As the change in name signifies, my years as director of the Bureau/Institute were a time of transition. I was hardly the cause of the transition, but my life was closely intertwined with it. When I was hired to come to Berkeley in 1946, I presumed I would be teaching political theory, which had been my area of concentration in graduate school. But postwar there was a flood of students and a shortage of teachers, and I was asked to do, and was willing to do, whatever was needed. The result was that I taught in every division of the political science curriculum except political theory.
I moved, by a series of accidents, into the field of public administration. My dissertation was a study of the political theory of the American literature of public administration. Then I spent four years in Washington in a variety of administrative assignments. And my early teaching assignments included public administration. So I came to regard public administration as my proper field. No regrets--I doubt I should have had anything new to say about Aristotle or Hobbes, and I found public administration challenging and rewarding.
In the mid-fifties wave of foreign economic assistance and technical aid, a contract for assistance in public administration was created between the United States and Italy, with the University of Bologna as the agents. Samuel May, just retired from the Berkeley faculty and from the directorship of the Bureau of Public Administration, was designated as the head of the UC effort. He died suddenly on the eve of sailing for Italy, and Joseph Harris replaced him on an emergency basis.
These events shaped my own career. I became director of the bureau on an acting basis; and then I followed Harris as the University of California representative in Italy for one year. On my return I was asked to become the director on a regular basis. I was pleased with the vote of confidence, though directing a bureau of public administration had not been in my career plans.
The Bureau of Public Administration that Sam May created over a period of two and a half decades was part of the bureau movement, a current in the general reformist-progressive activity of the time. Bureaus, typically university related, gave advice and assistance to municipal and state governments seeking to reform or improve their administrative endeavors, and May?s bureau was outstanding in its class. He boasted that the bureau had done five hundred studies on requests from Sacramento. After becoming director I boasted that the bureau had the best public affairs library west of Chicago (i.e., west of the libraries at the then ?1313? complex).
In the forties and fifties historical events and intellectual developments brought into question the rationale and functions of the bureaus created in the previous decades. Books could be written, and have been, describing and analyzing these developments. It must suffice to observe here that these developments brought into question an alleged narrow and formulaic approach to reforming and improving public administration. At center was an impulse to reconceptualize the boundary between the political and the administrative¾indeed, perhaps to erase the boundary.
Responding to the changed environment, Gilbert Steiner of the University of Illinois proposed to York Willbern of Indiana University and to me that we organize a conference on the research functions of university bureaus¾which were increasingly named or supplemented by institutes. We did so, and the conference was held in Berkeley in August of 1959. Various of the big names of the day made presentations. I edited the conference products, and in 1960 they appeared in a book--published by the bureau (in hard cover, no less!) and titled The Research Function of University Bureaus and Institutes for Government Related Research.
As this well indicates, I was of opinion that the functions of the then bureaus needed to be transformed to fit the needs of a changed environment, and much of my time was spent thinking¾and talking¾about what directions to take, what means were appropriate, and how movement was possible given past commitments and present restraints. A fortuitous even facilitated movement: the university, in a tidying-up program, prescribed that the title bureau be used only to designate an internal service unit, the title institute for research units.
I used the directive regarding the noun as a strategic means of changing the adjective phrase. The phrase ?of Governmental Studies? was suitable to claim a large space but flexible enough to permit much change with that space. It was fortunate for the redesignation process that I was asked to return to Italy to head the so-called Bologna Project for the year 1961-62. During my absence Eugene Lee, as acting director, moved ahead more adroitly than I could have managed with the politics and formalization of the name change.
Upon my return to Berkeley the problems that led to my leaving began to develop. The problems detracted from my contribution to changes in program to accord with the new name. My relationships with members of the Institute were no part of the problems and were among the most pleasant and rewarding of my life.