Berkeley

JUST before Memorial Day, Ashley Judd graduated from Harvard. In a universitywide commencement ceremony, she shared billing with Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline, who was getting her bachelor’s degree, and Meryl Streep, who was awarded an honorary degree. Ms. Judd’s father and “a mess of girlfriends” were in Cambridge, Mass., for the ceremony. Her husband, Dario Franchitti, could not attend because of the Indianapolis 500, which he would win that weekend for the second time. He watched live via Harvard’s Internet feed, and they texted.

Ms. Judd, who plays tough-yet-vulnerable women on Broadway and in film (“Double Jeopardy,” “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”), has spent the last year in the midcareer master’s program in public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Hollywood has always had its share of activists — from Ronald Reagan and Warren Beatty to Madonna and Angelina Jolie. But Ms. Judd is one of the few to get formal training in public service.

She hardly lacks for causes. She has delivered impassioned speeches to the United Nations General Assembly about sex- and labor-trafficking, and to the National Press Club about mountaintop-removal mining in Kentucky, her home state. She is a board member of PSI, a global health organization where she has worked on issues like maternal health, family planning and malaria prevention.

During her travels in developing countries, she has met women who support themselves with native handicrafts. But it was Martha Chen, one of her Harvard instructors, who taught her the concept of the “informal economy” that exists beyond the regulated economy.

Ms. Judd says she attended Harvard not for the prestige — “compare, despair,” she says — but to become a more effective activist. “I didn’t go to Harvard Kennedy School to be approved of by anyone, but to immerse myself in some very serious, earnest, practical learning with people who have literally dedicated all they have to public service.”

Organizations benefit from charity-minded celebrities who can generate media coverage and encourage donations. Stuart I. Bretschneider, chairman of Syracuse University’s public administration department, calls this “the Bono model,” in tribute to the U2 lead singer who raises money to fight global poverty.

An understanding of how governments and nonprofits work could help a star activist better manage her celebrity status in the public interest, Dr. Bretschneider says. For those who cannot be Ashley Judd, Syracuse has a course in courting Ashley Judd. It’s called “Fund Development for Nonprofit Organizations.”

A Kennedy School degree can also provide the tools and credibility needed to sit across the table from policy makers and speak their language. Harvard’s program is specifically designed for established professionals, often in their 30s and 40s. Notable alumni include Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of the New York Police Department and, most recently, the accused Russian secret agent Donald Heathfield.

More typically, public administration programs attract students who want to hone on-the-job skills or are planning moves into government or nonprofit management. Many have altruistic motives.

“Increasingly, you get these social entrepreneurs,” says Ellen Schall, dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. “They want to feed the poor, make urban education work, get health care to people who haven’t had it, or financial instruments for the unbanked.”

Ms. Judd, at age 42, may be riding the wave of the Obama era, suggests Ms. Schall, who also teaches health policy. “There’s a new interest in public service, because we have a president who cares about public service,” she says. “I think people have stopped and taken a look at what they want to do.”

Ms. Judd says that “going to graduate school is always something I thought I would do.” But the path was hardly a straight line.

Ms. Judd graduated with honors from the University of Kentucky as a French major with four minors. But her degree was delayed 17 years, until 2007, because, she says, she neglected to complete paperwork for a course substitution in science. Her “untreated shame from a kooky upbringing” — her mother, Naomi, and older sister, Wynonna, are the popular country music singers — had made her shy of authority and she had not even planned to go to commencement. “I was ready to blow out of town and get started in the Peace Corps, or bail on that and hit Hollywood, my secret dream.”

From the time she was an undergraduate, she says, she also dreamed of going to Yale or maybe the University of Chicago to study anthropology. More recently, she thought about applying to the University of California at Berkeley for a master’s degree in public health, “under my mentor Malcolm Potts,” who is on the board with Ms. Judd at PSI.

Since her home is a Tennessee farm, she also considered Vanderbilt, in Nashville. But while visiting campus, she was surprised when “a really dynamic, brilliant faculty member” ended their conversation about her interests with a question: “Why are you not going to Harvard?”

To her, going to Harvard sounded as realistic as “going to the moon.” A friend suggested she look up the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School. Reading about the center’s work with exploited women, “I just began to weep,” she says. “I thought, this is my home, these are my people, this is where I’m meant to go.”

She reels off favorite professors and courses, among them: Marshall Ganz and Bernard Steinberg, teaching moral leadership; Jacqueline Bhabha on human rights; Robert Kegan on psychological development in adults; and Diane Rosenfeld on gender violence (for anyone who still thinks she is a dilettante, Ms. Judd won a dean’s scholar award for her final paper in that class). She got through quantitative methods — a core requirement along with classes on management and leadership, democracy and political institutions — by “overbooking” her professor’s office hours. “It was harrowing at first,” she says, laughing. “I had no idea that I would go to Harvard to exorcise my 11th-grade geometry demons.”

She loved school so much that she looked forward every weekend to going back. “Every day I was eating the best piece of homemade pie; it was something I savored,” she says. “That entire place was there simply to give. I’m in a position in my life where everybody wants something out of me. I’m constantly on transmit, coping with influx, demands, some of which are very admirable and some of which are just rude, you know.” For once, she says: “I wanted to be on receive. I wanted to have a greedy and selfish experience and just take in all I could.”

Fellow students, she says, expressed no cynicism about a movie star’s motivation. “They were shamelessly unapologetic about being do-gooders,” she says. “Other people were doing the injustice rage, too. I didn’t have to be the standard bearer.”

Talking as she rushes around doing errands a few days after graduation, Ms. Judd says she is still devoted to acting. “I don’t think it’s an either/or career,” she says. “I’m very spontaneously jumping onto a film. I literally start tomorrow.” The new film is “Flypaper,” a comedy about a bank heist, which is filming in Baton Rouge, La., and costars Patrick Dempsey.

She has hardly had a moment to think about what she will do with her new degree. “I had nine final papers due between Easter and the end of reading period, and then it was graduation and the Indianapolis 500,” she says.

But after a pause, she admits that she has thought a little bit beyond “Flypaper.” “One interesting idea is to possibly apply for a White House Fellows position,” Ms. Judd says. “That could be pretty cool.”

ROCHESTER, Oct. 26—Many of the country’s leading experts on slavery met here this week to confront a pair of economists who have brazenly invaded their territory with computers and formulas to suggest that blacks thrived under slavery in the South.

The two scholars, Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engernan of the University of Rochester, are the authors of “Time on the Cross,” an iconoclastic book that purports to undermine many assumptions about the horrors of slavery, not to justify it, but to shed new light on what they see as the richness and integrity of black culture under bondage.

The notion has provoked such scholarly and even public debate that 100 or so prominent historians, economists and sociologists gathered here at the university to debate its implications.

They traded arguments and even bitter accusations in a three‐day discussion of a study that many feel is likely to force some fundamental rethinking of modern American history and redirect the search for the root cause of the race problem that has so torn the fabric of American society.

Press Agentry

Few works of scholarship have ever drawn so much public attention or been so aggressively promoted. Reviews have appeared in almost every major publication, and the senior author, Professor Fogel, has appeared on morning television shows.

This week’s meeting, which ended today, was observed by reporters from several national newspapers and magazines, assiduously recruited by a New York press agent engaged by the university.

Though many scholars resent all the promotion, few can ignore the book’s basic argument. It is that plantation slavery in the South, no matter how repugnant morally, was a rational and viable economic system. On this basis, the authors dispute the notion that slavery left blacks crippled intellectually and culturally.

On the contrary, they say, slavery succeeded economically because the slaves developed a high level of skill, worked at least as hard as free farmers, ate well, maintained stable family lives and even prudish sexual mores, and were whipped only enough to maintain production, not excessively or out of sheer cruelty.

The implication of the book is that the destabilization of the black family, so often cited as the cause of black troubles today, occurred in the post‐Civil War period, possibly during the Depression of the nineteenthirties, and that therefore the blame for the race situation cannot be consigned to a small long‐gone Southern aristocracy.

The effect of their work, say Professors Fogel and Engerman—dubbed the “Deadly Duo” by Prof. Lance Davis of the California Institute of Technology—is to dispel the “myth” of black incompetence and “recover” black history.

Others, however, have derived a less‐benign message. The authors have been bitterly accused‐of using cold statistics and averages to paper over a harsh and degrading reality that must be understood in psychological and social terms, and of revibing old arguments to justify slavery.

“Neither the cause of black Americans nor the search for reality has gained much from their transformation of the slaves from a childlike Sambo into a willing collaborator, a success‐oriented Calvinist who internalized the values of the master class,” said Prof. Kenneth Stampp, a historian from the University of California at Berkeley, who is a leading authority on American slavery and whose previous works on the harshness of that system, were attacked in “Time on the Cross.”

Professor Etampp said:

“They deny the slave his voice, his initiative, and his humanity, they reject tile untidy world in which masters and slaves, with their rational, and irrational perceptions, survived as best they could, and replace it with a model of a tidy, rational world that never was.”

More than most academic meetings, the conference —sponsored by the university and the mathematics social science board’ — floated above strong undercurrents of professional jealousy, territorial defense and ego‐building that often seemed to motivate scholars as much, as the search for truth.

Group Is Varied

There were the tweedy silverhaired and silver‐tongued historians and scruffy young graduate students. The humanists often grew impatient, as the discussion seemed to bog down in recondite arguments over the age at which slave women reached menarche, the amount of lard in a dressed pig, or the percentage of black overseers on plantations.

Professors Fogel and Engerman had to defend themselves not only from the historians, but also from their fellow cliornetricians the term used to describe the growing breed of specialists who use mathematical models to elucidate history.

The most‐concerned such criticism came from Prof. Richard Stitch, a Berkeley economist who reanalyzed much of the data in “Time Of The Cross” and found the veidence “weak,” resting partly on “selective data and dubious assumptions.” He challenged the conclusions on the high quality of slave food, shelter and family life, and the book’s contention that slave families were seldom torn apart by trading or migration.

There were relatively few black scholars at the meeting, possibly because it coincided with the conference of the Association for Afro‐American Life and History in Philadelphia. But those who came were generally hoctile.

For example, Prof. Marcus Alexis, an economist at Northwestern University, expressed doubt that the stories of slavery days told by former slaves, which form the basis for much of the traditional writing on slavery, could have been so wrong about sexual exploitation, the poor food and other harsh conditions of plantation life.

Franklin Knight, a black historian from Johns Hopkins, observed in an interview: “If you say the blacks were just good Southern whites, you have done a disservice to the cause.”

For his part, Professor Fogel took a conciliatory stand at the closing session today, conceding that the book was “inadequately documented,” but defending the basic theme.

“Our emphasis was not to deny that slavery was an oppressive system, but that it was within the system for the development of black culture,” he said. “It seems to me the central problem in the study of slavery is the recovery of black history. It is not learning more details about how the economic system worked.”

But for all the controversy, even the book’s critics conceded that it could not be ignored. “It’s an important work,” said Eugene Genovese, the Marxist historian at Rochester, whose own very different work on slavery, “Roll Jordan Roll,” was published recently. “They have broken open a lot of questions about issues that were swept under the rug before.”

“For a long time the inevitable temptation was to leap to slavery as the one experience common to blacks as the explanation for black misfortunes —this is now open to question,” said Prof. C. Vann Woodward of Yale, a leading Southern historian, in an interview. “It is no longer possible to shift the blame to a long‐past, discredited ruling class.”

Prof. J. R. T. Hughes of Northwestern agreed, arguing that American slavery was not some form of degenerate Roman slavery. “It was our own thing—we created it,” he said. “You can’t ask me to believe that slave holders were different from the rest of Americans.”

Had anyone’s mind been changed in the three days? Very doubtful, observed Professor Hughes “it’s too emotional—it’s like religion.”