ANYONE WHO expected to hear thoughtful criticism of the Center for International Affairs during the guided tour last week must have been disappointed. Like most school-boy trips to a zoo, the November Action Committee's visit to "our own local jungle" was dominated by a feeling of juvenile amusement rather than educational interest.

Sight-seers on the tour gawked at the offices and laughed at the guides' descriptions of members of the Center. However, they carefully heeded the solicitous warnings coming from the loudspeakers that radicals always seem to have available: "Don't talk to the animals. These animals are dangerous, so don't talk to them."

Perhaps they felt that conversation with the objects of their protest would have destroyed the togetherness which radicals groove on during pseudo- revolutionary moments. Or possibly the guides knew that much of the information they were dispensing could have been easily challenged by members of the Center.

Some charges made against professors were trivial. (For example, one was condemned for having worked in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.) Other accusations were more serious, although some of these misrepresented the facts. For example, one guide told his listeners that Thomas C. Schelling, Professor of Economics, had submitted recommendations to the "Senate National Security Subcommittee" on ways "McNamara's planning system for the Department of Defense could be applied to the Department of State." Actually Schelling's statement was prepared for the National Security and International Operations Subcommittee of the Senate's Government Operations Committee. In fewer than ten pages Schelling generally examined the Planning-Program Budgeting System, told why it would not fit foreign affairs as it did defense, and explained why Congress probably would not want it to be used in the State Department. Scholars from other universities prepared statements on the same subject for the subcommittee.

The fact that radicals did not present an effective indictment of the Center during the tour, however, does not mean that it would be impossible to do so. At the least, there are serious questions to be asked about the nature of the work members of the Center and other social scientists are doing.

THE CENTER directs three main activities. Probably the most important is research, which is conducted by faculty members associated with the Center and by research associates, some of whom are junior faculty members. Several projects are supported by a Ford Foundation grant which will expire in two years, but most work is financed by government and foundation grants to individual professors or research associates. Sometimes the individual has his grants assigned to the Center for "administrative convenience," according to Raymond Vernon, Professor of International Trade and Investment at the Business School and Acting Director of the Center from 1966 to 1968.

Members of the Center are especially concerned with political and economic development. One branch of the Center, the Development Advisory Service, contracts with governments of poor countries to provide assistance in planning economic growth. The advisory service has its own director and is financed by contracting governments, the United Nations Development Program, and a separate Ford Foundation grant.

The Center also invites 12 to 15 middle-career bureaucrats, or social scientists who might become bureaucrats, to spend a year as Fellows, with the opportunity- according to its tenth annual report- "to examine and reflect on some of the basic problems in foreign affairs." Although Fellows are regularly accepted from the U.S. armed services, State Department, and other agencies, many foreign Fellows are recruited. Ben Brown, director of the Fellows program, said that the Center has had a Yugoslav Fellow and has tried to attract Fellows from Rumania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. According to Vernon, the Center still has an invitation outstanding to a Russian official to be a Fellow.

Other members of the Center have little contact with the Fellows. Vernon said "they lead too much of an intern life" and "the contributions they make to our research usually turn out to be marginal."

THE DEVELOPMENT Advisory Service is a much more important function of the Center. It has been condemned by radicals. Responding to this criticism of its efforts to foster economic development, Vernon said the main consideration in planning economic growth should be, "Is there something you can do for the people despite the character of the government?" He points to Mexico and Venezuela as examples of nations where the citizens have benefited from economic development. These countries have "marked income mal-distribution," Vernon admitted, "but there has been marked improvement in welfare" throughout society in both countries.

Radicals could argue endlessly with Vernon and members of the development service whether the citizens of the developing country are helped much by economic growth "despite the character of the government." Vernon readily conceded that the point involved the "old philosophical question- whether you think the time has come to operate by the revolutionary device of smashing everything, or whether you should operate by change within the structure without the brutality and pain of revolution..."

That the choice is a personal one and that it does have political effects are the central points. Radical attacks on faculty research have been met with firm replies about the sanctity of "academic freedom." Professors steadfastly resist the notion that there should be political tests for scholarly work, or that students should have any influence on the direction of that scholarship.

This position assumes that there are objective standards for measuring scholarly research, and that these standards are non-political. Whether this belief is true. whether the nature of political science and the activities of political scientists are political, is of fundamental importance in considering the argument in favor of absolute academic freedom.

"In recent years," says a public-relations circular the Center tried to distribute to the November Action people, "funding from the U.S. government has increased." The funds have been used "to support research originating in the Center." Vernon added that, since the Center's major grant from the Ford Foundation will expire in two years, "we have been under strict instructions from the University administration to try to reduce our dependence on that Ford grant." The federal government looms at the only major source of new research money.

In The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith discussed the prospect of government and corporation financing of the social sciences: