Some Unfinished Business in Public Administration

Some unfinished business in public administration First let me thank ASPA for inviting me to give the seventh Donald C. Stone Guest Lecture. It is a special honor to join such distinguished luminaries in public administration as Ferrell Heady, Harland Cleveland, Louis Gawthrop, Naomi Lynn, Herbert Simon, and Robert Behn in this series of tributes to one of the truly great figures in our profession. As with them, and many of you, I knew Don Stone well and had the privilege of working with him in a number of his incarnations. In each, he was always exhorting me to do more to live up to his expectations, although I was never quite able to do so. Some of Don Stone's admonitions are still with me today. Here are some examples. He counseled me--and sometimes scolded me--on such things as: 1. How to be an effective president of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), and to be sure that ASPA leaders better appreciated the contributions of the American Public Works Association to our profession; 2. How to become a useful executive council member of National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA), especially as it embarked upon the uncertain waters of accreditation--of which he was very suspicious; 3. Why it was important to be an ever vigilant fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), given his fears that it might become too elitist or just another Washington job shop; 4. Why the mission of the late American Consortium for International Public Administration (ACIPA) as the U.S. National Section of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) was essential--if only, he sometimes hinted, to support his beloved International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) in the machinations of IIAS in Belgium. (As an aside, it's interesting to note that today, although ACIPA has been laid to rest, IASIA is still going strong under the leadership of ASPA member Allen Rosenbaum.) 5. That the most important thing I should know about holding successful high-level meetings was what he called "the administration of chairs"--how you stand depends on where you sit, according to Miles's Law. And during Don's final years as titular head of the Coalition to Improve Management in State and Local Government, his office was down the hall from mine on the Indianapolis Campus of Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and he was ever beseeching me to put my oar in the water on behalf of the coalition in order to keep it at Indiana University. Today, the coalition, one of Don's fondest enterprises, is at the University of Texas at Arlington, under the loving care of one of Don's deputies, Jim Kunde. The big reason Don felt such ownership in each of these pillars of our professional community--ASPA, NASPAA, NAPA, APWA, ACIPA, IASIA, and on down the line--was that he helped create all of them, and served in top leadership positions of every one of them, usually as chair, president, or executive director. It would not be unfair to say that he expressed his impatience and disappointment with most of us in our stewardship of his progeny. He always felt there were so much unfinished business in these offspring--and so little time to get it done. Today, in tribute to Don Stone, I want to reflect on some of this unfinished business. Parenthetically, I should note that most of my predecessors as Stone lecturers have been thoroughbred academics, while my perspective is more that of what Dwight Waldo referred to as a "pracademic," that is, one who is congenitally a practitioner, but sometimes dabbles in academia between gigs. Today, I speak primarily as a practitioner of the art and science of public administration. My colleague, former ASPA president and NAPA Fellow, George Frederickson, in his column on "Public Administration and Gardening" in the February issue of ASPA's PA Times, provided a useful metaphor for our purposes today. …