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255  An Appraisal of Posts As
     An Interdisciplinary Effort

     The bibliography appended to this summary report is the most
tangible witness of the effectiveness and productivity of the POSTS
program.  It reflects a scope and quality that is in the best traditions
of the center, and I believe will be a source of gratification in
response to any questions that might be posed about the value of
the effort and of the investment that made it possible.
 
     When POSTS was first proposed as a Center effort - a process in
which I played some part together with many others - we may also
have had a further range of expectations that have been met to
varying degrees in some cases rather poorly.  Some of the ideological
conflicts between the conception of organized group research on
the one hand and the selection of individual scholars on the basis
of isolated merit on the other have been compromised but never fully
resolved.  The Center has never understood its role to be that of a 
site of active, continued, focussed research on a given topic nor
does it have the facilities to do this except to the most limited
extent with respect to the planning or to the digestion of data 
already accumulated.  Under the best of circumstances, the term of
residence, one year, might be barely sufficient to enable a long-term
interdisciplinary research project to get well started at an
institution that was fully committed to its long tenure.  The Center
has provided an excellent opportunity for people from diverse
backgrounds, geographic and academic situations, and academic
interests to get to know one another and to provide useful mutual
criticism.  This process of mutual acquaintance and indoctrination
already takes a significant part of the year.

     Perhaps the greatest difficulty in the administration of the
POSTS, from my own perspective, was the implication that such broad-
ranging interdisciplinary efforts could and should get their principal
initiative from the Center as the site of solicitation.  Yes,
over a 10 or 15 year period of time this might indeed be workable,
but we soon found that the process of negotiation with respect to a
particular time and subject which is already complicated and uncertain
with individual fellows becomes inordinately compounded when groups
must be assembled.

     I believe that we were fortunate to be able to produce a limited
number of such effective groups but indeed the main thrust and value
of the POSTS operation has come, as is true of most of the work of
the Center today, from the efforts of particular individuals.

     In my own academic work at Stanford I have been involved in
several major interdisciplinary projects and believe that they can
be proudly forwarded as excellent and successful examples of such
coordination: for example, the Human Biology education effort; the
DENDRAL/SUMEX computer Science and artificial intelligence research
project, as well as my participation in the NASA Viking exploration
of Mars.  It is therefore manifest that such larger scale activities
can be done, can be done profitably, and may be the only way to
approach certain kinds of tasks.  In translating that perception to
the organization of policy oriented research efforts like POSTS, I
would have to reflect at this time that the local management of the
Center should play a general, overall guiding role in the organization
of such programs.  They will succeed primarily in terms of the
initiative and effort that will come from the self-selected and self
-organized groups who have discovered a particular problem, and the
pertinence of their own mutual collaboration as a way of attacking
it.

     In accord with that model, the Center could still play an
important catalytic role in furthering such initiatives, could provide
the most productive environment imaginable for such groups to work
and to plan together (within the constraints of facilities for
operational investigative work), and in critical selections, in 
refinement and in imagining some part of all of the requisite funding 
for such efforts. However, such an undertaking would have to be given an
assured lifetime of a number of years before it could be expected to
mature as a stable and effective institution to complement the 
traditional orientation of the Center's work.

     Given these problems, I view it as an extraordinary accomplishment
that a significant part of the total output of successful POSTS'
efforts stemmed from collaborative interdisciplinary programs.
The fellows' reports and their experiences should offer an excellent
sample of the range of uses and successes of the program as seen
through the eyes of its principal constituency.
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