SCIENCE POLICY
Hollomon Heads New Science Policy Center J. Herbert Hollomon, formerly director of the Center for Policy Alternatives at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been appointed director of a new Center on Technology & Policy at Boston University. The program "absorbs," according to the university, its existing Program on Work & Technology that has been directed by social scientist Gerald Gordon. Gordon is codirector of the new center. Last January Hollomon, while rem a i n i n g a t e n u r e d professor of engineering, was removed as director of the MIT center, which he established in 1972. Sources say that the usual academic mixture of personal and policy differences between him and MIT's dean of engin e e r i n g , Gerald Wilson, led to Wilson's decision to relieve Hollomon. Hollomon was replaced by one of his protégés, chemist and environmental advocate Nicholas Ashford, who had served as associate director. At least three staff members of CPA under Hollomon will be transferring over to the new center. Hollomon says his center will continue the thrust he directed at MIT, but have the advantage of including in it the more social and human dimensions Gordon's program already entails, with its projects on worker disability and studies like the cognitive processes by which women learn science. With the coming of Hollomon, Boston University will have analytical capabilities on factory a u t o m a t i o n and the worker, entrepreneurship and innovation in Japan, if Japanese ideas can be adapted to the U.S. technical system, and the future of high technology in the economic development of states. Also being developed are new sets of data as indicators for the state of the scientific and technological health of the U.S. Hollomon's new center begins w i t h a professional staff of 15 people, which he hopes will dou-
Hollomon: ambitious program ble in five years. "We will have a difficult financial time, but less difficult than at MIT because we have some internal support from Boston University," he says. "The BU administration felt the need for something like this for some time. One of our jobs will be to pull the campus together in related fields like health technologies and education." He adds that he is attempting to get some private endowment funds for a more secure financial support in a field notorious for its dependence on so-called "soft" g o v e r n m e n t money. The new center will have no teaching function and Hollomon will report to the vice president for academic affairs. "But we hope to start a graduate program as soon as we get established. We are not an academic department but we hope to be eventually." Hollomon's new enterprise has the security of newness in a university that under its president, John Silber, is engaged in an ambitious program to strengthen its reputation in engineering and social sciences.
Establishment of Hollomon's new center comes at a time of growing national debate over the shape of some sort of "industrial policy" needed to attune the U.S.'s labor force and economic policies with fundamental changes in technology. But at the same time, the Reagan Administration hasn't exactly been encouraging the growth of science, technology, and public policy centers around the country. The result has been that funding for such "social science" enterprises has become scarce and academic jobs hard to find. Young faculty members in such interdisciplinary centers often find difficulty getting tenure since many have no home in any single department. Hollomon always has been an innovator in the field of technology policy. One of the products of his MIT program was a published symposium on the processes of technological innovation and its policy, now seen as a basic guidebook in the field. He always has held to the belief that the government has a leadership role in the high-technology era of stimulating specific civilian technologies w i t h h i g h economic potential, a philosophy the Reagan Administration opposes. He is a bit quiet on that position now, but says he is urging establishment of a permanent Council on Industrial Policy that would report directly to the President with the goal of integrating business, labor, government, and academia into a sense of unified purpose. Hollomon, 64, went to MIT in 1970 after serving as president of the University of Oklahoma. Before that he was assistant secretary of Commerce for science and technology between 1962 and 1967. His industrial experience was mainly at General Electric where he was general manager of its engineering laboratory. Wil Lepkowski, Washington September 26, 1983 C&EN
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