Priorities for 2001 and Beyond

Priorities for 2001 and Beyond I. We have been preoccupied for some time now with the prospect of beginning a new millennium. In fact, I must admit that I speculated about this many years ago. A while back I reread letters exchanged with my wife while I was on sea duty in the Pacific during World War II. In one of them, I mulled over the prospect of living until the year 2000, figuring out to the day how old I would be if I should survive that long, and concluding that it wasn't likely to happen. By the late 1990s, when it began to appear that I might actually still be around, I must admit that I found the prospect to be exciting, and looked forward with considerable anticipation to January 1, 2000. Indeed, it did turn out to be a milestone date for me and probably for many others in my age bracket, who may have shared my hope of moving into the next millennium. One nagging problem about all this hoopla was that purists were insisting that the actual new millennium would not start until January 1,2001. While begrudgingly recognizing that they were probably technically right, I tried not to let this interfere with the significance of that magic number 2000, and for the most part it didn't. However, this discrepancy did attach more significance to the beginning of 2001, because by then there could no longer be any doubt that we had moved from one millennium into another. Now 2001 is more than two months gone, and we can concentrate on this new millennium without any worry about this being premature. When I was honored by being invited to deliver the Donald C. Stone lecture at this year's ASPA national conference, my objective therefore became to consider what I might say about priorities for public administration as we enter the opening years of the last millennium in which any of us are going to be participants. In doing this, I want to keep in focus the example set by Don Stone as a practitioner of and thinker about public administration in modern society. In the booklet published by ASPA as a tribute to his lifetime of public service, I contributed a remembrance, which described Don Stone as "the nearest thing to an all-round Renaissance man to be produced by the public administration community during this century." Of course, I was referring to the twentieth century. He lived through most of it, from 1903 to 1995, and was active professionally almost to the end of his long life. His influence will undoubtedly extend well into the current century. Like a multitude of his friends and acquaintances, I have fond personal memories of Don Stone and his wife, Alice, in addition to appreciating his professional achievements. He was 13 years older than I, enough of an age differential to keep me from being a contemporary, but not enough to deny me the opportunity to work with and have many fruitful contacts with him for over half a century beginning in the late 1940s. These were concerned mostly with activities of the American Society for Public Administration, the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), and the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS). One of my cherished personal memories of Don came in 1980 at an international gathering in Spain. I had heard for years of his enthusiasm for tennis and skill at the game, which has been my favorite diversion most of my life, but I had never had an opportunity to get on the same court with him. We arranged for two or three matches there, playing both singles and doubles with his wife and others. Don was 76 years old at the time, but still demonstrated the same zest for tennis as he did for life generally. I treasure that opportunity to have been across the net from him, and am sorry it could not have happened earlier and more often. Turning back to my theme of priorities for 2001 and beyond, I must start by admitting that I have no grand vision of what they should be. It would be gratifying in a way either to make a ringing pronouncement about a new paradigm for the field of public administration and claim its coming dominance, or to conclude that we have reached a state of decline or decadence requiring revolutionary efforts to rescue us from irrelevance. …