25 

 visitor seeks to repress in undertaking collaborative duties abroad may 

 represent values about work and productivity that might have been his most 

 significant local contribution. To preclude this contribution and hamstring 

 his substantive input by undue emphasis on cultural sensitivity in the early 

 part of his relationship is poor strategy indeed. It is also patronizing 

 to the local counterpart. There will be differences in the two value structures 

 that the visitor will want to think about, but this is best done in the course 

 of the planning and execution of substantive tasks, and is certainly no pre- 

 condition to the foreign venture, 



A final perception - on which the evidence is not yet in and may 

 not be in until another generation works its way up through the university 

 structure - holds that certain research specializations will never lend them- 

 selves to the broader context. This perception holds that the nations on 

 the brink of development may provide a rich and variant laboratory in which 

 one finds different rates of change, different sets of givens, and less in- 

 herited blockage to technical and structural experimentation. It may be the 

 only place where certain phenomena of theoretical interest can be studied; 

 but foreign service can be a seductive mistress to one whose focus is a 

 narrow abstraction in which situational variation is denied or held steady. 

 The fallacy in such reasoning is that this kind of a conclusion only the specialist 

 himself is in a position to achieve. What is urged is that he not deny him- 

 self or his juniors the opportunity to test it by means of brief foreign ex- 

 posure, and that he not be denied such exposure by others who prejudge the 

 circumstance. 



For the technological totality that we monitor by the instrumentality 

 of scientific research is not what it was when we could satisfy ourselves in 



