The Peace Corps and the University

Abstract

T NHE Peace Corps is the most imaginative and possibly the most successful New Frontier idea-become-reality. Despite the skeptics' predictions and a continuing bombardment of biting cartoons, volunteers have gone overseas, performed their tasks effectively, and managed to escape identification with the more controversial issues of the Cold War. True, Moscow has called the volunteers agents of imperialism; the Nigerian postal-card incident shocked many Americans into an awareness of the high stakes involved;1 and a few volunteers proved inefficient or delinquent and returned home involuntarily. But these instances have been rare. The Peace Corps has become a viable American institution. The forty-six nations receiving assistance have asked for second, third, and fourth contingents, and the prospects for continued demand seem promising. Congressional support has been bipartisan. In general, press coverage has been both extensive and kindly. American colleges and universities have been deeply involved in the Peace Corps experiment. They have borne the brunt of the training responsibilities, using their reservoirs of skilled man power, university facilities, and extensive experience to prepare the volunteers for teaching, nursing, road-surveying, and nearly three hundred other kinds of overseas tasks. Since the trainees work at least six, ten-hour days a week, the teaching and administrative staffs also drive themselves the proverbial twenty-five-hour day. Inasmuch as a host of trained specialists, both native and foreign, bring to the project their insights and experience in many basic fields (area studies, language, world affairs, communism, health and medical training, physical training and recreation), the training program adheres to no staid academic schedule of class attendance at nine, ten, and one o'clock on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The volunteers live in suspense, since they do not know whether they are going to be selected or rejected at the end of the program. Instructors, selection officers (who are usually clinical psychologists), psychiatrists