When my mind was not turned to the events in Europe, my three years at Berkeley as director of Administrative Measurement Studies were exciting and illuminating. I learned to manage an organization of considerable size (not only my own staff of five, but the 50 WPA workers who were attached to our project and, while we were studying the State Relief Administration, several hundred people in that organization as well). Somehow, my social self was able--most of the time--to overcome the introverted self. I learned how to delegate. I even learned how to fire an unsatisfactory employee.
I was able to delegate much of the direct management task. The WPA group had a supervisor, a cheerful and able young Mormon graduate student. Bill Divine, who had just finished his studies in public administration at Pomona, took chief responsibility for the large project in the State Relief Administration in Los Angeles; he lived there and I visited every couple of weeks. Fred Sharp supervised most of the extensive field work for our studies of land use in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ronald Shephard saw to it that we used appropriate statistical techniques and theories in all our work. Hence, my administrative duties were largely limited to supervising these immediate assistants and a secretary, planning and budgeting for the project, and hiring staff replacements. I learned early that (in principle, at least) it gets easier, not harder, to administer as you move upward in an organization.
Nominally, Sam May, director of the Bureau of Public Administration, was my boss and in charge of the project. But he paid little attention to it, being busy learning to ice skate at the new rink in Berkeley and courting a young woman who soon became his second wife (he had been a widower). Often forgetting that he was there, I made the hiring and firing decisions that properly were his and had complete responsibility for the plans and budget. Once or twice he expressed irritation at my failure to consult him, but he never reversed my decision.
He paid more attention to some other bureau functions, especially the advisory service it provided to the state legislature. I pitched in a couple of times on legislative studies, writing a report on water problems in the Central Valley, then as now a major set of issues in California politics, and on reapportionment of the state legislature. Once I helped draft the annual report to the legislature of UC Berkeley President Robert Gordon Sproul. He told us to be sure to devote plenty of space to medicine, agriculture, and engineering; the rest didn?t matter much.
My colleague of the previous summer, Milton Chernin, a senior member of the bureau staff and fully 29 years of age, with his Ph.D. behind him, was the older brother who instructed me on the novel problems of managing a large project and who served as front man when the demands of extroversion were too much for me. He participated actively in our study with the State Welfare Administration and advised on the others.
Chermin also served as a surrogate director for most of the other programs of the bureau. At this time he had no tenure track position at Berkeley, and no strong prospects for one, but friends on the faculty who were aware of his talents were working on it. Before we left, he had become a faculty member In the School of Social Welfare, and subsequently dean, a position he held until his retirement from the faculty many years later. He also became a major force in Berkeley academic politics and after his retirement served as president of the Faculty Club for a number of years. He was extremely bright, oriented to social policy more than to science. He was a staunch liberal, and, as we shall see, was sometimes accused, without basis, of Communist tendencies and associations. Modest to a fault, more than generous in sharing credit, he was loved deeply by his associates, hence always able to claim their loyalty. It was a joy to have him around, together with his attractive, bright, skeptical, streetwise wife, Gertrude, a social worker.
Victor Jones and his wife Annie Mae had come to Berkeley the previous year from Chicago, where they had been our good friends in the political science department. Victor and I and several others shared an office for several years in the bureau, very amicably, although we sometimes had to draw a chalk line on the floor to prevent territorial encroachments. Victor was a professional southerner, with a great fondness for black-eyed peas.
The bureau was our social as well as our professional home--an exuberant young group of political scientists who both worked together and partied together. At a party celebrating my success in the final oral Ph.D. exam at Chicago, they presented me with a copy of Bertrand Russell?s An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, in which I find all of their names inscribed to remind me of those times.
While we were at Berkeley, I also completed my University of Chicago Ph.D. in political science. By arrangement, I took a three-month leave of absence in 1940 to prepare for preliminary examinations and statistics, which I was permitted to write in Berkeley under the supervision of the political science department there.
Shortly after the beginning of the new year, 1941, I was notified that I had passed. With the exams out of the way, I began to devote evenings and those weekends I could spare to drafting my thesis. My dissertation later became Administrative Behavior, and it contains almost all the essential content of the book.