TIME keeps in constant touch with the academic world. Our writers and correspondents search out scholars in many fields, seek their thoughts and enlist their help with future ideas or stories already under way. Occasionally, some of us get a chance to go beyond weekly news concerns and discuss long-range issues and new ideas with academicians and other intellectuals. In May 1971 several Time Inc. editors, writers and correspondents were the beneficiaries of a thoughtful two-day colloquy at the University of Chicago; equally provocative was a series of informal meetings in the fall of 1972 with thinkers in Los Angeles. This month 19 top editorial Time Inc. staffers met in the library of the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Mass., with scholars in several disciplines. The purpose of the seminars, as envisaged by Editor in Chief Hedley Donovan, was to explore the problems of a "post-Watergate America."

Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell, a FORTUNE editor for ten years, opened the discussion with an analysis of America's recent failures, including aspects of the Great Society, Viet Nam and Watergate. Social Scientist David Riesman talked about higher education; Radcliffe President Matina Horner discussed the outlook for women; Bernard Frieden, director of the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, the scarcity of housing. The other seminar participants: Law Professor Paul Freund, Harvard Business School Dean Lawrence Fouraker, Historian Bernard Bailyn, Sociologist Gene Sharp, John F. Kennedy Library Director Dan Fenn Jr., Head of Harvard Russian Research Center Adam Ulam, and Harold Demone Jr., professor of social welfare at Harvard Medical School. At a Monday-night dinner in Boston, the TIME contingent met with Pat Caddell, a young pollster who made a name for himself working in Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign, and three Massachusetts members of Congress: Margaret Heckler, Paul Cronin and James Burke.

Most of the planning of the seminars was undertaken by our Boston Bureau Chief Sandra Burton, TIME Behavior Correspondent Ruth Mehrtens Galvin, and Louis Banks, former Time Inc. editorial director, who is now a Harvard Business School professor and a member of Time Inc.'s board of directors. The guest speaker at the final dinner was Former Attorney General Elliot Richardson. "I am still a little worried," Richardson told us, "about the fact that TIME wants to know what's going to happen next. I would have thought you had quite enough to do telling us what happened last week."

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