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Stanford Business magazine

 

Strauss Challenges Peace Corps’ Legend

Imagine an Iowa farmer confronted by a freshly minted college grad from Cameroon armed with a three-month crash course in agriculture and the certainty she can teach the Midwesterner how to raise pigs.

“I’m pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey,” says Robert Strauss, MBA ’84, who witnessed the reverse of this scenario when he was Peace Corps country director in Cameroon from 2002 to 2007. Strauss was also a Peace Corps volunteer from 1978-1980 and a recruiter in 1982.

The world has changed since 1961, when the Corps first offered developing countries “well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma,” Strauss observed in a January op-ed column, “Too Many Innocents Abroad,” in the New York Times. “What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates—as the top professional schools do—and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.” If this means fewer volunteers, he said, so be it.

Strauss’s op-ed was widely disseminated in print and online. Although he received kudos from some readers, many echoed the objections raised in a letter to the editor from U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., a volunteer in the Dominican Republic in the mid-’60s, who announced he had written a bill that would not downsize but, rather, double the Peace Corps.

Strauss obviously hit a nerve. But why? Part of the reason, he surmised in an email sent from Madagascar where he has begun a consulting business, is “because Peace Corps is the last untarnished remnant of the Kennedy years, the last line of defense before all the walls of Camelot come tumbling down. Also, no one likes to wash dirty laundry in public, and since the very beginning the Peace Corps has been exceptionally good at keeping its dark side private.”

As for Dodd’s suggestion to double the Corps, Strauss wrote, “And where would he send twice as many volunteers? I don’t know a lot of country programs that would be ready to accept them until there was much more support for them in the field.”