than it can if some regions are too poorto help themselves.

How many people with what technology?

The complexities of technological choices often disappear in heated exchanges between environmental pessimists and technological optimists: Ecologist: When a natural resource is being consumed faster than it is being replenished or recycled, an asset is being depleted, to the potential harm offuture generations.

Technologist: Ifnew knowledge and technology can produce an

equivalent or superior alternative, then future generations may turn out to be better off.

Taxpayer: Which natural resources can be replaced by technology yet to be invented, and which cannot? Will there be enough time to develop new technology and put it to work on the required scale? Could we avoid future problems, pain, and suffering by making other choices now about technology or ways of living?

[No answer ji-om ecologist or technologist.]

How many people with what domestic and international political institutions?

Political organization and effectiveness affect human carrying capacity. For example, the United Nations Development Program estimated that certain countries could mobilize for development as much as $50 billion a year (an amount comparable to all official development assistance) if they reduced military expenditures, privatized public enterprises, eliminated corruption, made development priorities economically more rational, and improved national governance. Conversely, population size, distribution, and composition affect political organization and effectiveness.

How will political institutions and civic participation evolve with increasing numbers of people? As numbers increase, what will happen to people's ability to participate effectively in the political system?

What standards of personal liberty will people choose?

How will people bring about political change within existing nations? By elections and referendums, or by revolution, insurrection, and civil war? How will people choose to settle differences between nations, for instance, over disputed borders, shared water resources, or common fisheries? War consumes human and physical resources. Negotiation consumes patience and often requires compromise. The two options impose different constraints on human carrying capacity.

How many people with what domestic and international economic arrangements?

What levels of physical and human capital are assumed?

Tractors, lathes, computers, better health, and better education all make workers in rich countries far more productive than those in poor countries. Wealthier workers make more wealth and can support more people.

What regional and international trade in finished goods and mobility in productive assets are permitted or encouraged? How will work be organized? The invention of the factory organized production to minimize idleness in the use of labor, tools, and machines. What new ways of organizing work should be assumed to estimate the future human carrying capacity?

How many people with what domestic and international demographic arrangements?

Almost every aspect of demography (birth, death, age structure, migration, marriage, and family structure) is subject to human choices that will influence the Earth's human carrying capacity.

A stationary global population will have to choose between a

long average length oflife and a high birthrate. It must also choose between a single average birthrate for all regions, on the one hand, and a demographic specialization oflabor on the other (in which some areas have fertility above their replacement level, whereas other areas have fertility below their replacement level).

Patterns of marriage and household formation will also influence human carrying capacity. For example, the public resources that have to be devoted to the care of the young and the aged depend on the roles played by families. In China national law requires families to care for and support their elderly members; in the United States each elderly person and the state are largely responsible for supporting that elderly person.

How many people in what physical, chemical, and biological environments? . What physical, chemical, and biological environments will people choose for themselves and for their children? Much of the heat in the public argument over current environmental problems arises because the consequences of present and projected choices and changes are uncertain. Will global warming cause great problems, or would a global limitation on fossil-fuel consumption cause greater problems? Will toxic or nuclear wastes or ordinary sewage sludge dumped into the deep ocean come back to haunt future generations when deep currents well up in biologically productive offshore zones, or would the long-term effects of disposing of those wastes on land be worse? The choice ofparticular alternatives could materially affect human carrying capacity.

How many people with what variability or stability?

How many people the Earth can support depends on how steadily you want the Earth to support that population. If you are willing to let the human population rise and fall, depending on annual crops, decadal weather patterns, and long-term shifts in climate, the average population with ups and downs would include the peaks of population size, whereas the guaranteed level would have to be adjusted to the level of the lowest valley. Similar reasoning applies to variability or stability in the level of well-being; the quality of the physical, chemical, and biological environments; and many other dimensions of choice.

How many people with what risk or robustness?

How many people the Earth can support depends on how controllable you want the well-being of the population to be. One possible strategy would be to maximize numbers at some given level of well-being, ignoring the risk of natural or human disaster.

Another would be to accept a smaller population size in return for increased control over random events. Forexample, if you settle in a previously uninhabited hazardous zone (such as the flood plain of the Mississippi River or the hurricane-prone coast of the southeastern U.S.), you demand a higher carrying capacity of the hazardous zone, but you must accept a higher risk of catastrophe.

When farmers do not give fields a fallow period, they extract a higher carrying capacity along with a higher risk that the soil will lose its fertility (as agronomists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines discovered to their surprise).

How many people for how long?

Human carrying capacity depends strongly on the' time horizon people choose for planning. The population thatthe Earth can support at a given level of well-being for 20 years may differ substantially from the population that can be supported for 100 or 1,000 years.

The time horizon is crucial in energy analysis. How fast oil stocks are being consumed matters little if one cares only about the next five years. In the long term, technology can change the definition of resources, converting what was useless rock to a valuable resource; hence no one can say whether industrial society is sustainable for 500 years.

Some definitions of human carrying capacity refer to the size ofa population that can be supported indefinitely. Such definitions are operationally meaningless. There is no way of knowing what human population size can be supported indefinitely (other than zero population). The concept of indefinite sustainability is a phantasm, a diversion from the difficult problems of today and the coming century.

How many people with what fashions, tastes, and values?

How many people the Earth can support depends on what people want from life. Many choices that appear to be economic depend heavily on individual and cultural values. Should industrial societies use the available supplies of fossil fuels in households for heating and for personal transportation, or outside of households to produce other goods and services? Do people prefer a high average wage and low employment or a low average wage and high employment?

Should industrial economies seek now to develop renewable energy sources, or should they keep burning fossil fuels and leave the transition to future generations? Should women work outside their homes? Should economic analyses continue to discount future income and costs, or should they strive to even the balance between the people now living and their unborn descendants?

I am frequently asked whether organized religion, particularly Roman Catholicism, is a serious obstacle to the decline offertility.

Certainly in some countries, church policies have hindered coupies' access to contraception and have posed obstacles to family planning programs. In practice, however, factors other than religion seem to be decisive in setting average levels of fertility for Roman Catholics. In 1992 two Catholic countries, Spain and Italy, were tied for the second- and third-lowest fertility rates in the world. In largely Catholic Latin America, fertility has been falling rapidly, with modern contraceptive methods playing a major role.

In most of the U.S. the fertility of Catholics has gradually converged with that of Protestants, and polls show that nearly fourfifths of Catholics think that couples should make up their own minds about family planning and abortion.

Even within the church hierarchy, Catholicism shelters a diversity of views. On June 15, 1994, the Italian bishops' conference is-

sued a report stating that falling mortality and improved medical care "have made it unthinkable to sustain indefinitely a birthrate that notably exceeds the level of two children per couple."

Moreover, by promoting literacy for adults, education for children, and the survival of infants in developing countries, the church has helped bring about some of the social preconditions for fertility decline.

On the whole the evidence seems to me to support the view of the ecologist William W. Murdoch of the University of California, Santa Barbara: "Religious beliefs have only small, although sometimes significant, effects on family size. Even these effects tend to disappear with rising levels of well-being and education."

In short, the question "how many people can the Earth support?" has no single numerical answer, now or ever. Human choices about the Earth's human carrying capacity are constrained by facts of nature and may have unpredictable consequences. As a result, estimates of human carrying capacity cannot aspire to be more than conditional and probable: If future choices are thusc and-so, then the human carrying capacity is likely to be so-and-so.

They cannot predict the constraints or possibilities that lie in the future; their true worth may lie in their role as a goad to conscience and a guide to action in the here and now.

The following beautiful quotation from Principles of Political Economy, by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, sketches the kind of shift in values such action might entail. When it was written, in 1848, the world's population was less than one-fifth its present size.

"There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts oflife to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of cooperation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been obtained. A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good forman to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. ...Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood ofland brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture."

0 About the Author: Joel E. Cohen is head of the LaboratO/y of Populations at Rockefeller University in New York City. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, How Many People Can The Earth Support? to be published this month.

The Fourth orld Native American Art in a New Museum In the beginning,

when all things were created and order had been established, or so it seemed, the world was changed several more times. As each world came into existence, it brought new beings and new dimensions. According to the \Vintu, each change comes about because of greed or wrongdoing. The first world was destroyed by fire, the second by a big wind, and the third by a nood. \Ve are now in the Fourth \Vorld.

- Frank LaPena Native-American

"1t all comes back to the grandfathers, the people who were here atthebeginning. " That was Linda Poolaw's reply when asked what words came to her when she thought of New York City, the site of the George Gustav Heye Center, the first museum of the Smithsonian Institution's plan for three National Museums of the American Indian (NMAI).

Poolaw is Grand Chief of the Delaware Grand Council of North America, and her Lenape (Delaware) ancestors were living on Manhattan Island when the first Europeans arrived. (They called the tip of lower Manhattan Hay-la-py-ee Chen-quay-hee-laas"the place where the sun is born.")

For Poolaw, the opening of the Heye Center in October 1994 represented the start ofa return, the partial reconnection ofa circle that was broken. As one who helped select the Native American works of art being shown in the opening, Poolaw made her own personal contribution to reconnecting that circle.

There are good reasons why the opening of the Heye Center may

artist

be seen as representing a kind of homecoming. For many years, many generations, the Native pcoples of North America have seen parts of their cultures-material, intellectual, and even spiritualtaken from them. Taken as gifts or by purchase, borrowed or stolen, the material objects, valued for their beauty or their uniqueness, have long added to the richness of what we know as contemporary American culture and to the diversity of museums and private collections all over the world. But seldom has there been the kind of acknowledgment that Native peoples deserve, an acknowledgment not only of the intellectual and spiritual depth of their many cultures, but also of the continuance of those cultures into the present day. Seldom, too, has there been full involvement of Native Americans in the interpretation and presentation of their cultures in the worlds of art and museums. And rarely has there been a giving back to Native peoples themselves.

The Heye Center is the first of three state-of-the-art NMAI sites to be built around a collection brought together between 1903 and

.

This Path We Travel

The most interesting exhibit in the new National Museum of the Atp.erican Indian (NMAI) is

the series of "installations"or artistic "happenings."

It is a collaboration of 15 Native American artists. They call it "This Path We Travel" because they had to travel to do it.

Over a three-year period, they traveled to four places that represented the cardinal directions: Alberta, Canada, in the North; Phoenix, Arizona, in the South; Hawaii in the West; New York City in the East. At each of the four sites, the artists participated in performances

and native ceremonies while creating their artistic installations. To hear it in their own words: "We believe this installation is a form of ceremony and ritual. It is based upon an older native model of cooperation and sharing .... We bring our own vision and experience to the ritual, which then becomes a multilayered vision of all the participants. Our collaboration therefore is an ancient continuous process."

The most dramatic perhaps of their installations was a sphere made of willow leaves (photo above) In Alberta, which represented the Earth. It was pierced by a pine pole which rested on two stone cairns of unequal height, one built on land, the other in water.

In Hopi tradition, a sphere placed on two uneven cairns has a deep and subtle meaning -a world spinning out ofbalance and the need for human conduct to set it right again.

"According to this prophecy," says Dan Namingha of the Hopi tribe, one of the chief artists of the sphere, "we are now in the Fourth World and are merging into the Fifth World. Spider Woman brought the people into this .world from the center of the Earth.

Her twin grandsons are guardians of the Earth-one watches the land, the other the water. So we constructed one column of rocks in the water, and one on land."

In Canada the artists created the installation of four hands

were done in the wilderness.

Back in New York, the cardinal point of the East, the 15 artists had to "re-create" the installations for the exhibit in the new museum in the heart of the city.

For the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, Richard West, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, "This Path We Travel" confirms "the distinctive process and place of artistic expression among Native Americans as compared with Western art traditions." For many Native Americans the term art, as it is understood in the EuropeanAmerican cultural context, did not exist.

"Unlike most of Western art," says West, "the objects created by those we now call native artists were not valued by their makers as representations of individual creative and artistic expression. The material, instead, was appreciated by the native maker and community principally for its communal, ritualistic, or ceremonial significance .... The process of creating the cultural material Left: Sphere made o/willow leaves, an installation created in Alberta, Canada.

shown on page 21. The handprints installation was Frank LaPena's brainchild. He and his fellow artists captured the four cardinal directions in a white schist cross on black granite. Then they placed their pigment-smeared hands on the stone to breathe life into the symbol.

And in Hawaii, a place to celebrate earth and water and the unique aspects of male and female counterparts in creation, the artists created a spider web (photo at right).

The original installations

Right: Spider web in palm trees, an installation created in Hawaii.

Page 21: Handprints, an installation created in Alberta, Canada.

was as important, or even more significant, than the object itself."

In Native American Indian culture there are no rigid divisions between art, ritual, and religion-or even between the past and the present. All blend into one. This is eloquently summed up by Richard W. Hill, special assistant to the museum's director, who was powerfully affected by a song Dan Namingha played on his flute when he joined the 15 artists in Hawaii on "one rainy evening." It was a song Namingha had composed about the mourning doves he heard singing when he was a child at Hopi. Hill describes his own feelings-which capture the essence of the installations, and perhaps the essence of Native American Indian art and life: His flute evoked a picture in each of our minds of what it was like when we were young, listening to the birds. Among my own people, the Iroquois, we are told that we are to be like the birds who sing their beauti-

ful songs early in the morning as the sun rises, and gather again to sing as the sun setslike them, we are to gi ve thanks at those very same times.

Dan's song made me wish [ could live more like that, instead of rushing to catch an airplane before the birds even start to sing. Anyone who has heard a dove would appreciate the beauty of that Hopi song, played as we looked out across the Pacific Ocean .... [The song] was agift freely given, from the doves to Dan, from Dan to us.

At that moment [knew that this exhibition would succeed, most of all in the hearts and minds of the artists.

To appreciate what is before you in "This Path We Travel," you will have to try to see beyond the words, hear beyond the sounds, and recall things you may not have known before. Ultimately, by looking at the installation, the artists want us to see ourselves as a part of the creation, a part of what makes life sacred, a part of the solution as well as the problem of the earth-sphere, out of balance.

spinning 0

Eskimo in kayak with fish net, 1917-19. Mackenzie River delta, Northwest Territories, Canada.

Inupiaq Eskimo kayak, late 19th/early 20th century.

Length 4.3 meters.

Above left: The Freye Center in Nell' York City, the new National Museum a/the American Indian.

Above right: POIllO cooking basket, 1900-30.

Height 24 cms.

Left: Micmac birch bark box with quilled decoration, early to mid-19th centUiy. 28X23X 19cms.

Right: Sioux beaded deerskin.

115.5 X 185 cms.

Kiowa beaqed cradle, 1910.

104 X 30.5 X 27.5 ems.

Crazy Horse:S shirt. Oglala Lakota. Hide with paint, scalp locks, and woodpecker feathers. Length 84 ems.

Ojibwe Bandolier bag, beaded cloTh, 82 X 35.9 ems.

Ceramicjigure of a woman, 300 B.C.-A.D. 600. Jama-Coaque culture, central coast of Manabi, EcuadOl: Height 46 cms.

Huron pincushion decorated with moose-hair embroidel)' and glass beads, 19th centtlly. Width 7.3 cms.

Prairie Potowatomi dol/, late 19thlearly 20th centtlly.

Height 25.8 cms.

Osage woman :s wedding outfit: Military-style coat, cloth, broadcloth, ribbon, German silver.

Length 120.1 ems; arrowhead sash, length 253.6 ems.

Sioux double-handle horn spoon. Length 20.3 ems.

Tsimshian mask, early to mid-19th eentwy. Height 24 ems.

1954 by George Gustav Heye, possibly the most intensely driven and acquisitive collector of the material artifacts of Native culture who has ever lived.

The historic landmark building which houses the new Heye Center was once a customs house. There are ironies about the collection. Containing more than a million objects-one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of the arts of indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere-it was kept for years in circumstances that were, at best, inadequate.

Less than two percent of the collection was exhibited, while objects in storage were threatened by humidity and insects. In recent years, few visitors ventured to the museum's less than desirable site at West 155th Street and Broadway in New York City.

NMAI has planned three sites for its three museums. The major museum-yet to be built-will occupy a site in Washington, D.C., near the National Air and Space Museum. The second site will be a Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, which will store the bulk of the collection and accommodate activities including research, exhibit support, collection site city and

conservation, and outreach. The third is the Heye Center, funded through the of New York, the state of New York, U. S. government support.

The three major exhibitions

that inaugu-

rated the Heye Center opening are exemplary of the tearing down of walls-those between Native peoples and their works of

telling. They span a range of tribal traditions from Aleut and Ojibwe to Aymara and native Hawaiian. Overthe course of several years, the artists met at four different locations-symbolizing the cardinal directions-to plan a large and intricate installation.

It would immerse the visitor in a spiral of native words and works, passing from Creation through the Sacred and the Profane into a vision of what the future might hold.

Douglas Coffin, a Potawatomi sculptor who lives in Abiquiu, New Mexico, was one of the 15 artists. They worked with other Native Americans trying to preserve traditional ways and traditionallands.

They experienced moments of shared understanding.

One such moment came on the island of Hawaii. "One of our group, Pualani, is a traditional chanter-she and her sister," Coffin said. "They had arranged for their dance group to meet us toward sunset at the edge of the volcano. It was dark; the steam was rising up in the background, and there was a soft, drizzling rain as they started chanting and playing gourds.

Then they started the dance movements

ARE OTHERS READY TO LISTEN?

around

the volcano.

We felt the beauty

of

Dakota Sioux nation, has this to say about the new museum: "For the first time, the Native American experience has been captured as something other than an ossuary of mute objects; the National Museum of the American Indian is instead an assembly ofliving voices."

their old traditions as they came alive before our eyes."

Expressing those moments of unified vision was the artists' challenge in creating "This Path We Travel."

The installation, says Director Rick West, makes another fundamental point about the American Indian, "namely, that these

"When I sing, I am the voices of my ancestors," writes Soni Moreno-Primeau, who is

are contemporary peoples, too." ativc Americans, he says, possess a brilliant

Author

Susan

Power, a member

of the

Aztec-Mayan, in words painted on the museum wall. "In fact, we have always been singing our

sense of adaptation.

"This is not to be confused with assimilation; this is art, and those between Native peoples and dynamic change-~always taking into non-Native peoples.

The first exhibit, own songs; maybe others are ready to listen." account what is in front of us, but using "Creation's Journey: Masterworks of our own past and our own set of values NativeAmerican Identity and Belief," is an and traditions to deal with that present." astonishing testament to the diversity of the collection.

Before the new Heye Center opened, I visited the maze of The second exhibit, "All Roads Are Good: Native Voices on Life and Culture," goes to the heart of the interpretation unfinished galleries in the Custom House, which would be the issue. In new museum's home. "Creation's Journey" would be here. the words of Museum Director Rick West: "One of the missing "All Roads Are Good" would begin 45 meters farther on. perspectives for many, many years-almost from the beginning of Ar9und another corner was the entrance to the chambered naumuseums-has been the voice of Native peoples themselves." tilus shape of "This Path We Travel."

As I watched carpenters "All Roads Are Good" is made up of more than 300 objects chosen by 23 American Indian "selectors"-religious elders, tribal leaders, artists, and other highly respected people who were nominated by members of their communities for this role.

That idea of connection-and inspired collaboration-defines the third and final exhibit: "This Path We Travel: Celebrations of Contemporary Native-American Creativity."

Unlike the first two shows, which are made up of already existing works of art, "This Path We Travel," is comprised of collaborative installations.

It ineludes the work of 15 contemporary Native-American artists. Its intention is to immerse visitors in the sights, sounds, textures, and spiritual philosophies of Native peoples.

The artists represent all the arts-the whole spectrum from painting, photography, and sculpture, to music, dance, and story-

finishing walls and floors that would soon come alive with the many colors and living shapes of Native art, I felt myself flow through time, moving in a circle that was not broken, one that begins again with each new birth and yet does not end with death. I heard Rick West's words again, which summed up for me the meaning and promise of this new museum.

"It is," he said, "a national institution ofliving culture. It is about a group of peoples and cultures that continue to exist right now and draw upon a lengthy and deep cultural past to maintain a present and to build a cultural future."

D About the Author: Joseph Bruchac, a lVriteralldstorl'te/if'l; o/the Abenaki Nation o/Vel'll/ollt.

is a me",ber

A Celebration e.ce of Ll 1~

by FRA

The author is the creator of one of the major installations (shown on page 21) of the National Museum of the American Indian s exhibit, "This Path We n-avel. " Frank LaPena, whose paintings and sculpture reflect a deep interest and appreciation of his native Wintu-Nomtipom culture, is a professor of art and director of Native American studies at California State University. Sacramento. A traditional dancel; singel~ and practitioner of Wintu culture, LaPena has exhibited artwork all over the United States for the past three decades.

My fascination with colors and the making of pictures is something I've been aware of all my life. My first notion of what art could do was when my mother colored a picture ofa Marine in one of my coloring books. It was during World War II, and the picture took on a realism that was total for me. I remember tearing out the page and carrying it around for a long time. This happened before I started going to the federal Indian boarding school in Stewart, Nevada.

I was born in San Francisco; on my father's side I am Asian and first-generation American. On my mother's side our beginnings are traced back to the time of emergence from this Earth. My father came here as a young boy of II and was ki lied when he was 29. I was five at the time, and it affected me deeply. Circumstances thus emphasized my involvement in my Native American culture. When my father was killed, an owl came and told us of his death, and a special burning offeathers and mourning had to be done in order to free his spirit from the house.

F eafhers is about this event.

My painting

Burning

My tribe, the Wintu-Nomtipom, are a mountain river people of northern California.

My mother's grandmother was from the upper Sacramento River Canyon in the Cedar district around Slate Creek. Grandma Rose married Garfield Towendolly from the Trinity Center area. His family held "head rights" and were responsible for the maintenance and preservation of tradition.

Grandma Rose was special. I lived with her some of the time, and I remember the clear water of Castle Creek and the flume that brought the water to the house. The Castle Crags towered

to the west of us and the woods were close by. To the

K LAPE

A

north was Shasta Mountain,

and in the winter it made its own

weather because it was high and massive. The rivers were clean and full of native fish. One time I caught a water snake and tried to scare Granny. I remember the smell and the color of the apples she used to keep on the porch. When I was growing up in the [Native] Indian schools, and later when I heard that "Indians" were bad, I knew instinctively that people who were saying this did not know what they were talking about. They did not know Indian people. Even at a young age I could understand this.

The first time we went to the Indian school it was snowing, and it took a long time to get there, but I was too young to be accepted, so we had to go back home. When I finally started school, one thing that separated me from the others was that I could do art-a lot too, but I had a preoccupation long time. Not only did I enjoy a way, and perhaps it kept me my mother.

of the other kids could do art with it and could do it for a doing it, it was like magic in in touch with the memory of

In the severe winters of the early 1940s, the devastation to the Southwest tribes, especially the Navajo, forced the Bureau of [American ] Indian Affairs to provide more boarding school room for them. As a result, we were sent to the federal Indian boarding school at Chemawa, Oregon, in 1948. Eventually, my sister Barbara, brother Ben, and I were put into a foster home in northern California.

My first attendance in a public school was eighth grade in Grenada Elementary School in Siskiyou County.

Because art was always a part of my life, I never gave much thought to it-I just did it. I took mechanical drawing classes in Yreka High School, but not art classes. It wasn't until college at Chico State that I decided to take one art class, which was an elective. I ended up doing poorly in most of my other classes because I spent all my time doing art, and promptly switched my major from the sciences to art.

When I went to Oregon to work as an adult on my own for the first time, I came back because of homesickness; I needed to be able to see high mountains and watch the clouds and sky change. I learned something about myself then. I still hadn't finished college-it took me nine years to get my degree-but I never gave up trying to finish. I was determined to make good for my family, because no one from either side ofthe fami ly had ever graduated from college.

1 consider the process of art to be the most important element in the doing of art. In creating art, people and events are remembered.

Being able to go back and forth in time for inspiration and to arrive at forms and colors can be quite exciting. Ideas and shapes are never the same; one can never get bored. Sometimes I work from concrete ideas such as a

directions in a white schist cross on black granite, and placed our hands on the stone with Earth's pigments to bring the symbol alive (see page 21). We laughed and prayed, and when we finished, a light sprinkle of rain blessed our efforts with water. We were silent then, and when I talked about this later, I found my eyes brimming with tears. We filled those

specific theme, but as I work there is a spontaneity, and images emerge in the paint on the canvas. When I am doing my art all other things drop away and I follow the magic of discovery; the journey is unpredictable and never-ending.

Having exhibited my artwork for more than 30 years now, there is a lot of art I still want to do. At this time in my life I

canyons with song, and the weekend hikers and mountain climbers were in their element just as we were.

I could not make it to Hawaii, but as I viewed the video of the trip, I was impressed by the power of the ocean. We landlubbers tend to forget how limited our movements are, regulated by the land. Because the Earth is three-quarters water,

can appreciate hard work. And I realize that it is better to seek quality and excellence in one's work because a full life has both good and bad, and before one knows it, all the unfulfilled things are lost along the way. One's health and abilities do not last forever.

"This Path We Travel" is a worthwhile project and long event for the Heye overdue. Obviously, it is a watershed collection and a public reminder of the greater National Museum of the American Indian to be built on the Mall in Washington, D.C., at the turn of the century. It has been

most of the settlement of the Earth has been by people traveling by water. Water, fire, vents of steam and lava, and the magic of emerging, lost beings behind curtains, mists, and the song of the chanter; these were magic enough for me. I could see the joy in the native people and how that naturalness seemed to free the spirit of the members of our group.

The women never looked more beauti ful to me.

fascinating to meet all of the excellent artists and to hear about their respective creative fields. This admiration does not diminish in my mind when some of them have had to drop out of this project, because others have struggled to hang on. I sense a camaraderie and concern with the issues we have articulated, and perhaps a joy of discovery with each other and with the sites we have visited. Part of this goodwill has been with the land, with each other, the art produced through group and individual action, and by the meet-

when one's own efforts fall short but one cannot escape the trying. Later, we had to cross the floodplain to reach the fields of birdsong, and our own footprints went down by those of the coyote, wildcat, and birds. We stayed and sculpted the clay into animals, gods, little-known beings, and little people of the imagination.

I liked this time of isolation from the others, walking in mud and singing and creating-the time flew. The next day we came back to see our creations drying and flaking apart under the hot sun,

ings

returning

with

elders

and other

caring

individuals

who

have

enl ightened us with their knowledge.

Those people who say, "What are these artists doing?" or "Can they pull it off?" need to real ize that our experiences help define our artwork. When we went to Morley, Alberta, Canada, I was pleased to be where the clders had kept their tribal consciousness of the world alive by sharing their beliefs and concerns in council. I had never made it to the previous councils, so I was happy to hear the tradition would be started again.

I have lived close to water for most of my life and know its power. In Morley, I sang to and with the river because it was alive and so was I-and the land was sacred and alive.

Singing to the river awakened a sound, a sound of moving together and joining with the wind. In this place and at this time-immediate and transitory-a process developed among the song, the river, and the land. One could crawl along the shore and discover the universe in stones, in the color and textures of river materials, or one could wander through grottos of rock canyons and create that pri ma I sound offlute and voice.

Some of the artists and I found the universe of the four

In Arizona, on the banks of the Gila River floodplain, I was enchanted by the birds singing in the morning. They were everywhere.

This is when song is most relevant-

to the Earth

from where

they

came.

The Gila

River Tribal Council members had never had a group come to them like ours-where nothing was taken-and all works were left on the land.

We have met so many times in New York City it is hard to relate to it as the site representing the eastern direction.

Meeting with the Indian community there seemed circumstantial and not as open as the other sites. New York City has been like a long lost uncle or distant cousin to me; I know I have a relationship with it, but I don't really know what kind of relationship it is. I know the city is a cultural mecca, but I haven't been able to see the galleries, or participate in the life of the city as I have had the opportunity to do at the other locations.

"This Path We Travel" is difficult conceptual exhibition. mentary, others give use of symbols-and existence as human celebration of life,

to define because

Some of the artworks are social form,to tribal concepts-such some share the artists' concerns beings. Ultimately, the exhibition an affirmation for art and

Americans, and a continuous, the Earth and all living things.

evolving

it is a comas the about is a ative

story of the spirit of

0

Overall score 1. Harvard University (Mass.)

BEST NATIONAL UNIVERSITIES The leaders among the 229 schools in this category

100.0

2.

Princeton University (N.J.)

98.8

2.

Yale University (Conn.)

98.8

4.

Stanford University (Calif.)

98.1

5.

Massachusetts

98.0

6.

Duke University (N.C.)

96.8

7.

California Ins!. of Tech.

95.5

7.

Dartmouth College (N.H.)

95.5

9.

Brown University (R.I)

Ins!. of Tech.

95.3

10. Johns Hopkins University

(Md.)

94.6

11. University of Chicago (Ill.)

94.4

11. University of Pennsylvania

94.4

13. Cornell University (N.Y.)

94.0

13. Northwestern

94.0

University (Ill.)

15. Columbia University (N.Y.)

93.8

16. Rice University (Texas)

936

17. Emory University (Ga.)

90.5

18. University of Notre Dame (Ind.)

90.1

19. University of Virginia

89.6 89.2

20. Washington

University

21. Georgetown

University (D.C.)

22. Vanderbilt University 23. Carnegie-Mellon

(Mo.)

(Tenn.)

University

88.9 88.8

(Pa.)

87.2

24. Univ. of Michigan at Ann Arbor

86.9

25. Tufts University (Mass.)

86.6

Overall score I. Amherst College (Mass.)

BEST NATIONAL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES

99.4

2. Williams College (Mass.)

99.4

4. Bowdoin College (Maine)

96.6

5. Haverford College (Pa.)

96.2

5. Wellesley College (Mass.)

96.2

7. Middlebury

94.7

College (VI.)

8. Pomona College (Calif.)

94.6

9. Bryn Mawr College (Pa.)

92.9

10. Smith College (Mass.)

92.2

II. Carleton College (Minn.)

91.0

12. Wesleyan University (Conn.)

90.7

13. Vassar College (N.Y.)

90.4

14. Grinnell College (Iowa)

89.9

15. Washington & Lee Uni. (Va.)

89.7

16. Claremont McKenna College (Calif.) 89.6 17. Colgate University

The leaders among the 161 schools i~ this category

100.0

College (Pa.)

2. Swarthmore

(N.Y.)

89.4

18. Bates College (Maine)

88.9

19. Colby College (Maine)

88.2

19. Mount Holyoke College (Mass.)

88.2

21. Davidson College (N.C.)

87.9

22. Oberlin College (Ohio)

85.4

23. Hamilton College (N.Y.)

85.1

23. Trinity College (Conn.)

85.1

25. Connecticut

83.8

College

Rl'prilllt:d from U.s. NCII"S & II 'odd Report.

September 18. 1995. publi,hed at \\',"hingtun.

Academic reputation

Academic reputation

Student selectivity

Student selectivity

Faculty resources

SAT/ACT 25th-75th percentile

Financial resources

Student! faculty ratio

Education expend. per student

I

5

1320-1480

$39,525

5

14

1280-1470

$30,220

10

4

1290-1460

$43,514

3

6

1270-1450

$36,450

6

7

1290-1470

$34,870

13

II

1220-1410

$31.585

2

I

1350-1480

$63,575

18

12

1250-1430

$32,162

12

29

1210-1410

$22,704

15

2

1210-1400

$58,691

7

9

1180-1400

$38,380

8

17

1190-1380

$27,553

II

22

1180-1380

$21,864

4

16

1160-1360

$28,052

14

10

1210-1410

$31,510

9

21

1270-1470

$24,167

16

15

1140-1325

$31,054

21

53

1150-1360

$15,122

33

62

1110-1340

$13,349

30

3

1130-1330

$48,309

48

27

1150-1360

$20,126

17

18

1120-1310

$24.794

19

18

1150-1370

$25,026

26

42

1060-1300

$15,470

29

31

1160-1330

$19,466

Faculty resources

Financial resources $22,227

7

4

1210-1420

2 9

2 II

1250-1440

$23,715

1240-1450

$22,929 $19,612

14

18

1180-1350

8

19

1200-1390

$18,826

4

3

1170-1360

$23,067

12

5

1140-1340

$21,265

II

12

1270-1420

$21,147

6 I

8 6

1150-1350

$21,139

1090-1290

$21,935

38

26

1160-1390

$18,700

18

24

1140-1360

$16,831

14

16

1140-1320

$17,687

17

14

1160-1370

$19,256

10

44

1200-1340

$17,196

22

12

1190-1370

$18,380

19

39

1ll0-1280

$16,033

24

29

1170-1330

$17,165

28

28

1105-1295

$16,845

5

9

1020-1250

$19,425

49

33

1160-1350

$18,386

28

20

1110-1340

$18,341

26

27

1030-1250

$18,289

16

16

1080-1260

$19,360

49

1064-1282

$15,620

13

D.C.

The ~t~!~~dolog How the rankings are determined.

Why rank colleges?

A college education is one of the most important-and often one of the most costly-investments prospective students will ever make. For this reason. the editors of Us. Ne\l's believe students and their families should have all the data possible about the comparative merits of colleges and universities.

What is the best way to use the U.S. News rankings?

Simply because a school is tops in its category does not mean it is the best choice for everyone. A student's academic and professional ambitions and financial resources, as well as a school's size, atmosphere. and location, should play major roles in dcterminmg where to go to college. And it IS important to remember that schools separated by only a few places in the rankings are extreme Iy close in academ ic qua Iity.

How docs U.S. News ensure the integrity of data used in its rankings?

First, the statistical questionnaire at the heart of the annual survey was subjected to a rigorous review by a group of admissions and financial aid officers. Then, the questionnaire was reviewed by experts on academic data at major institutions. Our goals: Maximum clarity, relevance. and precision.

Internally, Us. News's computers were programmed to flag data that were inconsistent or at great variance with data previously fi led by a school. We a Iso crosschecked with a database information provided by schools when they seek to borrow market. money In the public finance Similarly, we check graduation rate data submitted by colleges against the data that

the U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) requires from its 302 Division I member institutions.

Did any colleges refuse to provide data?

Only one school out of the 390 in the survey's major categories-national universities and national liberal arts colleges-did not respond to the US. News questionnaire.

The lone holdout: Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

It contended that participating in this survey was not in its best interest. Among the 1,029 schools in the other categories, 976, or 95 percent, supplied requested data.

What's new this year?

Because more students are choosing a school on the basis of the quality of a particular undergraduate major, Us. News ranked the best undergraduate programs and departments in two of the most popular majors-business and engineering. the How does U.S. News determine various academic categories?

We divided the 1,419 accredited fouryear schools in the survey into categories based on classifications maintained by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. To simplify the groupings, several categories were combined, and some larger ones subdivided by region.

Schools with fewer than 200 students were not ranked. Nor were the five military service academies: Too few in number.

Finally, because of the new rankings of business and engineering programs, we eliminated the categories of schools specializing in these disciplines.

This year's categories include: The 229 national universities. These usually have more-selective admissions and greater resources. They offer a wide range ofbaccalaureate programs, place a high priority on research, and award many PhOs. The 161 national Iiberal arts colleges are also highly selective but emphasize-and award more than 40 percent of their degrees in-the liberal arts.

How were the rankings determined?

First, the 2,700-plus college presidents, deans, and admissions directors who par-

ticipated in the survey of academic reputation were asked to rank all the schools in the same category as their own-placing each school into one offour quartiles. Each time a school was placed in the top quartile, it received four points; in the second quartile, three points, etc. A school's total points were then divided by the number of survey participants. "Don't knows" did not count.

The resulting rankings were combined with data provided by the colleges on the following measures of academic quality: Selectivity. This was determined by (I) the acceptance rate among applicants to the fall 1994 entering class; (2) the "yield," or the percentage of those accepted who actually enrolled; (3) either the average or the midpoint score on the verbal and math Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) or the composite American College Testing Assessment (ACT); (4) the high school class standing of entering freshmen. [f a school omitted information, it recei ved the equivalent of the lowest score for that variable attained by any institution in its category. This may have lowered a school's ranking.

Schools that did not provide inclusive

data on entrance test scores and high school class standing-for all first-time, full-time entering students for whom information was available-were asked why they had excluded students. Some said they do not judge international students on the basis of scores on the verbal portions of entrance exams; others said it was unfair to include students admitted under special programs.

If a school provided adequate information on test scores but not on high school class standing-or vice versa~US. News increased either the weight given high school class standing or test scores in computing student selectivity. A similar method was used for schools that submitted comprehensive test score data but lacked scores for all students because they do not require standardized aptitude tests.

A few institutions refused repeated requests to provide data in the form requested

by Us. News. In these cases, the measure of student selectivity was deternlined by the school's acceptance rate.

Faculty resources. Using data from the 1994 school year, this ranking was derived from (l) the ratio of full-time-equivalent students to full-time-equivalent faculty, excluding law, dental, veterinary, and medical schools; (2) the percentage of full-time faculty with doctorates or other terminal degrees; (3) the percentage of faculty with part-time status; (4) average salary-including benefits-for all fulltime faculty (salary was adjusted for differences in cost of living in metropolitan areas, using indexes supplied by Runzheimer International); (5) class size, determined by the percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students and the percentage with more than 50.

Financial resources. The strength of a school's resources was determined by its total fiscal 1994 expenditures on instruction, administration, student services, and academic support (including libraries and computers) divided by total full-timeequivalent enrollment.

Counted separately: All other 1994 spending-research, scholarships, public service, and operations and maintenance-per student.

0 About the Author: Robert J. Morse is a senior editorlvith U.S. News & World Report.

THE

ENGINEERING SCHOOLS

The

Consulting Game

.,

-

THE TOP 50 PROGRAMS

Rank

Avg. Score

I. Massachusetts

Institute of Technology

hortly after 6 o'clock on a spring evening earlier this year, about 75 high school students sat in the small auditorium of a nondescript office building in Concord, Massachusetts.

Each held a small metal box; on top of every box was a dial that could be moved between the numbers zero and ten. For the next two hours, the students, representing a variety of high schools in the Boston area, answered a series of questions about college by turning their dials.

Every time the students responded to such questions as "How much do you think ayearof college is worth?" their replies were fed electronically into a computer that produced a statistical breakdown of their responses.

The breakdown was projected onto television screens in an adjoining room where a half-dozen staff members of Maguire Associates Inc., a Concord research firm, were watching. By the time the dials were turned for the last time that evening, the Maguire firm's database, which includes results from surveys of some 14,000 high school students, had been enriched by 720,000 pieces of informationall the better to advise the company's financially hard-pressed colleges and university clients.

For those who hold a traditional view of the way colleges operate, this electronic focus

S

3.8

Rank

Avg. Score

28. Arizona State University at Main Campus

3.1

I. Stanford University (California)

38

28. Case Western Reserve University (Ohio)

3.1

3. California

3.7

28. Columbia University (New York)

3.1 3.1

Institute of Technology

3. Carnegie-Mellon

Schools turn to outside help to target and select students.

RANKING

University

(Pennsylvania)

3.7

28. Iowa State University

3. Cornell University (New York)

3.7

28. Rose-Hulman

3. Georgia Institute of Technology

3.7

3. University of California at Berkeley

37

28. University of Arizona

31

3. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

37

28. University of Florida

3.1

3. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

3.7

28. University of California at Davis

3.1

Institute of Technology

(Indiana)

3.1

10. Purdue University at West Lafayette (Indiana)

3.6

28. University of Colorado at Boulder

3.1

II. University of Texas at Austin

3.5

28. University of Pennsylvania

3.1

II. University of Wisconsin at Madison

3.5

38. Brown Unjversity (Rhode Island)

3.0

13. Northwestern

University (Illinois)

3.4

38. Dartmouth College (New Hampshire)

3.0

13

State University at

38. Lehigh University (Pennsylvania)

3.0

3.4

38. Michigan State University

3.0

13. Princeton University (New Jersey)

3.4

38. North Carolina State University at Raleigh

30

13. Rensselaer Polytechnic

3.4

38. University of Notre Dame (Indiana)

30 3.0

Pennsylvania

University Park

Institute (New York)

17. Johns Hopkins University (Maryland)

33

38. University of Southern California

17. Ohio State University at Columbus

33

38

Univ~rsity of Virginia

3.0

17. Rice University (Texas)

33

46. Cooper Union (New York)

2.9

17. Texas A&M University at College Station

3.3

46. Drexel University (Pennsylvania)

2.9

17

University of California at Los Angeles

3.3

46. Rutgers at New Brunswick (New Jersey)

2.9

17. University of Minnesota at Twin Cities

3.3

46. University of California at Santa Barbara

2.9

17. University of Washington

3.3

46. University of Delaware

2.9

17. Virginia Tech

3.3

46. University of Iowa

2.9

25. Duke University (North Carolina)

3.2

46. University of Missouri at Rolla

2.9

25. Harvey Mudd College (California)

3.2

46. Vanderbilt University (Tennessee)

2.9

25. University of Maryland at College Park

3.2

46. Washington

2.9

group would seem out of placemore suited for testing audience reaction to a TV sitcom than for gauging student attitudes toward tuition costs. But college admissions and financial aid are no longer the low-key enterprises they were two decades ago when the pool of prospective students exceeded the number of places for them on campus.

Many schools, faced with dwindling enrollments and ballooning financial aid budgets, are operating much more like corporate America, turning to consultants

University

like Maguire for sophisticated adv(ce on issues ranging from how much to raise tuition to how to distribute aid most effectively.

"Colleges can't maintain huge staffs, so they are outsourcing to experts, mimicking what business is doing," explains John Lawlor, a Minneapolis consultant. That is why higher-education consulting has become a $100 million-a-year business. It is an enterprise operated in large part by former college admissions officials with an entrepreneurial bent. For example, John

(Missouri)

Maguire, president of Maguire Associates, is a former dean of enrollment management at Boston College. virtually every stage of the admissions and financial aid process, Maguire, Williams, and their competitors are transforming the way many institutions, especially private colleges and universities in the second, third, and fourth tiers, conduct business.

When schools start to build up a potential applicant pool, consultants

A

help determine the look and content of the letters and brochures mailed to high school students.

Maguire Associates will even show groups of students specific language and pictures a school is contemplating using in its brochures, then will advise its client on what works and what does not.

To build an applicant pool, colleges typically buy names of high school sophomores and juniors from the College Board, which collects voluminous data about students who take the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT). Schools can purchase names by ZIP code, SAT performance, race, and the like. Once they have made their purchases, many schools turn to another group of consultants~ experts in geodemographics.

Using a system called PRIZM, which divides the nation's neighborhoods into 62 "geodemographic" clusters based on economics and lifestyle, the consultants help schools find in the lists they have bought those who reside in the same clusters as undergraduates already at their institution.

The theory: Schools tend to attract students from similar geodemographic backgrounds.

T

he process targets markets that are potentially rich sources of applicants.

It also helps schools pare as many as 30,000 names from lists of 100,000 or more, saving some $30,000 in mailing costs.

"What we do is let schools work smarter instead of harder," says Tim Dodge, senior vice president of College Marketing Technologies Inc. in Crystal Lake, Illinois. Consultants also can help clients send different messages to different geodemographic groups. Concordia College in Seward, Nebraska, did just that after a Washington, D.C., firm, Consultants for Educational Resources & Research (CERR), analyzed the composition of its student body. CERR

discovered that the majority of students came from three geodemographic clusters: "Down on the farm," "white picket fences," and "new mainstream."

The mailing to those classified as down on the farm emphasized small classes and campus friendliness; the brochure for the upwardly mobile, white-picket fencers stressed career-placement services. The literature for those in the new mainstream, a relatively affluent, well-educated group, focused on how well Concordia graduates do after college. "We can't help an institution get students to go there, but we can help schools present themselves and make themselves available in markets that are most productive for them," says Elizabeth Balut, CERR's director of marketing and research.

After a school has built a potential applicant pool, it tries to convert those who have made enquiries into actual applicants.

Here another type of specialist comes into play~the "telequalifier"~a firm hired by a college to call students to determine their interest level. Ruffalo, Cody & Associates in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, makes calls for 40 to 50 schools annually. Once a representative from the firm has established that a student still is considering applying to a school, it tries to determine just how interested the student is. The firm also assesses a student's financial situation by asking how difficult it will be to pay tuition. The information is then sent to the client, which generally uses it to focus energies on those deemed most likely to apply.

Chris Munoz, associate provost for enrollment management at the University of Dayton, uses Ruffalo, Cody because he thinks "students are more candid with a third party than with us."

Every year the University of Dayton cuts its inquiry pool by 15 to 20 percent by using telequalifying, saving money on follow-up

mailings. The service also allows the school to identify students for whom costs are a major barrier and to communicate very early in the process with those families, explaining the kind of aid for which they may be eligible.

Consultants leave their largest~and most controversial~imprint on what, by any measure, is the most sensitive stage ofthe process: The decision on whom a school accepts and how much aid they receive. Only a few years ago, admission was based primarily on merit and financial aid on need. While merit, very broadly defined, still governs admissions at most institutions, decisions on aid at many private schools are shaped by advice from consultants who help institutions "to maximize net tuition revenue." In short, they offer advice on how to meet enrollment targets, attract the best students, and get the maximum in tuition dollars, while not spending any more on financial aid than they must.

The strategy has led many institutions to use at least a portion offinancial aid funds to discount tuition. "The industry has gone from using financial aid as a voluntary charitable tool to using it as a discount," observes David Strauss of the Art & Science Group Inc., a Baltimore consulting firm. But that discount is usually labeled a merit award by colleges. While there certainly are}rue merit awards, more often than not these awards are now an indirect way to cut tuition for those who are considered academically strong, financially attractive (able to pay at least part of the bill), or some combination of the two.

At the same time, these schools are charging a much higher rate, in some cases the full or "sticker" price, to applicants they deem less desirable who have the wherewithal, or the inclination, to pay. The reason: Research has shown that the weaker students are academi-

cally, the more likely they will be willing to pay whatever is necessary to attend a school they feel suits their ability. anyprivate colleges argue that they must covertly discount tuition to remain competitive with less expensive public schools.

They contend that openly dropping their price would not work because the public would think their quality was being diminished.

Moreover, consultants have demonstrated that cutting the sticker price may yield less net tuition than targeted discounting, called "financial aid leveraging" in the vernacular of the trade.

Leveraging generally works this way: All admitted applicants are placed into one ofa number of categories based on how they rank on academic ability and financial need. For each category, the school has established a specific aid award and determined how that award will be funded.

For example, all students ranked seven out often in ability who are considered to have medium need may get a $4,000 grant and an $8,000 loan, while those ranked six in ability and low in need may, nonetheless, get a $6,000 grant because the school, to maximize tuition revenue, has chosen to try to increase the number of medium-ability, low-need students. Hence, a student with limited need may get a larger grant than someone more needy.

Decisions about the aid amount for each category are usually the result of a consultant's analysis of the applicant pool of the previous two years. This helps a school see which groups of students are enrolling in higher-than-expected numbers and which are lagging.

The analysis also indicates whether a school is overawarding money to some categories~those in which enrollment is unexpectedly high~while underawarding others. A school can then adjust

M

BUSINESS SCHOOLS both the amount and the mix of aid in each category to bring in the kind of class it seeks. Some schools discover that increasing grants by only $1,000 to students in a given category can make a big difference in enrolling that group, while other institutions, operating in a more competitive market, may find it takes $3,000 to make a difference for moderate achievers and $5,000 for a high-achieving group.

Consultant Thomas Williams says that in 1994, on average, his clients increased net tuition revenue by $588,000. Ohio's Denison University, which is not a Williams client, has done far better. Relying on $250,000 worth of research by Maguire Associates, Denison decided to target "alumni awards" of$3,000 to $5,000 to accepted applicants whom President Michele Tolela Myers describes as "good kids with solid grades and SAT scores of 1100." Denison had been losing a number of these applicants to other schools. During the past two years, the strategy has helped Denison boost its freshman class from 508 to 721 and increase net tuition revenue by $1.5 million. hile financial aid leveraging benefits colleges, some educators worry that it is unfair. When aid was based simply on need, counselors could tell students to apply wherever they wanted.

Now, worries William McClintick, director of college counseling at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, "I have to counsel kids to look for schools that will be attracted to them academically. Odds are good that a $25,000 school won't meet their financial need if they get in by the skin of their teeth."

Where all these changes le::lVe higher education is far from clear, but an experiment at the University of Rochester may be a harbinger. Last year, the school announced that starting with this fall's entering class it would pro-

W

THE TOP 50 PROGRAMS Rank

Avg. Score

Rank

Avg. Score

I.

University of California at Berkeley (Haas)

3.7

25. University of Arizona

3.1

I.

University of Pennsylvania

3.7

25. University of Maryland at College Park

3.1

36

25. University of Notre Dame (Indiana)

3.1

25. Wake Forest University (North Carolina)

3.1

3.6

31. Brigham Young University at Provo (Utah)

3.0

36

31. Georgetown

3.0

3.

Carnegie-Mellon

3.

Massachusetts

(Wharton)

University (Pennsylvania)

Institute of Technology (Sloan) 3.6

3.

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

3.

U.N.C. at Chapel Hill (KenanlFlagler)

7.

Indiana University at Bloomington

7.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

3.5 ' 3.5

University (Dist. of Columbia)

31. Texas A&M at College Station

3.0

31. Tulane University (Freeman) (Louisiana)

3.0 3.0

7.

University of Virginia (Mclntire)

3.5

31. University of Georgia (Terry)

7.

University of Wisconsin at Madison

3.5

31. University of Iowa

3.0

II.

New York'University

3.4

37. Babson College (Massachusetts)

2.9

II.

Penn State University at University

37. Boston College

2.9 2.9

(Stern)

3.4

37. College of William and Mary (Virginia)

Purdue University at W. Lafayette (Indiana)

3.4

37. Miami University at Oxford (Farmer) (Ohio)

2.9

University of Southern California

3.4

37. Rensselaer Polytechnic

2.9

Park (Smeal)

II. II. II.

University of Texas at Austin

16. Ohio State University at Columbus (Fisher)

3.4

37. Rochester Institute of Technology (New York) 2.9

3.3

37. Syracuse University (New York)

2.9

37. University of Colorado at Boulder

2.9

37. University of Missouri at Columbia

2.9

37. University of Oregon

2.9

16. University of Minnesota at Twin Cities (Carlson)

3.3

16. University of Pittsburgh at Main Campus (Katz)

Institute (New York)

3.3

37. University of Tennessee at Knoxville

2.9

16. University of Washington

3.3

48. Boston University

2.8

16. Washington University (Olin) (Missouri)

3.3

48. Florida State University

2.8

21. Case Western Reserve University (Ohio)

3.2

48. Southern Methodist University (Cox) (Texas) 2.8

21. Emory University (Goizueta) (Georgia)

3.2

48. SUNY at Buffalo

2.8

21. Michigan State University (Broad)

3.2

48. University of Kansas

2.8

21. University of Florida

3.2

48. University of South Carolina at Columbia

2.8

25. Arizona State University at Main Campus

3.1

48. University of Utah (Eccles)

2.8

25. Georgia Institute of Technology

3.1

48. Virginia Technology

2.8

vide $5,000 annual grants to New York State residents and children of alumni, effectively cutting tuition for those groups. The announcement, contrary to conventional wisdom about the negative effects of price cutting, did not erode public perceptions of the school's quality, perhaps because the change was presented as a grant, not as a reduction in price.

This fall, Rochester enrolled a freshman class whose average SAT score was 35 points higher than that of the preceding class. At

(Pamplin)

the same time, the school modestly continue and more and more improved its net tuition revenue schools employ sophisticated because the grant brought in more techniques like financial aid first-year students who, as a group, leveraging, the competitive edge had lower financial need than the gained by those now using these previous year's entering class. methods will be substantially lost.

Many schools do not have Then, the consultants and their the same academic strengths as struggling college and university Rochester. But if its experiment clients may have to find a new magic bullet to help cure higher succeeds, it may encourage D other institutions-and their con- education's financial ills. sultants-to be more straightforward with students about dis- About the Author: Alvin P SanojJ is an assistant managing editor counting policies.

In the long run, ifpresent trends with U.S. News & World Report.

RE

It was two years in the planning and when it all came together on October 3 last, 34 foreign alumni of the American Embassy School (AES) in New Delhi met for the first-ever reunion to be held in India. They came from all over the world-the United States, England, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand-to join their Delhi-based peers in the celebration of their shared past. Many alumni, some of whom were returning to India after two decades or more, brought their wives, children, parents, or friends.

The credit for arranging the reunion goes to K.C. Gray-Siebert, who left AES in 1969 as an 11th grader and hadn't been back since. But, she nurtured the dream of holding the 25th reunion of the class of '70 in Delhi, to which alumni of all years would be invited. She organized the get-together with the assistance of Delhi-based alumnus, Jeff Campbell. Gray-Siebert runs the AES Alumni Association in the United States from her home in Springfield, Virginia, and publishes a newsletter that goes out twice a year to more than 1,000 alumni, teachers, administrators, and parents.

The AES Alumni Association was

we realize that the friends we made in India are like none other. As the graduates from the 1980s and 1990s get older, I think they also will feel the bond with India and their friends."

More than any other factor, perhaps, it is the sense of having shared a unique experience that has kept this mutual bond alive.

Kim Waters, who graduated from AES in 1966, agrees that living in India was probably the single-most influential experience of her life. "I don't think any of us can adequately describe what an enriching experience living in India has bcen for us, the degree to which it influenced decisions we made, roads we took, or perspectives we assumed to view life," she said.

Ann Rieger (class of '72) attended college in the United States, but has never attended any of its reunions. But she has a very strong attachment to AES. "I feel so blessed that I was able to go to high school in New Delhi," she said.

Other alumni too are convinced that their years in India have done much to determine the course of their lives. For Anne Weathersby (class of '65), it was her fifth

UNION! Alumni of New Delhi's American Embassy School recently returned to revisit a corner of their memories that is forever India. launched in 1980 when Gray-Siebert hosted the first reunion for the class of '70 along with fellow alumnae Maggie King and Sarah Bohr. From the original three members, the association has grown over the years to more than 2,000 members today. The alumni meet every five years. The second reunion was held in 1985, also in Washington, D.C., and the third in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, in 1990.

This reunion was the fourth.

Among the AES alumni, the graduates of the 1960s and 1970s evinced the most interest in holding a reunion in India.

Gray-Siebert attributes this to maturity.

"We are older," said Gray-Siebert, "and

visit to India since she graduated. "India is a part of me and I need to come back every once in a while to be revived," she said.

Robert Blake graduated from AES in 1964. "My years in India affected me profoundly," he said. "I learned to be patient, flexible, and adaptive. I learned how to appreciate things from someone else's point of view while still retaining a distinctly American perspective."

The high point of the reunion was the special assembly held to mark the "Backto-School" day. Five former students, representing various graduating classes and widely differing career choices, spoke movingly to current students of their AES experience.

They urged today's high schoolers to make the most of the "golden years" and assured them that the friends they have now will be the ones they will remember two or three decades hence. They invited them to see how living in India and studying at AES could give them multiple perspectives from which to view the world.

Barry Rogers, a 1973 graduate, spoke for the whole group when he said: "My five years in India gave me an acceptance of people, culture, and diversity that remains very much a part of my life today."

Alumni who had brought their children along enjoyed the opportunity of showing them scenes from their schooldays. For most, Delhi itself had changed a lot. Some missed the ubiquitous bicycle of yore, others the "cozier" Delhi minus the high-rises in Connaught Place. Yet others felt that the ambience had not changed. Many headed, as soon as they arrived, for their old addresses to see what their former houses looked like now. One mother said, "I can see India through myoid and experienced eyes-and also through the eyes of my kids who are experiencing India much as I did when I arrived 30-some years ago in ninth grade. It was wonderful, it is wonderful!"

While touring the campus escorted by AES Director Stephen Kapner, the alumni discovered that the school itself had changed: More students, more educational aids like computers, a gym, and swimming pools that were added a decade or so ago.

A couple of alumni who were here in the late 1950s and early "1960s recalled the school's humble origins in a one-story

building on Janpath which has since been replaced by an office high-rise.

The school was begun in 1952 when small group of American diplomats, U.S. government employees, heads of U.S.based foundations, and business executives living and working in New Delhi decided to establish an American-type school for their children. Initially, the newly established school moved into the "Taj" Barracks (a name given to temporary buildings by American servicemen who had been billeted there during World War II) to share space with the single employees of the U.S. Embassy. There was only one teacher to take care of all instruction, and even basic facilities were nonexistent. Children were required to bring their own desks!

As the school expanded, it outgrew the Taj Barracks, and opened its doors to a veritable Who's Who of distinguished visitors, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower; Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; American First Lady Jackie Kennedy; cybernetics genius Norbert Wiener; architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller; actors Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck; and illustrator Norman Rockwell.

The school moved into its present location in January 1963. Designed by architect Joseph Stein the buildings have larger classrooms, big playing fields, and seemingly unlimited space.

The AES of the 1960s and early 1970s is what most of the visiting alumni reminisced about, with its boarding facilities, the minicourses (which at that time were just that-six-week-long courses in the humanities and not the out-of-town trips that go by that name today), and the trappings of psychedelia: Bell-bottom pants, beads, long hair, and campus rock groups like Yesterday's Children.

These memories-added to those just acquired-are what the alumni carried with them when they departed.

That these 34 former students of the American Embassy School feel a deep bond with India is without doubt. But what makes the Indian-American cross-cultural experience so unique? From the vantage point of having spent an adult lifetime in India and having observed other Americans with more than a casual interest in this

a

country, it is evident that the attachment AES alumni have for India cannot be explained away in adult terms. Unlike the more mature Indophiles who eagerly flock to this country seeking spiritual enlightenment or some aspect ofIndian culture, AES students usually arrive as dependents, with no more control over their destination than the baggage and lift vans that accompanied their parents. While in Rome or Vienna, Paris or Singapore, they would find some cultural similarities underlying the surface differences, New Delhi is different. India is different. It often appears to exist without reference to any other place on Earth. The centuries-old, unbroken links with its own past-a past everywhere in evidence-can partly account forthis.

The American children and teenagers transplanted into this environment must have initially found it hard to see themselves other than outsiders, as different.

Going to the same school every day provided the structure for the bonding that inevitably followed. All were in it together, and intense, lifelong friendships ensued.

In time, what began as a hardship was transformed by shared experiences into the stuff of happy memories: Close personal ties with peers, exciting school trips to real jungles, to see real tigers and elephants, to see the world from the backs of real came Is, and not from the vantage point of the ersatz "jungle rides" of Disneyland. India's ancient past itself came to be appreciated, as they went on veritable "time machine" excursions. Within the span of a week they traversed whole centuries-from Ajanta and Ellora to Agra and Old Delhi. They went white-water rafting on a sacred ri ver.

The spell ofIndia remains. It is evident in the stated determination and need of many of the alumni to return to this country. As adults now, they rejoin their fellow American Indophiles, not in search of gurus, ancient art forms, Indian history, literature, and the like, but in pursuit of the childhood that together they learned to love.

0 About the Author: Jacquclin

Singh is a ji-ee-

lance writer based in New Delhi. She is a teacher of English and has been associated with AES since 1958.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Remembered byVATSALA VEDANTAM

In one of the last interviews before his death last summer, the Nobel laureate spoke to the author at his University of Chicago office.

"How can you write about meyou don't know me," he says.

"We have met twice and you have been talking," I answer.

"That still does not mean anything-you don't know my thoughts," he persists.

I try another line.

"Maybe I could talk to people who have known you?"

"Listen," he says, "I am asking an academic question. If you meet a person for a few hours, and talk to some of his associates, can that give you insights enough to write about him?"

"I am not writing a biography," I counter. "I amjust setting down my impressions in a newspaper.. .."

He interrupts with: "How will that interest your readers?"

"That is how I profiled M.S. Subbulakshmi," I tell him. And add, "My readers liked that piece-including you."

He is un fazed.

"Subbulakshmi was different," he states. "You had known her all your life."

"Of course, I didn't," I protest.

"You knew her since your childhood," he continues, unperturbed.

"You had seen her act in movies; you had heard her sing in concerts.

You grew up with her. Don't you see, you were attuned to your subject?"

I give up. I have no more defenses.

"But you don't know me." We are back to square one. "You are not familiar with my work. You have not read my publications. You have not heard my lectures."

I interrupt feebly.

"I did hear you once."

"Where and when?" comes the

swift question.

"At the TIFR auditorium in Bombay," I tell him, "I think it was in 1971."

"Did you understand what I said?"

"Not a word," I confess, but go on to add: "I only remember how you ended your talk with that story about the Pandava princes and Arjuna's powers of concentration while looking at the eye of a bird.

You mentioned that is the kind of concentration which a scientist needs to have."

The old man suddenly relaxed and smiled his rare smile.

"Ah, that was my favorite anecdote which I used to tell my students."

He leans back in his chair. The sparring is forgotten.

That was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Scion of an orthodox Shaivite race. Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. Indian scientist. American Nobel laureate.

The man who unraveled the mystery of the stars. The astrophysicist of the 20th century.

Young scientists say they feel "intimidated" in his presence. His colleagues maintain a respectable distance. Deans of other faculties mention his name with deference.

At the University of Chicagowhere he has outlasted six university presidents-"Chandra" has become an institution in himself.

Debonair at 83, a distinguishedlooking man dressed elegantly in a charcoal gray suit walked down the corridor and stopped at the door of his secretary's office.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," he apologized.

The Nobel laureate was exactly four minutes behind time!

As we stepped across the corridor to his room, he casually peeled off a notepaper from the door, saying, "I don't think you saw this."

It contained a brief message: "I shall be back in a few minutes.

Please wait inside. The door is open. -Sc." That piece of paper spoke more eloquently about Chandrasekhar than anything I had read or heard.

It seemed an awesome room.

Portraits of Ramanujam on one side, Newton on the other.

Statuettes of Socrates, Aphrodite, and Aristotle standing alongside Michelangelo's Moses dominating the rest. Volullles of books everywhere. The man of science is also a meticulous individual. He carefully places his black umbrella on its rack, hangs his coat on another, and fusses with the chairs.

"Are you sure you are comfortable?" he worries before seating himselfin his armchair.

"Now, tell me," he begins. _ You feel totally inadequate in that milieu and stammer something about wanting to write a human interest story about a great physicist of our times. He senses your discomfiture, leans forward, and observes very earnestly: "I hope you don't write anything like this: 'In July 1930, a young Indian stood on the deck of a ship, bound for England and higher studies. He was none other than S. Chandrasekhar, the future Nobel Prize winner" "That is how someone wrote about me once," he added. He

couldn't have thought of a better way to start an interview.

But Chandrasekhar refuses to be drawn into personal conversation.

In his own words, he is a highly private person-a loner with few friends.

"It is not a criticism," he adds. "It is only the character of my work."

At the same time, there is a note of regret when he says, "Many young people in this university are not even aware that I exist."

University students, on the other hand, claim that they are so awed by his presence that they even avoid crossing his door for fear of running into him. Says a research scholar from Bangalore: "He is so distant, I feel afraid to approach him." And yet, according to his colleagues, Chandrasekhar loves young people-the undergraduates-and would have them come and talk to him.

How does one profile an enigmatic personality like Chandrasekhar's? This "glorious scientistin-exile, whose sparkling intellect can take you out of yourself and transform you into another world," according to Kameswar Wali, his uncritical admirer and biographer.

A scholar who is described somewhat exotically by fellow-scientists in India as "a rishi who has chosen the difficult path of sadhana and tapas to attain his goal." A teacher who can bow in deference to a 19year-old undergraduate whom he

considers "one of the great scientific minds of this century." A humanist who can relate warmly to a high-school student in Bangalore when she proudly shows him her science proj.ect. A concerned host, who insists on making the beds for his guests when they,visit his apartment in Chicago. A boss, on the other hand, whose secretary quit in anger, because she found him "arrogant, secretive, and frigid."

Mavis Lozano's main grouse was that the distinguished professor for whom she worked between 1975 and 1981 did not encourage friendship or familiarity.

Even though she secretly admired this "fantastic mathematician" who returned to work within a month of an accident and a hip fracture, her American upbringi.ng could not comprehend his aloof manner and formal behavior. However, she grudgingly admits that he never argued, never lost his temper, nor showed the least discourtesy to those around him.

"I disliked him all the same," says Lozano emphatically, in a separate interview. Reason? "He was so formal. Would you believe it, he wore a white shirt, a dark suit, and a tie all the year round? He did not remove his jacket even once in the office. Imagine being dressed like that on an American campus, where our professors work in shorts and T-shirts!"

To people like Lozano, Chandrasekhar would have seemed an anachronism-a total misfit in Chicago's racy ambience. People like Lozano would also not understand why her "arrogant and secretive" professor should go to great lengths to obtain her address for a visiting journalist.

It is not easy to draw a portrait of a man whose personal life has been completely subdued by his brilliant scientific achievements. Educator, researcher, scholar, author. The recipient of the world's highest awards and honors. Perhaps the greatest astrophysicist of this century. Understandably, his acquaintances become adulatory when they talk about him. One of his close as-

sociates went as far as to say, "Chandrasekhar cannot tolerate trivial conversation nor does he suffer presumptuous fools. He, therefore, enjoys very few friendly relationships with people."

And yet, when the distinguished scientist visited the newly established planetarium in Bangalore a few years ago, he not only sat through an entire program, but later submitted himself to the absurd antics of an amateur photographer, who tried to make the great man smile for a picture!

Chandrasekhar himself feels that no one-except perhaps Kameswar Wali-has really understood him and his work. Yet, to a nonscience person, he comes out as the gentlest 9f human beings. A truly civilized person, totally devoid of conceit or condescension.

A man to whom courtesy and good manners are not mere appurtenances. They are all part of his great humanity.

The "unapproachable" man of science is in fact endowed with great humility. In 1968, when he was awarded the Padma Bhushan

along with M.S. Subbulakshmi in New Delhi, Chandrasekhar crossed the stage, bowed in deference to the great musician and told her, "Madam, I am deeply honored to have shared the same platform as you today."

The best assessment of Chandra comes from himself. Seated on the lawn of his brother's house in Bangalore recently, he summed up his earlier remarks about himself and his work: "I do not consider myself as someone who is striving toward a goal."

He measured every word that he spoke: "In my perception, science is not finding solutions to problems. Nor is it making a discovery. To me, science is a search for truth, a search for a definite pattern in creation."

He was lost in thought for some time. Then went on softly, talking as if to himself: "Mozart looked for it in music.

Monet saw it through a haystack that he painted.

Michelangelo found it in stone. Poets down the

EPILOGUE When Dr. Subrahmanyan me a letter. I quote excerpts:

Chandrasekhar

read this article, he wrote

It is always difficult to judge an article on oneself, even as it is difficult to judge one's portrait. You probably know that Mrs. Winston Churchill tore up a highly praised portrait of her husband

by Graham Sutherland. However, discounting the flattering things you say, I found the article well written .... All the same, I must confess that when I read any artide about myself, I feel that it is about someone else whom I happen to know!

In any event, I did enjoy our conversations and I look forward to meeting you once again (but not for an interview!) when I next visit Bangalore ....

Alas, that was not to be. But I will forever cherish memories of my meeting with him at the University of Chicago. As I got up to take leave of him, he said, "I will see you to the elevator," and accompanied me down the corridor.

When we reached the elevator, I wished him good-bye. But he got in without a word. When we arrived at the basement, he also stepped out--to my embarrassment.

"I can find my way," I told him. He did not answer, but started walking toward the door. But that was Chandra. An enigma in the world of science. An autocrat to fellow scientists. But, a man of culture to those who cared to see it.

My last recollection of this unique person is that ofa dapper-looking man standing on the-s-teps of the Enrico Fermi Institute. On reaching the end of the street, I turned back and he was still standing there-a frail figure before that imposing edifice.

-Y. Y.

ages have written about it. Perhaps a scientist seeks it through a mathematical equation. But we can all see only a part of this pattern at a time. It is given only to a few to see the whole .... " It now becomes clear why this man of science has gone through the painstaking process of studying and understanding art, music, and literature. As one of his friends pointed out: "Chandra seems to admire all those great achievers who disciplined their minds (like himself) and chose the difficult path to selfrealization. " When Chandrasekhar was invited to attend a Mozart concert in Europe, he made a detailed study of the life and work of the great composer. When his doctors advised him to take a break from research after a major heart attack and triple bypass surgery, he made use of the time to study Shakespeare's plays!

His 83 years are forgotten when he is absorbed in his work. Even though his vision in one eye is very diminished and wife Lalitha feels concerned about it, "I can still read with the other," says an irrepressible Chandrasekhar.

Maybe his sense of humor, his capacity to laugh at himself, have something to do with his amazing youthfulness.

To the last and inevitable question about the Nobel Prize, for example, Chandrasekhar replies with a mischievous smile: "Have you heard the story about this general, who had all those gold medals on his chest? Someone asked him what they were for and he answered, 'This first one here was a mistake, the rest simply followed.' " Born in the year 1910, Chandrasekhar was the eldest often children. His parents, C.S. Ayyar and Sitalakshmi, belonged to erudite families. Although Chandra's early ancestors were landholders, they came under the influence of British education. Both his father and his uncle (SirC.V. Raman) had a liberal education in arts and science.

(Continued on page 43)

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Chandrasekhar learnt pis early lessons with home tutors.l'Ie was a precocious pupil, who got books of the higher classes a~d went ahead of his classmates, a~cording to his teachers. In the Hindu High School at Triplicane, Madras, Chandrasekhar recalls ho~ he got "excited" when he discovered there was algebra and geometry in the IV Form curriculum. H~would get the texts in advance, ahd complete all the portions before the classes started!

No wonder he was able to join the Presidency College when he was IS. In 1936, Chandlf.lsekhar went to the U.S. after receiving his doctorate degree from Trinity College, Cambridge. The following year, he entered the University of Chicago, where he has continued his scientific career through five decades to become PFofessor Emeritus in 1986. It is now 40 years since he formally became an American citizen.

Chandrasekhar married Lalitha in 1936. She was a student of physics at that time in the Indian Institute of Science at Bafigalore.

Many years later, they were both felicitated in the same institution, where director Ramaseshan introduced her to the audience as "the lady who deserted physics for a physicist." According to biographer Wali, Chandra and Lalitha live unostentatiously in a 12th floor apartment on westside Chicago. They eat strictly vegetarian meals, he adds, with the Nobel laureate cooking circular dosas "with the same care as he writes his equations!"

The Univcrsity of Chicago offers walking tours. Visitors can sometimes see a dapper-looking man in a charcoal gray suit walking slowly down the East 56th Street, carrying an umbrella under his arm.

His image blends gently with those tree-lined avenues and gothic halls which form the perfect b.ackdrop fora Nobel laureate's work: 0 About the Author: Vatsala Veduntam is an associate editor of Deccan Herald, from which this article has been adapted.

. "1 HAD

NO

QUESTION: You came to America in 1936. Do you thinkyou would have achieved what you did had you stayed back in India?

CHANDRASEKHAR: In a narrow sense, the answer is NO. There were better facilities for work here. I was also disconcerted with science politics in India. I was very sensitive and I desired the mental peace to do science the way I wanted.

Secondly, how can one evaluate scientific achievement? It is not a personal accomplishment.

I had many students and collaborators.

Science has to be an integrated effort. Otherwise, it would be too narrow.

Q: Who wasyollrearliest mentor?

And who influenced you most in your career?

A: I had no mentor. And nobody "influenced" me. I wrote my thesis on my own. I have always been alone. This is not a criticism. It is the character of my work.

Q: Was your father a dominating influence in your life?

A: All Indian fathers are dominating! [With a laugh] Q:.Do yOIl recall your mother and her attitudes, which may have shaped yours?

A: Yes, I recall a particular incident, which revealed my mother's extraordinary awareness. I was hardly ten years old, when she woke me up one morning and said, "Do you know Ramanujam is dead? It has come in the newspaper."

The very fact that she realized that Ramanujam's death was an important event showed her enlightenment in these matters. Her attitudes did influence me a great deal.

Q: Has your wife been a great support to you in your scientific career?

A: I have mentioned Lalitha in my book, Truth and Beauty. My biographer Kameswar Wali has also written a whole chapter on my wife. [Suddenly, with a smile] Do you know the American press

MENTOR" called that the best chapter?

Q: Have you, at any point of time, regretted your decision to leave the country of your birth?

A: There is no point in regretting or being happy over decisions you have made. I think it's irrational to regret the past anyway. You must reconcile yourself to the life you have chosen and lived.

Q: Would you call yourself a religious person?

A: No. I am an atheist.

Q: Do you enjoy teaching?

A: I always integrated teaching with research. They support each other.

Q: What is it that makes Indians achieve more in this country (America) than in India? After all, it is the same brain. Do you think it could be the academic climate?

A: I wouldn't judge achievement by awards. The quality of science in India is good, too. But I remember, in the 1930s, the great scientists of that country were in the universities. But today, it is not so.

And, that is a loss.

Q: Whom do you consider as the great scientists in India ?

A: I think [Homi] Bhabha has contributed more than anyone else to science in India. Another was [Shanti Swarup] Bhatnagar, who is sadly underestimated by those who work in his own institutions.

Q: Has your personal life been complete and happy?

A: That you should ask Lalithamaybe I could have given more.

[Pause] I don't believe that a scientist-a true scientist-can ever have a complete personal life.

[Pause again] I sometimes wonder whether all that I did and accomplished in my lifetime-was it really worth it?

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There:S so much cynicism these days ...

Drawing by Handelsman;

© 1995 The New Yorker Magazine. Inc.

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Drawing by Eric & Bill <!"! 1995 Tribune Media Services. Inc, All Rights Reserved .

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A Tiger in the Grass

byCURRYKIRKPATRICK

He can hit like Greg Norman and putt like Jack Nicklaus. At 19, Eldrick (Tiger) Woods is already the most acclaimed teenage player in the history of golf.

T

he prodigies of sport know who they are. They know when it's their time. How or why doesn't matter. They just know.

Michael Jordan, callow, serene, lofting the shot that won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship at 19. Boris Becker, aloof, haughty, diving into the turf and capturing Wimbledon at 17. Forrest Gump, idiot savant, opening his first box of chocolates. Somehow they all know.

And so, now: Tiger.

Already he is blessed with first-name recognition, the.signature of legends~Pele, Magic, Elvis~because, in his own sphere, at least, he is one. The game of gol f has been waiting for Eldrick (Tiger) Woods since birth. The game's, not his. When he teed off in the first round of the Masters GolfToumament in Augusta, Georgia,

last April as the most acclaimed teenage player in history~having surpassed the amateur records of both Bobby Jones and Jack Nicklaus~his blissfully sweet swing, mature countenance, and sheer, outrageous ability confirmed the arrival, finally, of gol f's first black superstar.

Just 19, Woods has talent, grace, and style. His manner~a striking combination of politesse and arrogance~served him well at the Masters Tournament, where sporting drama and magnolia-scented beauty tend to overwhelm the petty autocracy and racist hypocrisy whispering through the pines. Woods was only the fourth black American

to play the Masters in 61 years.

Golf Digest rated his chance to win at 200 to I. "They're crazy.

More like 500,000 to 1," Woods told Sports Illustrated. Ah, but that

was the politesse, a blatantly false modesty. "Can I do well?" the Stanford freshman mused while w31ming up for a college tournament. "Doing well is winning. To walk where Jones and Nicklaus walked, that will be daunting. But I'm not afraid of the Masters. I've never been afraid of anything. I'm going down there to win," he fairly snarled, Tigerdoing a tiger (see box on next page).

Augusta's wide-open fairways and sparse rough may render Wood's only vulnerability-wildness of the tee-meaningless.

He strikes the ball to impossible distance and possesses a marvelous creativity of shot. His mid-irons, short game, and putting are routinely brilliant; the kid, Ballesteros-like, can get the ball up and down from a garbage can. So pumped up for the Masters, he practiced for its lickety-split greens by putting across the basketball floor of Stanford 's Maples Pavilion.

For good measure, Tiger's instructor, the acclaimed Butch Harnlon, gives Woods "the great player's chance on a great golf course. I don't care how young he is. Tiger already has [Greg] Norman-type length. Like Arnold Palmer, he's absolutely fearless.

We have a saying; he calTies his [testicles] around in a wheelbarrow."

His father, retired Lieutenant Colonel Earl Woods, has another saying: "I wouldn't bet against Tiger doing anything, any time."

In fact, before he finished high school in Cypress, California, Woods had donejust about everything a nonprofessional could do in golf. On national TV he upstaged Bob Hope in a putting exhibition-at the age of two. He shot a score of 48 for nine holes-at the age of three. He was undefeated in more than 30 southern California junior tournaments-at age II. As a teen, Woods played with every golfing deity from Sam Snead to Nicklaus and Norman, and in pro tournaments from Texas to Florida to New York. He is the youngest (16 years, 2 months) to 'play in a Professional Golfers' Association (PGA) tournament, the 1992 L.A. Open; the first to win three U.S. Junior titles-one on the 18th hole, tl{e other two on an extra 19th; the first to win both the U.S. Junior and the U.S. Amateur; the youngest to win the Amateur; and, of course, the only black Amateur champion.

The great Byron Nelson saw Woods a couple of years ago and couldn't wait to get to a phone. Nelson called his ward, the great Tom Watson. "I've seen Ben [Hogan] and Jack and you. I've seen 'em all," said elson. "Tom, this young fellow has no \\Ieakness."

Woods would be immersed in his third-quarter studies back in Palo Alto rather than wallowing in links history in Georgia were it not for his dramatic comeback performance at the U.S. Amateur in August 1994. Contested amid the lagoons and railroad ties of the Tournament Players' Course (TPC) at PGA headquarters in Ponte Vedra, Florida, the Amateur was lit up by the theatrics of this Tiger, burning bright. On the first day of qualifying Woods shot an astounding 65. In the third round of match play he came from three holes down with five to play to beat a former champion, Buddy Alexander. In the final round he came from six holes down, then four down at the lunch break of the 36-hole match, to tie Oklahoma

State's Trip Kuehne.

On the TPC's 17th hole-the stadium course's postcard par three, 127 meters to an island green-Woods studied the wind and changed clubs, fueling the suspense. Then he cut a pitching wedge shot that landed on the fringe barely one meter from the water. After anolher dramatic pause, the straw-hatted Woods calmly curled in the 4.2-meter putt and then fist-punched the air. His triumph was the greatest comeback in the 99 years of the Amateur.

It was the elder Woods, 63, a former Green Beret with two tours in Vietnam, who named his son-in tribute to a South Vietnamese soldier with the same nickname who saved his life from sniper fire. It was the father who bestowed him with athletic genes-Earl was a catcher, the first black baseball player at Kansas State University. It was the father who found golflate (at 42) and turned himself into a one-handicap. Then he made sure his son found golf early (at 18 months): "I wanted to give Tiger a game for a lifetime." Earl taught Tiger all about the kid's "mission"; he "debriefed" him after tournament rounds; he filled his inquisitive mind with subliminal tapes to make him "mentally tough." Earl even had a sports psychologist, navy Captain Jay Brunza, hypnotize him-at 13-so that Tiger could "delve into his subconscious," learn to blot out distractions on

As the young Arthur Ashe was wont to do, Woods is reluctant to the golf course, and "focus." All of this presupposes a netheraddress the issue. "I'm only a role model because other people make worldly, computerized automaton, a one-dimensional, sociopathic, me one," he says. Then bored, he repeats the mantra: "I don't want to pastel-clad contract killer. bethe best black golfer. I want to be the best golfer, period."

"But, hey, I had a normal childhood," says Woods. "I did the same things every kid did. I studied and went to the mall. I was addicted to IN THRALL TV wrestling, rap music, and The Simpsons. I got into trouble and got Nobody believes Woods will live up to his avowed goal of staying out of it. I loved my parents and obeyed what they told me. The only at Stanford for four years, passing up the tour and the hundreds of difference is I can sometimes hit a little ball into a hole in less strokes millions of dollars awaiting him in the endorsement village. For than some other people. So I have to do media." now, Woods remains in thrall to his fellow Stanford freshmen: Actor In combating the oppressive crush of notoriety since he was in Fred Savage of The Wonder Years; gymswaddling clothes, Tiger has developed nast Dominique Dawes, a future a certain coldness around strangers, a Olympian; and his own brainy Larkin hard-edged wariness. His voice is highTiger Woods did not win the 1995 Masters Golf dorm mates. Why, another versatile pitched, Tysonish; his language is Tournament. He finished with a score offive-over-par 293, freshman athlete has already accomspiced with four-letter barracks mater19 strokes behind the winner, Ben Crenshaw. But Woods plished more for the university than ial-surprising from such a fresh, innowas the best among the amateurs. Before returning to Woods possibly can: Kristin Folklled the cent face. Absent his Stanford ball cap, Stanford University, he wrote a letter of appreciation to the women's volleyball team to the national Woods appears to be a freshman in high officers, tournament staff, and members of the Augusta National Golf Club. We reproduce here the text of the letter: championship last fall and the women's school, not college, albeit in total conbasketball team to the Final Four early trol: Ego, manners, and temperament as Please accept my sincere thanks for providing me the opportunity to experience the most wonderful week in my life: this year. impeccable as his tempo.

It wasfantasy land and Disney World wrapped into one.

"I'm not a celebrity at Stanford," I was treated like a gentleman throughout my stay and I Woods says. "Everybody's special. You trust I responded in kind .... Your magnificent golf course have to be to get in here. So then nobody For that, his father credits his will provide a continuing challenge throughout my amateur is. That's why I love the place." mother, Kultida ("Tida" for short), a and professional career.

I've accomplished much here and learned even more.

And it shows as on one blustery afternative of Thailand whom Earl met Your tournament will always hold a special spot in my heart noon at Half Moon Bay, to which the while based in Bangkok. Earl has as the place where I made my first PGA cut and at a major Cardinal golf team had driven an hour three grown children and three grandyet! It is here that I left my youth behind and became a man. in their Stanford van. Once there, Woods children from a former marriageFor that I will be eternally in your debt. totally ignored another legend in the young Tiger is, in fact, Uncle Tiger.

With warmest regards and deepest appreciation, I remain Sincerely, golf shop--none other than Joe But he is Tida's "one and only baby," Tiger Woods DiMaggio-to join his peers. The team she says. "I don't want the one and includes Notah Begay, a Nativeonly to g;ow up spoiled. So I sit him American; Casey Martin, who suffers down by TV one day, watch John from Klippel- Trenaunay- Weber syndrome, which has shriveled his McEnroe. I tell Tiger, 'See that? Never that. I don't like that. I right leg; and Steve Burdick, a Bible-toting, devout Christian. not have my reputation as parent ruined by that.' " Bristling with enough diversity for a presidential cabinet, this crew Once, after a bad shot in a junior tournament, Woods smashed his won the NCAA championship last year-without Woods. Now club on his bag. Tida reported him to the tournament director and dewhen the newcomer dons his glasses, they call him "Urkel," after the manded her son be penalized two strokes. "Mom!" he said. "Shut up," goofy TV character. They make him carry the extra luggage on road she said. "Did club move? Did bag move? Who make bad shot? trips. They even answer his naive, rookie-boy questions.

Whose fault? You wantto hit something? Hityourselfin head!"

"How much is a letterman's jacket?" Woods asked th?t day.

Likewise, golf should probably slap a restraining order on itself "It's free," snickered Martin. "But you got to order now or wait for labeling its Great Black Hope merely black. Actually, Tiger is forever to get it." part Thai, part Chinese, part Indian, part black. He writes "Asian" on The world can only stay tuned to see how many golfing records the forms requesting ethnicity. "Actually, I'm 90 percent Oriental, Tiger Woods will win to see ifhe obliterates the records of Jones and more Thai than anything. I've gotten used to being 'the only one out Nicklaus or ifhe gets his letterman's jacket first. That's a lot for anythere.' But this perception is just another example ofthe inequity of body to carry in his wheelbarrow. But don't bet against the kid doing race in America," says Woods. Earl says, "It's all in the language. all of it. Anything, any time.

0 'Blacklists.' 'Blackball.' 'In the black.' It's all wrong. But don't get my wife started on this." Tida, walking a fairway, whirls, angry.

About the Author: Curry Kirkpatrick is a contributing editor of "Hah! To call Tiger black is to deny my existence. You know what Newsweek magazine. my grandfather on mother's side is? Dutch! White! Hah!"

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