April 28, 1991

For all the fragmentation of the Democrats over the last three decades, the one issue that has always pulled the party together is the one that created its coalition in the Great Depression: unemployment. Now, in the midst of the first recession in a decade, its impact underlined by the report on Friday of a sharp drop in national output earlier this year, the Congressional Democrats have an issue and they do not seem to know what to do with it.

Sadaaki Nanai says it took him a while to realize that research and development work in Rochester, N.Y., where Eastman Kodak Company has its headquarters, is very different from research and development in Yokohama, the Japanese industrial center where he opened Kodak's new research laboratory two years ago. In Rochester, Kodak's top researchers rely heavily on technicians to perform much of the laboratory work, freeing scientists and engineers to think about the results. When the basic research is done, the work is turned over to a development team responsible for translating it into new Kodak products. Except in rare cases, Kodak's American researchers do not visit customers. "Rochester is discovery-driven," said Mr. Nanai, a veteran of the Citizen Watch Company and several other Japanese enterprises, of Kodak's American ways. "Visiting customers doesn't help you make discoveries."

Vincent Scully did not want to retire, but Yale University insisted, and so it was time for the last lecture of the class he started teaching in 1947. He was not expecting it to be all that different from the others until he arrived on Friday to see that the audience more or less constituted the course title: Modern Architecture. Sitting there among the freshmen taking the introductory course was Philip Johnson, 85 years old, the designer of the A.T. & T. Building and so much else. Not far away was Maya Lin, 31, who designed the Vietnam War Memorial during her senior year at Yale in 1981. Scattered around the auditorium were dozens of other architects somewhere in between those two ages.

Fordham University plans to proceed with a 20-story, 532-room dormitory on its Lincoln Center campus, despite the failure of a deal that would have helped subsidize the project. Groundbreaking for the dorm, at 155 West 60th Street, is scheduled for fall. The project will be financed by a $51.8 million bond issue by the New York State Dormitory Authority. The architects are Schuman Lichtenstein Claman & Efron of Manhattan. Fordham had hoped to sell part of its Manhattan campus to the Kaskel family development concern, which would have built a 41-story luxury apartment building on the site. The $16.5 million from that sale would have lowered the annual cost of room and board to $6,500, from $8,900, it was estimated. But the deal, approved by the city in 1989, is now on hold. "Both parties remain interested," said Dr. Brian J. Byrne, Fordham's vice president for administration, "but the state of the real-estate market is such that the transaction is in suspension." As for the design of the tan-brick building, the architect Peter Claman said: "The colors, textures and materials of the existing campus had to be respected. So this building will blend in and not be too strong a contrast."

For all their glorious goofs, the Mets have never had three base runners on the same base. But suddenly they have three managers in the headlines on the same weekend. Bud Harrelson, the sensitive incumbent, has canceled his pre-game WFAN radio show because he believes some of announcer Howie Rose's questions were too negative. Davey Johnson, the manager of the 1986 World Series champions, has not been invited to the "World Series Heroes" festivities of Old-Timers' Day on June 15. In the confusion, Dallas Green, insensitive enough to fire back at George Steinbrenner after being dumped as Yankee manager two years ago, was hired as a special-assignment scout, if not an obvious manager-in-waiting.