David A.

Dr. Wu: Thanks for your note. I am not presently in government service. But over the course of my academic career I have taken leave to serve as a member of a state public service commission (regulating utilities) and as a state revenue secretary (formulating tax policy and collecting taxes). I have also served in a number of unpaid, part-time government roles: as member and then chairman of a state elections board, regulating campaign finance; as a member of a state criminal justice board that allocated law enforcement grants to local governments; as a member of an advisory committee in the United States Department of Education that reviewed accrediting bodies for their conformance with federal law. Along the way, I also served as a university president at two large urban research universities, for a total period of 21 years. My efforts to integrate public service into university workways met, I'm sorry to say, with only limited success, as did my efforts to persuade academic people to recruit those serving in public service into the faculty. (The few occasions where this was done turned out, however, to be quite successful.)

My principal interest and concern is how academic people can move back and forth between academe and public service. This has become increasingly difficult with the heavy pressure to publish and with the enormous expansion of knowledge in each academic subdiscipline, making it difficult for anyone who undertakes public service to keep up in his/her field. And the reverse is true: it is more and more difficult for those who serve in government to rotate into and through academic appointments, largely for the same reasons.

If this background and set of interests is at all valuable to the discussions you plan, please let me know.

David A