Reputedly some Las Vegas casinos set their roulette wheels so that overall ‘the house’ never loses although many play and some players win. In effect, the house sets the odds which remain unknown to the players. So it is with private pension plans in the United States, with the important difference that employees cannot decide whether to play or not; the decision is made for them by their employer or through collective bargaining.

In the public service a research strategy is specifically designed to yield information of value to policy-making, that is to management. This is the only ground on which the expenditure of public funds can be justified. The kind of research which I am discussing therefore is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; it is research that is an integral and inseparable part of management. Because research has not often, in the past, been properly related to and integrated with management, it has tended to be regarded as an expendable fringe activity; to be restrained at all times and sacrificed in time of stringency (usually when it is most necessary). This is especially true of local government and the researchers (particularly the research directors) are often as much to blame as their political masters.

In recent years American universities have come under increasing attack from many students and a small proportion of faculty for being a spawning ground of ‘institutional racism’, a charge that implies various malefactions. The language of this accusation is often so inflammatory that different meanings of the term are fused and consequently policies to deal with the problems at issue are confused. Having spent a good portion of the last two years listening to the accusations, proclamations, and demands made in the name of institutional racism, we should now like to examine what some of the basic issues seem to be about and their policy implications for the university.

In the United Kingdom, special legislative provision for medical research was first made by the National Insurance Act 1911. On various earlier occasions public funds for the purpose had been provided on a small scale to successive central health departments in England and Wales, sporadically from 1833 and regularly from 1870; and notably to the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis appointed in 1901, which decided to ascertain facts by investigation rather than listen to opinions from witnesses.