Every year since 1938, about a dozen newspapermen have come to Harvard and have been paid to do whatever they want under the Nieman Fellowship program. During their stay they have the run of the College and the professional schools. Faculty and administrators cater respectfully to their desires. In June they return to their jobs, hopefully taking with them some knowledge that will make them better journalists.

It's a fascinating idea, giving Harvard to non-academics on their own terms. But few of the visitors explore the breadth of the University. Most use Harvard just to brush up on their own particular fields of reporting. Science writers study science, business writers study economics.

For most, holding a Nieman Fellowship is like having your father's Diner's Club card and eating all your meals at Elsie's. After all, you were brought up on hamburgers.

It shouldn't be this way. The Nieman Fellows are bright, interested, motivated men and women. Fifteen applicants are rejected for every one accepted. That most of the Fellows use Harvard as a trade school is not so much their own fault as it is the fault of the program itself and of its administrators.

President Conant made the Nieman program virtually shapeless to encourage independent scholarship. Fellows are required only to take one half-course. Under the direction of Louis Lyons, Curator of the Nieman Fellowships from the program's second year until 1964, this shapelessness became purposelessness.

Lyons's innovations during his 25 years were the opening of the program to women (1945), the formation of the Nieman alumni organization (1946), and the first publication of Nieman Reports (1947), the Fellows' quarterly journal on the newspaper business. Lyons's penchant for tradition and alumni solidarity has made the Nieman Fellows more an aristocratic fraternity of journalists than the group of scholars that President Conant had hoped for.

Lyons records this development in his book on the Nieman program, Reporting the News. Talking about the weekly Nieman dinners with leading journalists, he says, "Without the stimulus of these discussions, Nieman Reports would never have been born, nor would the remarkable esprit de corps of the Nieman Fellows have developed as it did, so that within a few seasons what began as an educational opportunity had become one of the prized distinctions in American journalism."

Were it not for Nieman Reports--perhaps the best publication of its kind--the Fellows might easily be confused with one of Harvard's Final Clubs. At a recent fund-raising dinner, the current class of Fellows and a long list of former ones got together for drinks, steak, St. Emilion, and after-dinner jokes. There the same strained conviviality, the same overly boisterous camaraderie that abounds at club punches and initiations.

Louis Lyons shaped the program into this fraternal institution; Dwight E. Sargent, his successor as Curator and editor of Nieman Reports, has made few changes. Sargent is a tightlipped, businesslike man, a different type entirely from his extroverted predecessor. A Nieman Fellow in 1950-51, he is a graduate of the editorial room, not th city desk; and his preoccupation with precision and organization betrays his background.

The fraternal complacency that has characterized some Nieman classes in the past is on the wane under Sargent's leadership. His quiet nature discourages the club atmosphere. But although he has diminished the inward focus of the Nieman program, he has not done much to enlarge the outward perspective.

Sargent continues to run the program much as Lyons did. He meets his day-to-day responsibility of arranging Nieman seminars, a major feature of the program since 1938, but he finds little time for innovations. He also spends several hours a day recruiting men and money for a $1.2 million Nieman fund drive now underway.

The seminars are a formal part of the Nieman year, and "attendance is expected," according to one Fellow. Sargent usually plays it safe when choosing a speaker. Since the only thing the Fellows have in common is their profession, a safe choice for a seminar usually means another journalist or a government, history, or law professor.

"About 60 to 80 per cent of them are in the field of public affairs," Sargent said, "because that's what the Niemans are most interested in. However, a Nieman year is more than just learning about history and government. It's learning about your own profession."

Sargent's conception of the Nieman year makes Harvard little more than a library for journalistic research. Most of the Fellows seem to take his cue. According to the prospectus issued by the University News Office, 10 of the 13 Nieman Fellows for 1965-66 plan to concentrate their most serious study this year in their own fields of reporting. Three of the six Associate (or foreign) Nieman Fellows are coming to Harvard to study their own countries.

For example, Dev Prasad Kumar, special representative of the Statesman, New Delhi and Calcutta, "will concentrate his study in international affairs on the history and politics of India and plans to make a comprehensive study of the development of Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan."