When I came to the Bureau of Public Administration as a full-time public administration analyst in November of 1947, the postwar campus was a busy place. A lot of World War II veterans, here under the GI Bill of Rights, were my age-group peers. I saw them around the bureau and its library and soon got to know many of them, mostly those in political science. Despite my having been a civilian through the war with a 4-F classification, we had a lot in common. They were an interesting, lively, and mature bunch who helped set the tone for the campus. Bureau Director Samuel May, who had been proselytizing political science students to consider public administration as a field of study or public service as a career since the early 1930s, had considerable influence on these GIs. The bureau was housed in the southwest corner of Doe Library, split between dingy research and administrative offices on the basement level and a corner office just upstairs. In 1950 the bureau?s cramped quarters would be greatly improved by a move to the new Library Annex.
In 1947, May and John Bollens were trying to get the bureau?s research and service activities going after a wartime period of near-cessation. Bollens, who ran the research side of the bureau and left in 1950 to join the UCLA political science faculty, was my principal mentor. At the time, much attention was focused on the biennial report series Legislative Problems, written by a small staff and graduate students, and treating a selection of topics likely to be considered at the next biennial session of the state legislature.
In addition to a handful of regular staff, graduate student research assistants were employed to dig out information and draft reports. I worked into the pattern immediately and soon found myself called upon to help some of the research assistants with editorial problems and report organization. It was an invaluable learning process. Careful editorial review was a bureau tradition that paid off in the clarity of the product and the experience research assistants got doing research, organizing materials, and honing their writing skills.
May had a vision of the bureau, its library, and research staff as playing a key role in transmitting knowledge. His was an idealized image of university resources employed to help achieve enlightened and effective public policy--especially at the state and local level. He saw his bureau as a principal vehicle for this, and tried hard to make it come to pass. But I found providing legislative research service to be an uphill struggle. We were in Berkeley and the action was in Sacramento. During the session legislators focused on information immediately available as bills were considered.
The bureau was adept at preparing bibliographies, summarizing current ideas on a subject, and reviewing other states' action on relevant topics. Starting in the early 1930s, Dorothy C. Tompkins, a skilled and prolific bibliographer, mined the Institute?s library for innumerable bibliographies. Margaret Greenfield was constantly at work in welfare, social services, medical insurance, and health care delivery. But despite the abundance of talent, there was a mismatch between what the lawmakers needed most and what our researchers could provide best. Our reports often arrived with more material than the legislators wanted, but too late for the main action.
We sometimes managed a more successful relationship by collaborating with an interim committee working between biennial sessions (California's part-time legislature sat in odd-numbered years.) A good example of linkage was our work on air pollution control. The bureau?s 1951 Legislative Problem on the subject led to staff working closely with a 1953-55 interim committee to create the highly effective Bay Area Air Pollution Control District. Meanwhile, the legislature was rapidly developing its own research resources in the capital. The bureau?s effort was shifting from legislative topics to policy issues of more general interest, particularly those that seemed to be emerging but not yet receiving policymakers' attention.
In 1961, under new director Dwight Waldo, the Legislative Problems series was discontinued, but May?s vision of university research helping state decision makers was by no means forgotten. Waldo initiated the Public Affairs Report, in 1960. Well-received from the outset, and attuned to its audience of policymakers, informed citizens, and academics, the PAR came out six times a year.
The PAR?s brevity and shorter preparation time had major advantages. Each issue gave the gist of a problem and potential solutions in readable, condensed text. Long-time IGS head librarian Barbara Hudson edited the PAR for its first decade, after which Harriet Nathan and I were co-editors until 1987. Ted Bradshaw edited it for a time during the changeover from Gene Lee to new director Nelson W. Polsby. After some refocusing, the PAR as we know it today emerged under Jerry Lubenow's editorship, with Maria Wolf handling the production.
One of the jobs I had taken over from Bollens when he left for UCLA was the secretariat of the Western Governmental Research Association. Formed in the mid-1930s by May and others, WGRA's annual conferences were a unique, well-attended meeting place for local and state administrative personnel, university faculty, and public administration research bureau staff. WGRA was formed two or three years before the American Society of Public Administration (ASPA), which served most of the same purposes, but for many years had no effective presence west of the Mississippi.
When I arrived, WGRA had made a vigorous start-up after the wartime lull, fueled by rapid changes and growing professionalism in state and local governments. The organization had a lot of vitality and appeal for about two decades after the war. But by the 1970s, ASPA became more active in the West, with a growing impact on WGRA. I recommended moving the secretariat to Cal Sate, Long Beach, which was done in 1981. Later WGRA shifter off-campus to Los Alamitos, where it publishes the monthly Job Finder and sponsors continuing educational programs and annual conferences.
The bureau?s initial interest in local government led naturally to problems of governance in metropolitan areas. The metropolitan regional government idea had been around for decades in California, especially the San Francisco Bay Area, and in 1948 the bureau published Bollens' book on "the problem of government" in the region. Predating Bollens was the 1942 book on metropolitan governance written by long-time Bureau/Institute colleague Victor Jones as his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago.
Elected in 1958, Democratic Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown established the Commission on Metropolitan Area Problems, which was active in 1959-60. Much of the background work for the commission was done by university researchers at Berkeley and UCLA, with the Institute an important contributor.
Bay Area Assemblyman John Knox began developing some of the commission's ideas, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s pushed versions of the "Knox bill" in successive sessions, trying valiantly to establish a Bay Area regional agency. At the high point, Knox fell a single vote short of passing his bill. (The subject was revisited in the early 1990s by the Bay Vision 2020 Commission.) IGS worked closely with Knox. Gene Lee, myself, and others prepared background papers on regional issues and helped Knox set up a couple of big regional conferences.
Many IGS staffers, as well as Victor Jones--who by then was in the Berkeley political science department--contributed to other Bay Area developments such as creation of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) in the early '60s to study regional issues. From 1963 to the early 1970s IGS published 17 Franklin K. Lane monographs, written by university faculty members on regional topics from housing, population growth, transportation, air quality and open space to race relations, social dependency and earthquake problems. These attracted a lot of media attention and prompted much discussion. A related Lane project was a series of books Victor and I edited on the governance of metropolitan regions in the U.S. and elsewhere, published by UC Press and IGS Press.
Governance of the Bay itself became a big issue in the early 1960s, when Kay Kerr and the Save the Bay Association got going, and Mel Scott's 1963 Institute report on the future of San Francisco Bay received headline attention. A four-year effort culminated in the creation of BCDC, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. Passage of Proposition 20 in 1972 initiated a statewide coastal governance effort modeled largely on what had been done for the Bay and created the California Coastal Commission in 1976. During this period and afterward, several Institute staff members and I worked on Bay Area issues, the Bay, and the coast.
A 1968 Lane monograph by Karl Steinbrugge drew attention to the Bay Area's earthquake vulnerability, then virtually ignored by policymakers. The ideas in Steinbrugge's report were immediately picked up by Bay Area state Senator Alfred Alquist, who got a joint legislative committee going on a shoestring budget in 1969. The topic's urgency was highlighted by the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, giving Alquist's effort a much-needed push. Thus began the state?s great involvement in the earthquake problem. It had the unexpected personal payoff of launching me on a parallel career in seismic safety and earthquake engineering policy, which included 18 years on the Seismic Safety Commission.
Throughout my time in IGS, the latter part with the skilled editorial help of Harriet Nathan, I spent a lot of time working on manuscripts for publication. Careful editing and peer review assured the quality of IGS monographs, allowing us to publish on controversial topics without undue criticism, and deal effectively with critics who did complain. We wanted Institute publications to be known for reliability and readability. We wanted publications on the ?cutting edge,? exploring new information, developing new conclusions, being prescriptive as well as descriptive, and exposing readers to a variety of information and ideas.
I view my Institute experience with a mixture of nostalgia, fondness, pride, and a few regrets. It was fun and hard work. Editing could be stressful and tedious, but it was gratifying to see authors' drafts take shape. There was insight and good judgment in IGS reports, and they got the attention of audiences we most wanted to reach.
Life in IGS was sometimes trying but seldom dull. There were interesting projects and a variety of people. The uniquely usable catalog and collection was a key IGS facility, and the reading room and carrels were good student hangouts. Looking ahead, we see a venerable but thriving 75-year-old institution exploring new directions with enterprising leadership and a promising future.