Science and the Public Sector: Practical Applications from Within the University to the Problems of Municipalities

Abstract

Last week I spent five grueling days going from one campus to another in a Sigma Xi Lecture Tour. I talked to a large number of faculty and students-mainly about our Program for Urban and Policy Sciences at Stony Brook--what it was doing in connection with the problems of municipalities and how it was going about it. I found wide-spread interest-and along with it-widespread confusion. In my talk today I will try to deal with the three basic questions that, in one form or another, kept coming up time and time again in these discussions. I think that taken as a whole, they go to the heart of any discussion of practical applications from within the university to the problems of municipalities. Before I begin to deal with these questions let me interject a few words of caution. Generalizations and lessons learned in this area, although easily stated, are difficult to prove. Different university groups who have involved themselves in one way or another with the problems of municipalities, have come away with vastly different conclusions. Most of my material is drawn from the experiences we have encountered at Stony Brook in our Program for Urban and Policy Sciences. This Program, a large part of which has been supported by the RANN Program at NSF, has its own faculty and graduate program, and has worked on a variety of problems with local governments on Long Island, New York City, and the New York State Legislature, over the past three years. Both the Program and the character of the research activities can be briefly described as involving the application of the tools of decision theory to public policy problems. I make no claim that either the Program or the lessons learned are either new or unique or, in fact, that the lessons drawn from these experiences can be transferred to other university situations. This you can judge for yourself after you have heard what I have to say. A final introductory point. The actual work I will describe is, of course, the product of many people's efforts, both. at Stony Brook and at Brookhaven National Laboratory, with whom we are collaborating on a number of research projects. At Stony Brook, Stan Altman, Ed Beltrami and Larry Bodin were the principals. At Brookhaven, Phil Palmedo, Ken Hoffman, and Mike Jones. Now to my first question: Why should any university, and in particular, its faculty, be interested in applying their talent and knowledge to the problems of municipalities? In the case of the Program for Urban and Policy Sciences in Stony Brook, the interdisciplinary activity is directed toward the real and immediate problems facing county, municipal, and state governments. We lay great stress on t'he conditions surrounding implementation of our results. This means we ex-