Both members and non-members point to Urban Planning Aid as the kind of enterprise academic people can engage in outside the auspices of the university. UPA is a firm of consultants founded, as Thernstrom puts it, "on the assumption that one of the reasons poor people get screwed is that they no technical competence." The members (two of them, Chester Hartman and Lisa Peattie, are Joint Center members) volunteer their services to represent the poor to development authorities.

UPA, funded entirely by the American Friends Service Committee, has none of the financial hang-ups the Joint Center has--at any rate it has different ones. Roxbury groups which are unlikely to request assistance from an urban-studies center affiliated with Harvard and MIT are considerably more inclined to go to a private organization.

The eal difference, of course, is one of perspective. UPA exists not for research, but as a service for its clients--low-income organizations which, says executive director James L. Morey, are "typically fighting the agencies the Joint Center is working for." Adds Morey, "We've been called the Cambridge Robin Hoods. I don't think the Joint Center could be called that by any standard."

A private organization like UPA has the added advantage of being able to work relatively quietly. Both Hartman and Fein suggest that relationships between academic "experts" and the community should be formed outside the public eye--"without trying to earn brownie points," says Fein. Technical assistance, says Hartman, "should be given by individuals offering something in subservient roles."

What is needed between Harvard and Roxbury seems to be a normal diversity in the pattern of engagement, an escape from the institutional rigidities of organizational relations.

If the Joint Center is not going to be the catalyst between the university and the ghetto, that does not render the Center useless. Ghetto problems are by far the most urgent concern of urbanists, but obviously not the only ones. The urgency of ghetto problems tends to suggest to people an "obvious" institutional role for the urbanstudies Center in the ghetto--but as the Joint Center stands now, it is singularly and paradoxically unsuited to assisting the community it studies