OR/MS Today - June 1999

June 1999

Private Life vs. Public Service

President's Award recipient Chaiken takes a "crazy leap into the arena of governmental appointments"

Karla Hoffman (left) presents Jan Chaiken with the President's Award.

When Jan Chaiken accepted an appointment by President Clinton in 1994 to join the administration team as the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, his friends and colleagues thought he was nuts. And that was before the Monica mess hit the press.

After all, most presidential appointees experience a drop in income, their lives are opened up to a thorough and potentially embarrassing investigation, and severe restrictions are placed on what they can do or say, particularly in regards to former colleagues and employers. The law also restricts what their family members can do, the investments they can make and the gifts they can accept. Last but not least, the appointment means they are technically on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"So much for a private life," Chaiken quipped before an audience of fellow operations researchers and management scientists at the recent INFORMS meeting in Cincinnati. "What I am about to tell you may sound stupid, but it is official."

Chaiken was in Cincinnati to accept the 1998 INFORMS President's Award in recognition of his effective and important contributions to the public interest. INFORMS Past President Karla Hoffman made the presentation. The ceremony was originally scheduled for the fall meeting, but his responsibilities in Washington, D.C., prevented Chaiken from making it to Seattle.

So why would someone like Jan Chaiken, someone who has enjoyed considerable success throughout his professional career, someone who holds a Ph.D. from MIT, accept a presidential appointment?

"We don't take these jobs for ourselves," he told his Cincinnati audience. "We take them for our professions. The government needs to have people at the highest levels who can understand what you are saying to them. How many of you have presented the results of a model or an analysis to some government official and halfway through the presentation you realize that the person you're talking to doesn't have a clue as to what operations research and management science is about?"

Chaiken left his audience with the following message: "If you are to impact policy, some of your colleagues will have to make that crazy leap into the arena of governmental appointments."

In reading the award citation, Hoffman noted that Chaiken has been serving the public interest for more than 25 years.

The citation read in part: "(Chaiken) was an early participant in the pioneering work of the New York City-RAND Institute in the late 1960s, where he worked on fire department deployment problems and made important contributions to the allocation of police patrol vehicles. He moved to RAND in Santa Monica in 1972 and became a major participant in the work of RAND in criminal justice. He pursued research on modeling the criminal justice system, studies of the criminal investigation process, and analysis of criminal careers.

"He left RAND for Abt Associates in Cambridge, Mass., in 1984, and was an important participant in many aspects of their work, including the development of the FBI's incident-based crime reporting system, which is now being implemented by an increasing number of police departments.

"In 1994, he was named by President Clinton to be the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In that position, he has been instrumental in bringing modem Web-based technology to making BJS data widely and readily available for the public and for the research community. He has also led the efforts to implement effective and rapid interchange of criminal history information and to develop effective computerized tracking of offenders through the federal criminal justice system."

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