Tracking Alaska's public polices.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: Interview with Institute of Social and Economic Research director Bill McDiarmid - Interview

In the past 37 years, the Institute of Social and Economic Research has studied Alaska, recorded its changes and examined issues as they developed. It has built a reputation as an objective, reliable source of information on economic and social trends in the 49th state.

The Institute of Social and Economic Research has been tracking Alaska social and public policy issues since it was formed by the Alaska Legislature in 1961. Topics have ranged from state and local fiscal policies, to the impacts of the oil and natural resources industry, to how policy changes affect Alaska Natives.

Bill McDiarmid, ISER's director and a professor of educational policy, arrived at the institute in 1979. He was fresh from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he was working on a doctorate in educational policy.

He left ISER in 1984 to become co-director of the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning at Michigan State University. In 1997 he returned to Alaska to take the helm at the institute.

Recently, he spoke with Alaska Business Monthly about the institute's role and impact on Alaska.

ABM: What is ISER and how is it funded?

McDiarmid: ISER is a public policy research institute that has been incorporated into the University of Alaska Anchorage. We are organizationally affiliated with the College of Business and Public Policy.

We do various kinds of contract and grant-funded research. A lot of our money comes from federal funding, about three-quarters of it in grants and contracts we've won from federal agencies; 12 percent comes from state funds; 8 percent from private, nonprofit groups; and 5 percent from for-profit corporations.

For the feds, we have several large projects, one of which is a multi-year project looking at the sustainability of arctic communities. Another is a federal grant looking at a project working with Alaska Native communities on developing Native studies curriculum materials. Those are two of the larger federal projects; there are smaller ones.

At the state level, we do research for a variety of state agencies, the Department of Natural Resources, for example. A lot of our research is on resource and fiscal issues. One that gets a lot of attention is Scott Goldsmith's annual paper on the theory of fiscal policy. That usually gets a big splash in the newspapers. Scott was one of the people who identified what came to be called the fiscal gap. Certainly, his report gets attention down in Juneau.

ABM: What is your...