Boston Research Center for the 21st Century

I Introduction Elise Boulding, Professor Emerita of Sociology from Dartmouth College was one of the two eminent scholars selected by the Boston Center for the 21st Century to receive its first annual Global Citizen Awards in November 1995. The other recipient was John D. Montgomery, Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus of International Studies at Harvard University. The Center was founded in September 1993 by Daisaku Ikeda, International President of Soka Gakkai, to stimulate dialogue between civilizations and a network of global scholarly and activist citizens seeking ideas for promoting peace in the 21st century. II Excerpted Remarks of Albert Carnesale I have had the honor of being a colleague of Jack Montgomery for more than 15 years at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Jack Montgomery is not only one of the founding fathers of the Kennedy School; he was, in fact, from his appointment in 1963, the first full-time professor of public administration at Harvard. Let me say a little bit about Jack's life before Harvard. He studied at Kalamazoo College, receiving both a bachelor's and a master's degree. After serving in the army during World War II, he volunteered his services to the Hiroshima Reconstruction Planning Commission. He then came to Harvard for further study, quickly became one of the leading scholars of what constitutes success and failure in rural economic development, and received his master's degree in 1948 and his Ph.D. in 1951. Over the next decade or so, he was a Guggenheim Fellow; he worked in operations research at Johns Hopkins University; he was Dean of the Faculty at Babson College; he directed research on development in Africa at Boston University; and he was chief academic advisor for the National Institute of Public Administration in Saigon. Then he returned to Harvard, where he has served since. He is now Director of the Pacific Basin Research Center, affiliated with Soka University, America, and he is Ford Foundation Professor of International Studies, Emeritus. Let's say you were a student rummaging through the card catalogue of a major library. You would probably think that there were at least a dozen John D. Montgomerys: Developing countries? His name is there. Science and technology policy? His name is there. Land reform? His name is there. Political development? His name is there. Nutrition? His name is there. His publications are listed in all those places. Analysis of how democracy can be introduced through military occupation, as occurred in Japan, Germany, and Italy? Jack wrote the book. The disconnect between domestic and foreign policy? Jack was among the first to observe and analyze it. All of this fruitful meandering has led, quite logically it seems, to human rights. Jack's primary insight, I think, is the link between what we call human rights and what is intrinsic to human dignity. Thus, in a career that has since 1946 examined policymaking and the needs of the poor in more than ninety developing countries, Jack Montgomery has seen and is showing us the link between public policy - ours and theirs - and human dignity. More recently, he has dedicated his own gifts and the research of the Pacific Basin Research Center to the study of "how policies to advance human rights affect the lives of individual citizens and thus enable them to achieve their own aspirations to human dignity." III John D. Montgomery - Banishing the Disillusionments of Our Age - This occasion celebrates confident aspirations for a new and perhaps better century. It calls for buoyant optimism, clear vision, and a ringing endorsement of the human spirit. To reach that point, however, we must speak of the current despair, disillusion, and cynicism, to see if, by examining their causes, we can weaken their force. My definition of our disillusionment does not echo the litany of current political complaints. …