Trial of an Adversary Hearing: Public Policy in Weather Modification

Summary

Proposals have been made to use some form of ‘adversary’ hearing to aid administrators in decisions that have heavy technical components. The authors sponsored a mock adversary proceeding as part of their statistics course in the Public Policy Program of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The topic of weather modification was chosen for the ‘hearings’ because it involves both simple and complex statistics in important ways, and because it raises important public issues of the control of technology, environmental impact, appropriate regulatory machinery, legal problems and bureaucratic responsibility. Three student ‘proposal groups’ presented at an all‐day hearing proposed 5‐10 year national plans for research and development on weather modification within the United States. A fourth group of students, the ‘administrators’, prepared a final plan based on the three proposed plans. The organization of the hearings is described in detail in this article, and a report is made on the presentations given and the responses to them. Finally, a critique of the hearings is offered: their format, their potential usefulness in real decision making and some suggestions for their use in other mathematics or statistics classes.