INSTITUTE of GO ERNMENTAL STUDIES UNI ERSITY of CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Aaron Wildavsky: a Memorial 1930-1993

J I Aaron Wildavsky: A Memorial 1930-1993 Working Paper 94-2 INSTITUTE OF GO ERNMENTAL STUDIES UNI ERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Aaron Wildavsky: A Memorial 1930-1993 Working Paper 94-2 Working Papers published by the Institute of Governmental Studies provide quick dissemination of draft reports and papers, preliminary analysis, and papers with a limited audience. The objective is to assist authors in refining their ideas by circulating research results and to stimulate discussion about public policy. Working Papers are reproduced unedited directly from the author's pages. Aaron Wildavsky 1930-1993 Class of 1940 Professor of Political Science and Pnblic Policy University of California, Berkeley From The Independent (London), Friday, IO, September 1993 Professor Aaron Wildavsky Aaron Wi/davsky, political scientist, writer on public affairs; horn New York City 31 May 1930; Assistant Professor, Oberlin College 1958-62; Professor, University ()f California, Berkeley 1963-93; Dean, School of Public Policy, Berkeley 1969-77; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1973- 93; President, Russell Sage Foundation, New York 1977-78; books include The Private Government of Public Money 1974; married 1955 Carol Shirk(deceased; three sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1973 Mary Cadman; died Oakland, California 4 September 1993. To describe Aaron Wildavsky as the world's leading scholar in public administration makes him sound dry as dust; nothing could be further from the truth. He was as warm and earthy as the kasha that he made each Sunday for brunch at his home overlooking San Francisco Bay. Wildavsky was a professor of political science because he cared passionately about politics. For him, it was not a spectator sport but the serious business of setting conditions in which people lived or were killed, as his Russian immigrant parents taught him. The Private Government of Public Money (1974) was a great book about public expenditure in Britain because it was not about money. It was about "village life inside Whitehall." With his co-author, Hugh Heclo, Wildavsky interviewed scores of "villagers" and saw that they were not so much concerned with money as with maintaining political consensus among barons in charge of different Cabinet departments. Consensus was achieved by excluding the public from decisions about billions of pounds. Budgeting fascinated Wildavsky because it was where money, politics, and people combined to resolve differences. Since there could never be enough money to go around, budgets required decisions about political priorities. Since politics is about conflicting opinions, there were bound to be disagreements. The task of politicians, including Treasury civil servants and the Prime Minister, is to balance conflicting interests. The approach was an explicit rejection of technocratic and ultimately undemocratic ideas about how public expenditure ought to be detennined. As a young assistant professor Wildavsky wrote the leading political text on budgeting in Washington, The Politics of the Budgetary Process (1964). Implementation (1973) opened a whole new field of studies worldwide; its message is contained in its subtitle: "How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland, or Why It's Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All." Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries (1974), co-authored with Naomi Caiden, is a magnificent analysis of how administrators behave in situations of chronic fiscal crisis. As a realist, Wildavsky did not dismiss the problems of 100 member states of the United Nations as "impossible." Instead, he outlined the stratagems used when finance is uncertain. The book would repay reading by British university administrators today. Whether walking down a street in Brooklyn, strolling around St. James's Park, or reading political journalism, Wildavsky had an eye for underlying patterns and anomalies. He collaborated with the quintessentially English Mary Douglas in two decades of work on culture. Their co-authored book Risk and Culture (1982), was subtitled "an essay on the selection of technologies and environmental dangers." It illustrates Wildavsky's concern with why people choose to regard some activities as "polluting" in the moral as well as chemical sense. Wildavsky began the study of social science in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn, going down to Borough Hall to help his father, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant, deal with the local bureaucracy. Initially, he wanted to study Russian politics, for his parents had experienced at first hand the pogroms and the 4 Communist revolution. However, he reckoned that if ever he were allowed into the Soviet Union, he would immediately be thrown out, Hence, he turned to American politics. Wildavsky became an academic by accident. Brooklyn College, where he took his B.A. in I 954, was not for the elite of New York City, but since he did not know it was '"non-U" he happily obtained a great education there. A scholarship to Australia drew him into teaching, and led to his first book. After a Ph.D. at Yale, he went to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963, and remained there for the rest of his life, except for a brief period as President of the Russell Sage Foundation, in New York. Among many campus contributions, Wildavsky was the founder dean of Berkeley"s celebrated School of Public Policy. No management consultant trying to account for an academic's paid employment could have made sense of Wildavsky. To him, teaching and research were not mutually exclusive alternatives but intertwined. Undergraduates were encouraged to work as carefully as he did. Students could enter one Berkeley course only if they did a good first-semester research project. Their second semester assignment was to rewrite the paper to make it better. Many graduate students ended up co-authors, benefiting from his unusual rule that authors' names should always appear in alphabetical order. Wildavsky was a speaker in the best Brooklyn style: clear, vivid in imagery, and firm in conclusions. In a lecture hall, Wildavsky had an imposing appearance, bald and bearded like an Old Testament prophet. Like the prophets, he was a natural communicator. Many of his remarks were couched in phrases whose full force drew upon Yiddish inflections. In Paris I once heard an OECD translator with impeccable French and English abandon an attempt to translate his keynote address because she could not cope with his inimitable manner of speaking. The title of one of his books-Speaking Truth to Power (l 979)-was applied in professional life. Wildavsky was ready to vote for Ronald Reagan in l 980 when this was unfashionable on campuses. He also raised topics that other social scientists usually avoid. At a Nobel Prize symposium in Stockholm on the growth of government, he silenced a roomful of candidates for the Economics Prize by asking the simple question: "Where do values come from?" In London, Wildavsky was a frequent visitor and member of the Reform Club, and had been a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. His widow, Mary Cadman, is an Englishwoman turned landscape gardener. The final word on Wildavsky can come from another political scientist, Leo Rosten, better known as the author of The Joys of Yiddish. That book defines a mensch as follows: "To be a mensch has nothing to do with success, wealth, status. The key to being a real mensch is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right." Aaron Wildavsky was a real mensch. Richard Rose University of Strathclyde Richard Rose is professor of politics and founder and director ,,f the Cell/re for Studies of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Scotland. A funeral service for Aaron Wildavsky was held in Lafayette, California, on September 6, 1993, with remarks by Adam Wildavsky, Austin Ranney, ). Merrill Sha11ks,Bernard Gifford, Percy Ta11ne11baum,Seymour Martin Lipset, and Nelso11 W. Po/shy. Remarks at the Funeral 7 Remarks by Adam Wildavsky Aaron was a wonderful father and a great scholar. rn remember him as a champion; a champion of liberty, of capitalism, and of intellectual honesty. I remember my father's favorite kind of speech ... a short one. Adam Wildavsky, of Queens, New York, born March 24, 1960, in Oberlin, Ohio, is the eldest son of Aaron and Carol Wildavsky. Remarks by Austin Ranney University of California, Berkeley I learned long ago that in Aaron Wildavsky·s presence l was well-advised to think before speaking and to choose my words rather carefully. It will be especially hard to live up to that rule on this occasion, but I will do my best. How favored are all of us in this room! We are here because we knew Aaron. A specially favored few are members of his family. The rest of us are his students and his friends-although it has to be said that for Aaron, the distinction between those two categories was never very clear or very important. After all, many people here today arc students who became his friends. But many others are friends who became his students. I know, because I am one of them. I have been ever since I first met him at the Democratic National Convention in 1960. He was a newly minted Ph.D. from Yale and in his first teaching job at Oberlin, and I was acting as the Citizenship Clearing House's amanuensis for Aaron and the other young professors whom CCH was paying to observe the convention. Before I had known Aaron more than a day or two, I learned from him that what the scholarly literature then said about how delegates to national party conventions get their information was wrong. That lesson was not easy for me to learn, for I had written some of that literature myself. Nevertheless, he was right, and he convinced me. But then and on many subsequent occasions I also learned from Aaron something important about teaching.

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