Priorities for 2001 and Beyond

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00042
• Date: 01 July 2001
• Author: Ferrel Heady
• Published date: 01 July 2001

390 Public Administration Review •July/August 2001, Vol. 61, No. 4

Donald C. Stone Lecture

In July 1995, ASPA’s Endowment Board established the Donald C. Stone Fund to honor the memory

of this public administration legend. Income from this fund is used to sponsor a lecture or sympo-

sium at ASPA’s national conference, which reflects Stone’s varied interests and contributions to the

field. This year marked the sixth Donald C. Stone Lecture. On March 13, Ferrel Heady was ASPA’s

Stone Lecturer and gave the following speech.

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 con-

siderable 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 recog-

nizing that they were probably technically right, I tried not

to let this interfere with the significance of that magic num-

ber 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 concen-

trate 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 con-

ference, 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 dur-

ing this century.” Of course, I was referring to the twenti-

eth 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 achieve-

ments. 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 cen-

tury beginning in the late 1940s. These were concerned

mostly with activities of the American Society for Public

Administration, the National Academy of Public Admin-

istration (NAPA), and the International Institute of Ad-

ministrative Sciences (IIAS). One of my cherished per-

sonal memories of Don came in 1980 at an international

gathering in Spain. I had heard for years of his enthusi-

asm 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 ar-

ranged 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

Ferrel Heady is a professor emeritus in the School of Public Administration at

the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where he was president from

1968 to 1975. He holds A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees from Washington

University in St. Louis. In 1994, he received the Dwight Waldo Award from

the American Society for Public Administration for career contributions to the

literature of public administration. He is the author of an autobiography,

One Time Around

(1999) and

Public Administration: A Comparative Per-

spective,

6th ed. (2001). He was president of ASPA (1969–70), and is a

member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Email:

fheady@unm.edu.