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Dean Misczynski, the longtime Director of the California Research Bureau, retired at the end of August. In this conversation with CSL Connection, Misczynski reflects on 15 years of researching both big issues, and obscure questions, for California’s government officials.

CSL Connection: The California Research Bureau published over 250 reports while you were at the helm. Can you describe one or two that you think led to changes that significantly helped the people of California?

Misczynski: My favorite is a series of reports that explored what happens to the kids when a single mother is arrested. The first report surveyed police departments around the state to see what their policies were in these situations. The startling, almost unanimous answer was that they had no policy. The research led to a bill allowing arrested single mothers a second phone call, to arrange for their kids. It took two years to get that passed and signed. Another bill directed the statewide police training commission to produce training videos to teach cops to look for signs of kids, to ask if they were at school, to make the arrest (if it could be done safely) out of sight of the kids, to explain to the kids what was going on, to avoid hauling the kids off in the back of the police cruiser, and lots of other things. CRB staff had starring roles in these videos, which are being used in police stations all around the state. They will probably be used all around the country. There is at least a chance that these changes may make a big difference to some kids, and may even save a life or two.

CSL Connection: We have to ask – what was the kookiest research request you’ve ever received?

Misczynski: Probably the request to examine the causes and impacts of the failure of the Velcro crop in the Central Valley in 1993. See http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html. 

CSL Connection: As Director, your name wasn’t on many of the reports. Do you prefer editing over writing? Or is there a writer lurking beneath the executive exterior?

Misczynski: I like writing. I hate editing. But it’s very hard to write when people come into your office or send you an email demanding an immediate reply every eight minutes. I gradually acceded to the idea that my job wasn’t to write but to do all the other stuff that needed doing.

So I am a frustrated writer. I am hopeful that I will find an arrangement to allow me to write, without many other demands, in my “retirement.”

CSL Connection: Oh – what kind of writing do you plan on doing?

Misczynski: I’m no novelist – that’s way too personal for an anti-introspective guy. My attempts at poetry were confined to my maximal testosterone years, long past. I’m afraid my writing interests are about public policy. I have in mind writing about the roots of our total incapacity to improve transportation in California, and about the connection between spatial demographic changes over the last 30 years and land use patterns here.

CSL Connection: Many young people and college students feel pressure to earn degrees that will help them get jobs. What do you think about that? Is learning how to be a researcher tied to a specific field of study or to the broader liberal arts curriculum?

Misczynski: Both. People with an intense technical background but no sense of historical or cultural context are dangerous as researchers. Liberal arts types who are intimidated by mathematics, regressions, and logical rigor are cut off from too many kinds of useful information.

One of the most imaginative researchers we ever had had an advanced degree in interplanetary atmospherics. That means Martian air. His approaches to automotive air pollution were wonderfully creative, and almost certainly effective, if we can ever convince enough people to take them seriously.