University Centers and Institutes Transcript - Part 1

GERTH: Colleagues, welcome.  Good morning.  This is the second among three discussions about an important theme in the history of SAC State:  the State University in the State Capital.  When Bev and I were approached by a few faculty and especially by some trustees, especially with two trustees with whom I had worked closely on a number of issues over the years, about moving to SAC State.  There were two themes that emerged with considerable frequency, in not only trustee discussions, but conversations with colleagues on the faculty here.  The first was the whole question of the State University in the State Capital.  SAC State had not developed this as a major strength despite the fact that California was a major player in U.S. national government, in the U.S. economy, and indeed, even in 1984 in world affairs.  Some of the trustees were particularly determined about this.  And they were vocal.  The second was governance.  Especially important, again, because SAC State is the State University in the State Capital.  If you are a member of the legislature or an official at one of the state agencies or staff member at one of the state agencies, and a question comes up at some point about the California State University, one of the easy things to do is go five miles down to J Street  and show up here on the campus and start a conversation going.  So, the State University in the State Capital must be a major theme-- an important goal educationally and in academic terms.  

The time had come in 1984: the trustees knew it, some students and faculty knew it, especially faculty and students that are on other CSU campuses, knew it.  I'm a political scientist and had been in the California State University since 1958.  And as political scientists from the various campuses would gather, almost inevitably, we got  into a discussion about what's going on in Sacramento  and could our colleagues at SAC State, sort of representing all of us, get us involved and so on and so forth.  So, the faculty on other campuses even were pushing this.  New York has SUNY at Buffalo, the State University of New York at Buffalo, with a national reputation—dealing with, addressing issues in the state government of New York.  New Jersey had Rutgers University.  The main campus of Rutgers is not in the state capital, but Rutgers had established a very functional, very, almost aggressive branch at that time in New Jersey's capital.  California needed a major University at the State Capital.  And that was to be California State University, Sacramento.  

This morning, this panel of knowledgeable faculty joined by a long-time senior and respected legislative committee figure, Peter, our good friend, will address University Centers and Institutes as significant players in State and other levels of government in public policy. 
The first of these three panels convened two days ago in this room.  And nine members explored the development and experience of the Sacramento Semester program.  The Center for California Studies, which is over more than 30 years, emerged as a very major player in the life of the State in many ways: the legislative  and executive  judicial fellow's programs and related matters.  

The third of these panels will convene here, in again, in another week, to address the establishment of, the mid to later 80s, of the Graduate Program in Public Policy and Administration and its role in state government and policy.  While it is clear that this is a work about history, it is a work addressing the years, really limited to the years 1984 to 2003.  Those are the years we [Gerths] were here and responsible for many things and we don't want to get beyond 2003 or, other than for the Sacramento Semester, prior to1984.  The University has a very well done history of the earlier years, up to the mid-80s, by a colleague of ours named George Craft.  That's of a more general nature.  

Today you are addressing the Institute of Social Research, the Center for Collaborative Policy, and the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership, and Policy-- in that order.  All entities created by individual members of this University community, individuals who saw a need in this state that members of this University could usefully and constructively address.  Much was accomplished.  And three of you, Carole, and Nancy, and Susan, started something good and great universities see and understand-- need, both on campus and in educational terms, and in the greater society.  And in a sense that's what this is all about.  I want to thank each of you for being here to discuss the years 1984 to 2003.  Much has happened since 2003.  Today we talk about the practical beginning and the roles of the Center and two Institutes and their meaning for the years of their times, vehicles for much that has happened over the years.  I want to thank Steve Boilard, whom we have come to know well over the past half-dozen years,  and who has given superb leadership to the Center for California Studies.  Steve agreed to be the moderator and facilitator for these discussions.  Unlike the other two sessions, each of the presentations of these three entities is in a sense self-contained.  Hopefully, at the time, for these three entities, as the time for the individual presentation about these three entities closes, there will be some time for a general discussion  about Centers and Institutes and their present potential roles within the University.  I will not be a major discussant.  But there will be a few times when I can help around a point.  And when we finish around noon, immediately after, we will enjoy a simple and excellent lunch together.  And then we can all go home or wherever it is we're going this afternoon.  Onward. Steve it's yours.  

BOILARD: Thank you very much, Don.  Why don’t we, before we even begin with the discussion of Institute for Social Research, why don't we just go around the table and do some self-introductions, starting with Carole.  

BARNES: I'm Carole Barnes.  And I was the Director of the Institute for Social Research [ISR], also Professor of Sociology here.  

SHERRY: Susan Sherry.  Executive Director and Founder of the Center for Collaborative Policy.  

BOOHER: And I'm David Booher.  I worked with Susan at the Center.  

[00:08:04]
DETWILER: I'm Peter Detwiler.  I'm a retired Legislative Staffer.  I also had the privilege of teaching part time on this campus for a little over 25 years.  

SHULOCK: I’m Nancy Shulock.  I came in on the ground floor of Don's administration in 1984.  And served in the administration in a number of capacities.  And then went over, as I will talk later, and was a founding Director of the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership, and Policy, known as IHELP.  

BOILARD: I'm Steve Boilard.  I came in on the ground floor of Don Gerth's administration as well, but as a student in a Master's in Government.  And, I was Executive Director at the Center for California Studies.  So, we'll begin this, today's discussion we'll focus on those three Centers and Institutes.  We'll start with the Institute for Social Research.  And Carole Barnes, who had been there from the beginning, if you have some thoughts or remarks about how the Institute came to be and the role that it played at the University.  

BARNES: Yes. If I may present the ...  

BOILARD: Please.  

BARNES: Yeah, I thought it might be helpful to briefly describe some of my funded research experiences here at SAC State that preceded the initiation of ISR and that led to its development in late 1980s.  I joined the faculty in 1964 after leaving my first job after graduate school at the Bureau of Social Science Research [SSR], an affiliate of Columbia University in Washington, D.C. The SSR did contract research for federal agencies with a group of PhD specialists in a dozen subject matter areas and a fleet of research analysts and computer folks who collected and analyzed the data.  The SSR, unknowingly at the time, became my model for ISR.  In 1968, Bill Bourne, who was general manager of Regional Transit, approached Otto Butz, who was Acting President of CSUS, to see if he could recommend several faculty members who could help with the Department of Transportation Research and Demonstration grant.  Otto invited me to a meeting with Bill Bourne, Milt Balm, and Al Gutowsky, who were from the Economics Department.  And we collectively ended up with a three-year, $250,000 demonstration grant from the Federal Department of Transportation, where we researched the effects of fare increases and service changes on ridership.  We also developed and initiated a new bus route-- and this comes right to the campus now.  It's called the cross-town line.  And it connected not only SAC State but the two other ARC and SAC City and several hospitals and apartment complexes and became known, because it didn't run into the downtown area.  It ran across town, around the city.  It became the first such type of bus route.  And it was also the first time that any buses stopped on campus.  Which we now, of course, have coming on a regular basis to the front of the campus.  The project employed a number of our graduate students and provided data for several master's thesis.  The contract was managed by the precursor to UEI [University Enterprises, Inc] when it was situated in the old temporary buildings near the levy.  This goes back a ways.  In the late 1970s, I participated in the Stanford University Summer faculty workshops sponsored by their Engineering Department--  the challenge to a multi-disciplinary team to solve the problem of airport access in the Bay Area.  Following that experience, I was hired by a local traffic engineering firm,  Jack Faustman & Associates, to work on the development of a ground transportation master plan for San Francisco International Airport.  By analyzing trip origins for passengers departing SFO, we identified the need for transportation alternatives from the South Bay and Peninsula; and introduced airport pick up and drop off by cabs from those counties, which back then was not approved by the cab companies in San Francisco, including signage and separate cab lots for cabs going to north and south out of the airport.  This project, too, provided paid research opportunities for my students.  So, the theme here is that people are coming to us, to the campus, for research services, before we were really in the business of actually going out and soliciting it.  Around the same time, I was consulting with attorneys  in death penalty cases and in the McMartin Preschool trial in Los Angeles on the representativeness of juries, comparing the age, race, and gender distributions  of jury pools with the jury eligible population, based on the census and DMV records.  And my colleague Rodney Kingsnorth and I were involving students and collecting  and analyzing data for research projects that led to jointly authored articles in peer review journals.  The students also wrote papers based on the data and presented them at student research conferences sponsored by the CSUs Social, Science, Research, and Instructional Council, which was started by a group of political science and sociology profs about 35 years ago now, I believe. 

Both Rod and I felt that direct involvement in research tasks, sampling every “nth” file from public records, identifying  and evaluating variables available in those files, constructing tables that showed relationships--  This was the very best way for students to understand what social research can tell us.  Many of those students went on to excellent graduate schools and to responsible data related jobs in state government.  And one of the Department's graduate students went on to become our Dean and now Dresident of CSU, Stanislaus.  My colleague, Frank Darknell , a specialist in the sociology of higher education was excited by all this off-campus utilization of our research skills.  And he saw a special role for the CSU in providing research services to the broader community, specifically state and local government.  A model that was quite common among land-grant universities in the mid-west.  And, which is on display down the causeway now at UCD.  Frank and I considered forming an institute in the mid-1970s.  But there was no campus support for such a venture.  

From the time Guy West retired as the founding President in the late 60s and the time Don Gerth became President in 1984, we had a succession of nine Presidents, none staying more than two years.  So, when Don gave his inaugural address, both Frank and I heard his invitation to develop Centers and Institutes, and we started our wheels in motion.  It goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, organizations resist change.  I'm not going to waste time on the many and varied road blocks and arguments that greeted our proposal.  But in the end, it took two years, starting in 1987, to get the approval of campus committees, arrange for space,  acquire nine computers to put in a telephone and computer lab,  buy tables and chairs, and hang out a shingle.  Don promised three years of financial support for a full-time research analyst  and half-time secretary, project manager, starting in 1989.  And Jack Brackman, then Chair of the Psych Department, generously volunteered a classroom that was being used as a hangout space for Psych students and an adjoining storage room that became our first office.  We were on our way.  Our first telephone interviews were of Delta and Northwest flight attendants, asking about the quality of their luggage, shoes, and handbags on behalf of a North Beach supplier for a court case in San Francisco.  Other early projects included analysis of visitors to Yosemite for the Wilderness Society, and participation and transportation planning for revised masterplan for Yosemite Valley in 1989.  Our first multi-year projects were with the Department of Social Services.  We did the three-year evaluation of the IHSS [In-home Support Services] program starting  in 1992, developed training materials for providers  and recipients and went on to do a series of work load studies for community care licensing and administrative law judges [ALJ], which continue to this day.  The work load studies are an ISR specialty, developed by Sandy Sutherland our founding research analyst.  In cooperation with the ALJs and licensing analyst we designed forms  that captured their work activities on specific types of cases, and in the case of the analyst, 14 types of institutions.  With three months of data collection by each ALJ or analyst, we could develop algorithms for the amount of time required to process DSS or DHS cases by the ALJ  or the amount of time required to monitor and relicense different types of state licensed institutions.  This data was then used by the Department of Finance  to determine the number of ALJs and license program analysts needed to handle a given size caseload.  We developed a lot of respect for the folks at DOF, the Department of Finance, who went over our data collection and analysis methods very carefully.  It was reassuring to find that there were other folks out there who understood and respected data and knew how to use it to make responsible decisions on behalf of the state.  In addition to program evaluations  and workload studies, ISR also does needs assessments.  One of our more challenging research efforts was to work with Sacramento County in predicting the number of food stamp eligible persons  in the county combining census data with estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants.  Together we developed a protocol that they could employ without our involvement-- and I think are still using it.  Another early initiative was working with Tim Hodson for the Center of California Studies in establishing CEDA, the California Elections Data Archive, now in its 25th year.  CEDA summarizes the votes on all candidates and ballot measures for local elections in all 58 counties, 480 cities,  and 1100 school and community college districts for every election since November 1994.  And we frequently get calls and people are just amazed that that data is out there.  I don't know what they ever do with it but I know they come to us and they're really happy to find it.  We've done numerous surveys by paper, phone, mail, email, and even kayak.  Certainly, one of the most extensive were two commissioned  by the California Association of Registered Nurses to obtain probability samples of registered nurses, to obtain an accurate picture of their training,  job environments, and income.  In our 30-year history we have worked  for over 50 state agencies, the County of Sacramento,  the community colleges, and some local agencies.  SMUD commissioned a survey of employee satisfaction.  And we did several federally funded projects with SAC PD  and the sheriffs' department including one that evaluated job satisfaction among Sacramento County Sheriffs.  Most of our work is written for a very narrow audience, staff and leadership of the agencies funding the research.  Only occasionally have our findings been openly discussed  in legislative hearings.  The first such occasion occurred in the mid-1990s  when our evaluation of the IHSS program found that in-home services provided  by a private contractor covered clients with fewer personal care needs, cost more for the care given, and received lower evaluations on the quality of that care.  These findings argued against privatization of the IHSS program and prevented the expansion  of that company's involvement in California.  Our second appearance before  a legislative committee grew out of what was perhaps our most unusual assignment,  assessing the current regulatory structure  for licensing Engineers in California.  This involved a detailed analysis of educational requirements for the major types of engineers in the U.S. and a comparison of the licensing requirements in all 50 states.  California's licensing system was, as you might imagine, unique.  And despite our testimony before the Senate Sunset Review Committee, it remained so.  With the exception of a portions of the Director's salary, ISR has covered all of our costs  with contract dollars every year since 1992.  Following our move to the Adams Building, this included a growing staff of research analysts, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as a fulltime project manager.  Grant activity has averaged $867,934 over the 27-year period from 1991 to 2017-- a total in excess of $22 million in contracts over ISRs history.  Grant activity over the past 13 years has been about 1 million 3  to 1 million 4 on the average.  With Don's permission here, I would like to also say a few words  about the Anthropology Department's Archeological  Research Center [ARC] because they were a parallel institution that started a little bit after us.  They started in 1995.  And we have worked a lot with them on issues about Institutes.  But I don't want to take a lot of time, but I think it should be said that they had brought in a little over 30 million dollars in grants since 1995 and they're still very active in providing services  to state agencies and federal agencies.  And I have information on that which I'll go into a little later if you'd like.  Thank you.  Questions?  

DETWILER: So, Carole, you'd already started this work kind of on an informal basis and going back  to Don's earlier comment about interdisciplinary studies.  I mean, a lot of that, you're a trained sociologist, but a lot of this was working with traffic engineers.  So, you were working across boundaries right from the start.  

BARNES:  Exactly.  

GERTH: Economists.  

DETWILER: And Economists.  

BARNES: Economists, right. 

DETWILER:  And then you follow up on Don's invitation.  Now, how is that different with that other Center that you had talked about between Anthropology and Archeology?  We're they responding to Don's invitation?  

BARNES: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  Yes. There was not an opportunity to build any sort of extra activities on campus when you have a complete turnover at the top on a regular basis.  And Don did mention Centers and Institutes in his very first address.  And lots of us heard that.  And I think, if you look back, there were a lot of Institutes around the campus that became .  . . that got started shortly thereafter.  And ARC has been very effective because there are very few college-based research institutes that provide archeological services.  And they're required by state law and by federal law, whenever there's any Department of Transportation road building,  things, they have to go in.  So, we have a great advantage because as a state agency, state agencies don't need to go out for competitive bid.  And so, as long as our .  . .  

DETWILER: When it's agency to agency.  

BARNES: When it's agency to agency.  So, there are a lot of private firms out there that do what ARC does, do what we do.  But we have an inside tract in competing for contracts because we save the agency a lot of time going through that competitive bid process.  

SHULOCK: Because it was a new set of activities on this campus and an institutionalized way to have a Institute or Center, what kinds of challenges, barriers, maybe, did you have to confront in terms of administrative, and processes, and budgeting, and time accounting,  and all those things.  Because when I get to my institute and provide it was a big.  It was a culture thing.  It was huge--huge change.  

BARNES: Definitely.  And there was no place to go for questions and answers.  

SHULOCK: Yeah, because there was no manual to cover that.  

BARNES: No. No, Exactly.  And some of the Institutes got started on, what I call, the University side.  California Studies Center, your Center [pointing to Nancy Shulock], and your Center [pointing to Susan Sherry]  were all on the University side.  ARC, ISR, and many of the others are what I call on the UEI side.  We brought our contracts through UEI.  And so there were major differences in how our contracts got worked out.  

SHULOCK: Ours were through UEI, too.  

BARNES: Oh, they were.  Okay.  But you were still hired on the [University side] .  . .  

SHULOCK: Well, yes.  Anyway. So, you really had to want it because it wasn't like there was somebody there over in the budget office  who could just tell you, give you the worksheet or handout  about how we do things.  

BARNES:  And I knew, first of all, I could never now compete for the job of Director.  It's a good thing I started it.  And we started small.  I knew nothing about contracting-- nothing about it.   You know?  And I'm not really geared toward all those, you know, .  . . I like numbers but I don't like numbers in that kind of way.  So, yes, learning the process of the budgeting, and getting the proposals in, and all that.  We ended up with a wonderful .  . . Judy Evey who is our wonderful person, contracts person, to manage all of our contracts.  She made it really pretty easy for us once we got things going.  But, you know, just getting our little computer lab.  The committee that doled out computers didn't know what sociologists would have to do with a computer.  So, you know, why should they give us nine computers?  So, I mean, there were little things like that.  But no, I think, even today, it's not a routinized process.  There’s  still a lot of individual negotiations.  I think ARC and ISR have had different experiences  negotiating with the Foundation.  I think it would be really nice to see the campus develop a structure that dealt with all Institutes in a similar way and that developed some guidelines that were the same for everybody.  

DETWILER: Was ISR the first of these experimental Centers?  Or were, were you really cutting new ground?  Or were you following in someone's administrative managerial footsteps?  

BARNES: There was one that I was aware of that was started out of the Chancellor's Office.  That was RELUI, Real Estate Land Use Institute, which was already a going concern when ISR started.  And it was very effective because the business community locally depended heavily on Bob Fountain and the work of RELUI for all kinds of economic forecasting.  So, but they were not .  . . they were run out of the Chancellor's Office.  

DETWILER: They were sort of sponsored by the System-- 

BARNES:  Yes.  

BOILARD: -- as opposed to a campus-based Center.  

SHULOCK: I just remember that when I first started in the role of-- in administration with budgeting and everything, there were a lot of faculty who were interested in doing these things.  But there wasn't any kind of infrastructure or support for them to do it the way …so, I think yours was probably the biggest one that made it happen.  And so, I remember in doing the budget we would find that there was this Institute and this one, and this one, or Centers.  But it was just one faculty member who had gotten three units of assigned time and called it an Institute and…

DETWILER:  and letterhead

SHULOCK:  -- and letterhead, maybe.  And so, we actually had to develop some policies.  And the ones that were really just not able to accomplish anything, we said, well, we can't . . .  

DETWILER:  So, Nancy, are you confessing that you were one of her obstacles in the early years.  [Laughter].  

SHULOCK: No.  

DETWILER: No, seriously though, was the budget or campus administration just, because it was a lack  of experience didn't know how to deal with these things?  

SHULOCK: It wasn't on their plate.  It wasn't a priority.  It was just individual entrepreneurs who had, who understood that the role of faculty should include that.  But I think it wasn't until Don came in and the culture started to change.  And we started to really professionalize that part of the mission of the University.  

SHERRY: Yes. I think what would be echoed in all of our presentations is the power of Don's leadership.  And the power of leadership to move things forward and to invite people to be creative and entrepreneurial…

BARNES: Right

SHERRY:  That invitation created all of this.  And it's very profound.  And none of this would exist if that hadn't happened.  And I think all of us are wise enough to know that we've been in different bureaucratic situations where that wasn't the case.  And so the contrast is quite significant.  And I . . . we'll talk about it a little bit when we talk about the Center for Collaborative Policy.  But the open atmosphere that Don created in the administration to support these things-- which could have been just blocked, because, you know, how bureaucracies can block things even if the top of the leadership wants them to happen.  But Don got into the weeds and said-- hey, we're going to make this work.  

BARNES: Right

BOILARD: Don, sounds like you had a rebuttal to that.  

GERTH: No. I'd like to add something.  It's not about Don.  There’s a cultural factor here.  The culture of the California State University took a long time to change.  And a lot of that… you mentioned the Department of Finance.  A lot of that had to do with the interrelationship of the California State University to the Department of Finance.  When I joined the System a hundred years ago, everybody's job was line item.  And if you wanted to change something, you had to go back and negotiate, not with the Chancellor's Office, but with the Department of Finance.  And this gradually loosened up.  And, at the state level, with the creation of the Chancellor's Office,  in a sense we had two Departments of Finance.  The one downtown here and the one in Long Beach.  And they tended to reinforce each other.  And…

SHULOCK:  And, and as I mentioned on Monday, we also had, maybe, a third little shadow Department of Finance,  which was some of the administrative departments at SAC State that Don inherited when he came, who were really expert at saying, well, you can't do  that because it's not right here in my books.  

SHERRY: [nodding head “yes”] You can’t do it

GERTH: Oh, I used to run into .  . . I'd be told you can't do that.  

SHULOCK: And I remember very clearly, Don's message to all  of us was that's not our job.  Our job isn't to tell these entrepreneurial faculty or anybody else that you can't do that.  Your job is to figure out a way to facilitate what it is.  

GERTH: But there is a culture variable here at the campus level and at the system level.  And for that matter in all the state agencies downtown.  And an enormous change occurred in the mid-90s.  A particular member of our Board, who had a fair amount of money, and eventually gave a lot of it to the California State University System.  He established a series of prizes.  You're probably, those of you who were around now, were aware of this.  But he kept pressing and pressing and pressing.  Both state agencies on the one hand, the Chancellor's Office, and the campuses to loosen up and make things happen, and so on.  But, we're still going through that process and even from a distance.  I'm talking too much…Even from a distance I see that in other aspects of higher edu--not just the California State University, in other aspects of higher education.  

SHULOCK: You know another cultural state-wide thing, I think really is relevant here, is because, before I came to Sacramento State I was in, worked in the Legislative Analyst’s Office, and I had the budget for the University of California.  So, I would be in hearings, budget sub-committee--  and there was a very, very strong belief  that UC was the research institution.  CSU was the teaching institution.  And I remember one Senator on the budget sub-committee  for Higher Ed. believed that the CSU was prohibited from engaging in research.  That was not…not only was it not our priority  but we were not allowed to do it.  And it actually wasn't until he died that the CSU was able to really take some steps forward  in promoting its appropriate kind of faculty research and scholarship, which is what so many of these Institutes were about.  

BARNES: Well, of course, one of the resistances to the Institutes being developed was that the faculty did not want, the faculty committees did not want to see research become an expectation for faculty who were teaching 12 units.  And there's a difference between being expected to do the research as a part of your job and doing it on the side in a funded capacity where we would buy our way out of the teaching in order to do the research.  That was a distinction we had to make.  

BOILARD: So, Carole, earlier you talked about one of the kind of advantages that ISR had compared to other maybe private research or other research groups-- as a state agency you had this kind  of advantage about the no bid.  Are there other aspects of the work of ISR that were made possible simply by being at a University campus?  I mean, obviously, you made use of student, graduate students in your research and that was certainly a service to the student  and to the University.  But I'm trying to think in terms of the product you produced  and the clients you had, what was it about being at a University that shaped your product  or gave you an advantage?  

BARNES: Well, I think, because we were committed-- everything we do is public.  So, we do not do proprietary research.  And of course, we pride ourselves on being objective as we can.  So, we're not taking a position with the data.  We let the data speak for itself.  And I think a number of agencies valued that.  They wanted to be able to get the independent.  And the University, you know, has that role in the community, to not be an advocate for a particular point of view, but to analyze data in as neutral a way as possible, and to measure things as neutrally as possible.  So, a number of state agencies came to us because they wanted a neutral presentation of the data that they needed to make policy decisions.  

BOILARD: So to provide more credibility to that research that you wouldn't get from a hired  gun kind of organization.  

BARNES: Exactly.  Exactly. And there’s a tension there, always.  Because a lot of the data .  . . a lot of the studies we did had very strong political overtones.  And, the one example I gave with the IHSS.  It was very political.  And we had to really walk a very firm line in order to keep our independence.  And we've done a number of projects that had that kind.  

BOILARD: Were there projects that you turned down because you just felt it wasn't an appropriate kind of thing to undertake?  

BARNES: There was a project that turned us down when it was clear that we were going to measure it and let the chips fall where they may.  We got actually into the design phase and when it was really clear that we weren't going to tilt it one way or the other, we got fired.  [laughter].  So, it does happen.  

BOILARD:  And with, on the students, these are all graduate students or do you use some of the undergraduates graduates?  

BARNES: No we use graduates and undergraduates.  Mainly, for our telephone interviewing lab, we use undergraduate students.  And that's really good basic experience for students.  But the graduate students have a little more background in terms of statistics and data analysis.  And so, they, they're hired more as a-- to actually work on projects and do some of the analysis.  Do some of the data collection.  

BOILARD: Do the students get … I mean these are paid .  . .  

BARNES: They're all paid positions.  Right.  

BOILARD: And do they get any kind of academic credit?  Or is this more work study?  

BARNES: For the most part, either you got paid or you got credit.  

BOILARD: I see.  

BARNES: You didn't get both.  A lot of our students appreciated that, the job, at the Institute because a) it's on campus, b) it's professionally relevant work experience, and it paid better than a lot of the jobs that they could get going through school.  So, I think they valued having a job at the Institute.  We had students, not just from Sociology but from Government, from Anthropology, from a lot of different departments.  And I think they really learned a lot from the experiences.  We placed a lot of our students in very good jobs for the state.  A lot of them go to CalPERS because they value their research background and several other agencies which do a lot of research like DOF.  

DETWILER: You mentioned some of your students getting their master's thesis topics out of the projects that they had worked on.  So, maybe they were paid for some of that work but then they were also preparing their academic research.  And that seems to be one of the other crossovers that may be a common theme among these.  Can you talk a little more about that?  

BARNES: Yeah.  No, I think a lot of our students who have worked on these various projects have gotten their master's thesis.  And true, there is an awful lot of work that goes into a master's thesis that's not relevant to the particular project.  Doing the …

DETWILER: Oh right. Doing the literature survey..

BARNES: . . .literature review…exactly.  So, they're putting in a lot of unpaid time into their master's thesis as well.  But a..

DETWILER: Were those mostly out of Sociology?  Or your master's students who .  . . were some of them coming out of Econ or Government?  

BARNES: Yes. We've gotten students from a variety of disciplines.  

DETWILER: But mostly Sociology?  

BARNES:  I'm not even sure that's true now.  Back when I was the Director, and I retired from directing  in 2005, an awful lot of them were from Soch [sociology]  because I was recruiting my own students.  But I think we have consciously broadened out.  And there is quite a few students from Econ, Government, and other departments now.  

DETWILER: Because I think that's one of the other important themes, is this crossover between professionally relevant research and degree granting at a State University.  It's a nice crossover.  

BARNES: No, and Anthropology, the Archeological Research Institute hires a lot of their graduate students.  And actually, pays for the field trips that they do.  

DETWILER:  Cool.  

BARNES:  And that's… yes. And they have their own vehicles.  They provide the transportation.  So, they're providing a lot of service to the Department in terms of supporting its program.  

BOILARD: Playing off of what Peter was just saying, I would expect that these services that you provided also raises the profile and reputation of the University if .  . . I'm assuming that clients are aware that it’s Sacramento State graduate students and others who are conducting this research... 

BARNES: Oh sure

BOILARD:  And so it kind of back to this point about does the University do research, particularly applied research?  Here is a very tangible product that, yes, and look at the good work that our students were able to do.  So, it's not just good for the students and good for the client, but I think it's good for the reputation of the University, as well, -- 

BARNES: Right.  

BOILARD: -- which returns to a central theme of all of these discussions, which is the State University in the State Capital-- that it’s connecting to the government, it, it’s producing something that's of service to the entire region.  

GERTH: And it's connected to public policy.  Not just a governmental agency.  But public policy in a broader sense.  

BOILARD:  Which goes back to Carole's point that the fact that this is a public university, there’s part of the mission in the DNA that we're serving the public and there needs to be a benefit broadly from the way we expend our resources.  

BARNES: Well, in just physically being here, there have been a number of other research institutes at other CSU campuses.  But we had a huge advantage just being in the Capital.  Because it's very easy to get together, to meet downtown or for them to come out to our offices--  just the, the proximity accounts for a lot.  

SHERRY:  We felt that our Center could not have existed in any other city, or for that matter, state.  Because the volume and the amount of government that's here in Sacramento is probably .  . . the only other place is Washington, D.C.  And so,  because you have that concentration,  it can provide huge opportunities to be self-supporting and to make a huge impact in the state, in the state.  

BOILARD:  So, Carole, any other thoughts or points about the Institute for Social Research you wanted to make?  

BARNES: I think we covered quite a bit.  

BOILARD: Okay.  

BARNES:  If I think of other things, I'll stick in an oar to go along here.  

BOILARD: So, anybody else want to add anything to this particular portion of the show.  Alright, well, why don't we conclude this first segment.  And we'll take a brief break and return to talk about the Center for Collaborative Policy.  Thanks, everybody.