33 



you have any sense of how these American students, 

 undergraduates at Harvard, what they thought of a new way of 

 looking at less-developed countries, for one thing, and 

 looking at resource issues from almost a sociological 

 perspective? 



Revelle: I can't say how all of them looked at it. Of course, 



students are wildly diverse, particularly Harvard students. 



But there were quite a few of them who used to come up 

 and ask me, "How can I get into this field? What do I have 

 to learn? What do I have to study? What do I do next?" What 

 I told them always was you have to become an expert in 



something, that it's no longer possible just to have good 

 will and go to a less-developed country and say, "I want to 

 help." They will say, "We want to help you out; which way 

 did you come in?" [laughing] 



They are just not interested in amateurs. If you are 

 a professional forester or a professional agronomist or a 

 professional engineer, there are lots of opportunities. So 

 what I used to tell them is, "You've got to get more 

 technical. You've got to learn some technology in depth." 

 Some of them did that. 



Sharp: There is this picture of the center that I'm putting 

 together of teaching more about the less-developed 

 countries, and some of the issues that they deal with about 

 population and use of natural resources; and doing basic 

 research in the countries using federal grants to do some of 

 the — . 



Revelle: And Ford grants — . 



Sharp: — and Ford grants to do some of the original research; and, 

 bringing individuals from these specific countries to the 

 center to learn more about how to pull all the information 

 together. 



Different aspects of education, I guess, educating 

 Americans like myself who know almost nothing about the 

 less-developed countries. 



Is that what you wanted to do with the center? Is 

 that what you thought the center was supposed to do in the 

 long run? 



Revelle: I guess so. I don't really think I had that idea in 



advance. I didn't really know what it should be in advance. 

 I thought of it in advance essentially as a research 

 institution to learn about population problems, and that's 

 what I thought universities are all about — research and 

 teaching on the basis of research. 



Jack Snyder had a different idea. I think he was never 

 very happy with my way of doing things . He thought that 

 what the center should be would be an activist organization 

 studying methods of introducing and promoting contraception, 

 birth control. 



