Futures of the Past: Collected Papers in Celebration of Its More Than Eighty Years: University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning, and Development

By Cristy Jensen, Chester Newland, Elmer Kim Nelson and Ross Clayton

The key roles that the University of Southern Californias professional schools have played in promoting public affairs are brought into sharp focus in this detailed history, edited by a group of academic experts intimately involved in the development of the school.

Through its School of Policy, Planning, and Development, USC has taken a distinctive approach in pushing forward community enterprise on a local and global basis. The school was forged through a merger of its School of Public Administration and School of Urban Planning and Development, both of which were pioneers in their fields.

This compilation was created as part of the 2009 celebration of SPPDs eighty years of widely shared academic inquiry, facilitation of learning, and advancement of civic and professional public practice. New generations seeking to sustain the schools tradition of leadership now have a detailed history that tells how amazing developments in technologies and systems enabled the university to successfully promote its ideals.

USC Emeritus Dean of Gerontology, James Birren, sums it up well when he states, You cant know where you are going until you know where you have been. Recall the universitys history of core values, vital practices, and great contributions in Futures of the Past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450257220

Cristy Jensen

Ross Clayton is an emeritus professor and former dean of the School of Public Administration at USC. Elmer Kim Nelson was also dean of the School of Public Administration at USC. He has a degree in law and a doctoral degree in public administration. Chester Newland is a long-term USC faculty member as well as a National Academy Fellow. Cristy Jensen earned a doctorate in public administration and is a retired professor of the California State University in Sacramento.

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FUTURES

of the

PAST

Collected Papers in Celebration of Its More Than Eighty Years:

University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development

Editors

Ross Clayton

Elmer Kim Nelson

Chester Newland

Cristy Jensen

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Futures of the Past

Collected Papers in Celebration of Its More Than Eighty Years: University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development

Copyright © 2010 Ross Clayton

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-5721-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-5723-7 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-5722-0 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 09/28/2010

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all former, present and future students, faculty, and staff of the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development, and its predecessors: the School of Public Administration, and the School of Urban Planning and Development.

EPIGRAPH

"You can’t know where you are going, if you

don’t know where you’ve been."

By James Birren, Emeritus Dean

School of Gerontology, U.S.C.

Foreword

by Kevin Starr

Biography of Kevin Starr

[University Professor Kevin Starr, California State Librarian Emeritus, holds a joint appointment in history and policy, planning and development. He received an MA and PhD from Harvard and MLS from UC Berkeley. His many articles and books, including his Americans and the California Dream series, have won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the Society of American Historians, the Presidential Medallion from USC, the Centennial Medal from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and the Humanities Medal from the National Endowment of the Humanities.]

Throughout history across a variety of cultures, certain callings have remained necessary and socially defined.

Tradition has assigned continuing professional status to law, medicine, architecture, engineering, military affairs, and the clergy. An expanded list might include politics, diplomacy, and scholarship. These designations suggest that human societies have perennially required these functions to be exercised and have established various pathways to their entrance.

There is another calling as well, equally important as these but more difficult to define because it is connected to and dependent upon these other professions, and appears in different guises in different cultures, and is so integrated into any successful society that it tends to be taken for granted. This is the profession of public administration, known also as civil service or public service, known also as planning and development or combinations thereof.

In ancient times, recruits to this profession in Egypt and the Middle East came from the priesthood and in China they came from the scholarly classes, although priests and scholars were intermixed in most cultures. As servants of the state, they were dependent upon the prince, the realm, the polity, and the law, and, once again, upon combinations thereof in differing cultures. In Roman times, they derived their authority from the Senate and the Roman people. In medieval Europe, they were trained and educated by the Church and tended, in the main, to remain members of the clergy. During the European Enlightenment, they were polymathic savants and scientists, recruited into the service of the state as administrators while remaining equally interested in the academic dimensions of their assignments.

They were, then, in one way or another, a learned class, linked by religion, philosophy, and law to their profession. For the past 2500 years or so – whether in the China of Confucius or the Athens of the Academy – they were prepared for their calling through a course of study and examination. In medieval Europe, their training and education helped precipitate and accelerate the rise of a new institution, the university. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, as the British Empire gained extent and momentum, they were recruited from the great English universities and were rigidly examined in arts and humanities prior to their appointment.

In the first decades of the American Republic, public administrators came in two classes: political appointees at the local level, haphazardly prepared, if at all; and in upper national federal circles from prominent families with a tradition of public service behind them. Yet that kind of recruitment, local politics or hereditary right to office, could not create the public servants necessary for a complex and rapidly developing continental nation. In the 1880s, through various federal, state, and local laws and statutes, examinations began to be required for appointment. This, in turn, reemphasized formal education at secondary and post-secondary levels; and as society grew more complex, so too did the requirements for entrance to public service. Meanwhile, a new institution was developing, starting in the 1880s and emerging into recognizable coherence by the 1920s – the American research university, which included a growing number of professional schools.

It was at this time, the 1920s that the University of Southern California first embarked upon the training of public administrators and planners, or civil servants, as the British call them. In entering this field, USC was a national pioneer. From an historical perspective, this should not come as too great a surprise. Ever since its founding in 1880, USC was the only comprehensive university in Southern California until the late 1920s. As such, USC had by the late 1920s long since been in the business of educating and training the doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, teachers, social workers, and clergy for a rapidly developing region. To say rapidly developing region is to put it mildly, for American history has few precedents for such an overnight development of such a complex society in such a short time, with all that that suggests regarding the need for the education of a professional infrastructure, to include public administrators and planners and, as an extension of planning theory, real estate studies, the economics and finance of development, and the theory and design of administrative systems.

For more than eight decades, the public administration, planning, and real estate programs of USC have been sending forth the university-trained public administrators, planners, and, eventually, developers that society–locally, regionally, nationally, and globally–required for its efficient operation and continuing growth. This book tells that story from a number of perspectives, including personal testimony. In doing this, it functions as academic history, intellectual history, social, political, and economic history, as well as autobiography and memoir. Like Southern California itself, moreover, and like the University of Southern California, this history progresses from the local to the regional to the national and to the global, and to the total fusion of all these dimensions characteristic of our digital age. As a research university, USC has advanced our understanding of public administration, planning, and development. As an educational institution, it has sent into society highly prepared public administrators, planners, and developers of every sort.

As has always been the case in the long history of public administration, knowledge and the knower, expertise and the expert, the common good and the public servant cannot be separated from each other. Nor can any of these fields be separated from the highest imperatives of society, however that society is configured by its environment, economy, history, and culture. Globally or locally, in various polities – provided that such polities are based on respect for human life and fairness – societies have across the centuries been asking their public administrators to create solutions for perennial concerns. How do we establish, consonant with our varying traditions, a theory and practice of public administration that meets the basic needs of human beings for safety and survival, for nurture, fairness, education, and respect among the generations, the protection of the weak and disabled, while at the same time safeguards the environment from which human life springs and upon which it depends, and serves those immemorial aspirations that have defined successful societies across time? Since USC first began to address these questions and prepare public servants to meet them, much has been accomplished. Generations of scholar-teachers and the graduates they helped launch into public service have helped create sustainable societies across the planet. Still, the future beckons, and the past continues to have its story to tell.

Preface and Acknowledgments

In January of 2009, the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development (SPPD) celebrated its eightieth anniversary as a School, and its tenth year since the merger of the Schools of Public Administration (SPA), and the School of Urban Planning and Development (SUPD) into the SPPD. Some editors of this volume were in attendance at the Celebration and came away convinced of the need for capturing the history behind the present school before any more of its aging emeriti faculty were no longer among us!

The editors include two former Deans of the School of Public Administration, a soon to be retired distinguished SPPD Professor, and a graduate of SPA, a former Assistant Director of the Sacramento Center who recently retired from the faculty of California State University at Sacramento.

The epigraph in this book, quoting Emeritus Dean James Birren of the School of Gerontology, accurately reflects our sense that there is substantial value in understanding where you have been, as you strive to know, where you are going as you create the School’s promising future.

Our purposes in this book include capturing factual materials that describe major events in the School’s history; that is, significant milestones along the routes that have lead to today’s School, the SPPD. Additionally, we have tried to tell many stories that reflect the School’s values, ever changing context, challenges and achievements. We have worked to capture the School’s dynamic culture by focusing upon the biographies of departed colleagues and the insights of former Deans and Directors.

A previously written history of the School of Urban and Regional Planning (which became SUPD) is included in this volume. Professor William Baer authored that history, and Professor Tridib Banerjee has helped update and embellish its contents for this book. A biography of one of SURP’s distinguished departed colleagues, John Dyckman is included.

The book ranges beyond the eighty year period we recently celebrated, noting both the first planning course taught in 1922, and Dean Jack Knott’s look at the current State of the School as of 2010.

Our intended audience for this book includes the School’s current faculty, staff and students, and its more than 16,000 alumni. Our hope is that it will be of interest and utility to the School’s Board of Councilors, its Sacramento Advisory Board, the numerous Academic Program Advisory Boards, and its Guardians and Athenians.

We believe that many alumni and former faculty of the predecessor Schools’ will find this book helpful in gaining a clearer understanding of the School of Policy, Planning and Development. We include here at the outset of the book a brief statement of how SPPD portrays itself to potential students; it is taken from a brochure for 2009-2010.

The school’s mission is to improve the quality of life of people and their communities, here and abroad. Throughout its academic programs, SPPD strives to address some of society’s most pressing issues challenging our students, faculty and alumni to develop innovative solutions in areas such as: sustainability and the environment, health care reform, housing, immigration, infrastructure, urban development and land use, transportation, social planning and policy, governance, and information technology just to name a few. SPPD students go on to redesign city, county, state and federal governance structures; manage the delivery of our health services; oversee the operational aspects of our airports, railroad systems, and harbors; build healthy, sustainable communities; and shape effective policy for the public good.

The narratives that make up this book address a great diversity of topics, personalities and issues across an eighty year span of time. Taken together, we believe they provide a deep contextual understanding of the origins and history of the present School of Policy, Planning, and Development. The writers speak in their own voices and from the author’s own individual points of view. As editors, we agreed upon a policy of inclusiveness in preserving their exact accounts, especially with respect to the early decades of life within the School. We believe that thoughtful readers of the early sections of the book will acquire insights into University and faculty norms and values in past years and better understand how they have changed and are changing as the future unfolds.

A few of the chapters in the book may prove of interest to a broader audience; however, it has not been our intent to produce a book for scholars or for a commercial market. This book has been written with the hope of providing a service to a School we hold dear.

We wish to acknowledge a number of people who have made major contributions to this book:

Frank Sherwood has written richly textured biographies for ten departed colleagues, and shared his knowledge and insights into the early history of the School of Public Administration and the origins of the Master of Planning degree. Frank is our oldest living faculty member and continues to be a remarkably productive scholar; he introduced us to the publisher of this book and provided much valued advice and assistance throughout our endeavor.

Carolyn Clayton Borden has provided vital assistance in manuscript preparation; she has formatted the book, assisted in its editing, and guided us in providing the manuscript and pictures to the publisher electronically in accordance with their guidelines. Carolyn managed to stream the multiple versions of each of our many papers into a single coherent manuscript, much to our delight and amazement! Carolyn holds the MPA degree from USC and works as a management consultant for Business Advantage Consulting, Inc.

Jack Knott, current Dean of the School of Policy, Planning and Development has supported this project both by writing a paper for the book and by providing some of the financial support required for its publication.

Claude Zachary, an archivist at USC, provided a lot of assistance, particularly to Gilbert Siegel as he researched the major international involvements of the faculty in the post war era in Turkey, Iran, Brazil and Pakistan. Gil also helped with early milestones in the School’s development.

Our thanks go out to colleagues from around the country who contributed papers to this volume. All of them are former students or employees of the School. We particularly single out John Kirlin who took time out from his responsibilities as Executive Director for the Delta Vision project and the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative to write two noteworthy papers. Also, Harry Marlow, who directed the civic center in the forties and fifties and was part of the School’s project in Iran, was very helpful in sharing his files and memories.

School and University staff members have been very supportive of our efforts to put this book together. These individuals include Regina Nordahl, June Muranaka, Connie Rodgers, Janis Peterson, Benedict Dimapindan, John Crowe, Daniel George, and Jennifer Eccles.

Kevin Starr’s willingness to write the foreword pleased us immensely. Kevin is now a University Professor, but he first came to USC as a member of the faculty of the School of Urban and Regional Planning. Kevin has taught a number of courses for the School at the State Capital Center in Sacramento and has been a supportive colleague over the years. His foreword will ensure this book is positively launched into its mission of preserving the School’s rich history.

We are grateful to all of the people at iUniverse who have helped us with the publication process. In chronological sequence of our exposure to them: Amy He, Michelle Polleti, Rachel Moore, Cherry Noel, Eric Hanselmann, George Nedeff, Rosalie White, Steven Matlock, and Laura Kagemann.

Ross Clayton wants to express his gratitude to his wife, Luanne, for being his partner through all of his many years at USC, and particularly for her patience and support for this endeavor.

Table of Contents

Chronology—Historical Milestones

Chapter 1: Introduction to Book by Kim Nelson

Chapter 2: Biography of Emery Olson by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 3: Challenge and Response: The History of the School of Public Administration by Emery Evans Olson (February 25, 1955)

Chapter 4: Biography of John Pfiffner by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 5: The Metamorphosis of a Mind by John Pfiffner

Chapter 6: Biography of Henry Reining, Jr. by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 7: The School of Public Administration Today by Henry Reining, Jr. (February 1955)

Chapter 8: Biography of Neely Gardner by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 9: Biography of Alberto Guereirro Ramos by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 10: Memories of a Unique Scholar: Alberto Guerreiro Ramos by Wesley E. Bjur

Chapter 11: Biography of John Gerletti by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 12: Biography of Bruce Storm by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 13: Biography of Bruce Storm by Jong S. Jun

Chapter 14: Biography of Robert Berkov by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 15: Biography of David Shirley by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 16: Biography of Richard Gable by Frank Sherwood

Chapter 17: Biography of Arthur Naparstek by Chet Haskell

Chapter 18: Frank Sherwood, 1967–1968

Chapter 19: David Mars, Director 1968–1971

Chapter 20: Kim Nelson, Director and Dean 1971–1975

Chapter 21: John Kirlin, Acting and Interim Dean 1974–1976

Chapter 22: The Leadership of Robert P. Biller, Dean 1976–1982

Chapter 23: Ross Clayton, Dean 1982–1991

Chapter 24: Jane Pisano, Dean 1991–1998

Chapter 25: The Emergence and Evolution of the Planning School by Tridib Banerjee and William Baer

Chapter 26: Tribute to John William Dyckman by Wook Chang*

Chapter 27: Civic Center Campus by Carl Bellone

Chapter 28: USC’s Capital Center in Sacramento by Cristy Jensen

Chapter 29: Reflections On The Three Decades Of the Washington Public Affairs Center by Jim Wolf

Chapter 30: The School of Public Administration’s Involvement in International Education and Institution Building programs by Gilbert Siegel

Chapter 31: SPPD as a School in Transition: 2000-2005 Dan Mazmanian

Chapter 32: A School for the 21st Century by Jack H. Knott

Chapter 33: The Politics of Endowment at USC by Ross Clayton

Chapter 34: Changes, Challenges, Choices: The 1960s and 1970s in U.S. Public Administration by John Kirlin

Chapter 35: Summary and Conclusion by Ross Clayton

Postscript: USC in Contexts of Community Enterprise: Practice and Theory by Chester A. Newland

Chronology—Historical Milestones

missing image file

Illustration 2. 1929 Schedule of Classes

Chapter 1

Introduction to Book

by Kim Nelson

Elmer Kim Nelson is a USC emeritus professor, having served the University as Director of its Youth Study Center, and as Director and Dean of the School of Public Administration and as Dean of the Center for Public Affairs. Previously he was an Instructor in Psychology at the University of Wyoming, and Professor of Criminology at the University of British Columbia where he founded Canada’s first university program in criminology. He took leaves from his academic posts for assignments in the administrations of California governors Pat and Jerry Brown, served as an associate director of Lyndon Johnson’s Presidential Crime Commission, and was the first warden of the Haney Correctional Institution in British Columbia. He holds graduate degrees in Law and Psychology from the University of Wyoming and a doctorate in Public Administration from USC. He was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration in 1974. He is the recipient of the University of Wyoming’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and was recognized as an Exemplary Alumnus of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1993.

Dean Emery Evans Olson loved to speak of the futures of the past and we have included his words in the title of this book. I first heard him use the term when I was a USC doctoral student in public administration and he was speaking at the 25th anniversary of the school he had founded. He used it again many decades later and not long before his death when, frail and shaky, he brought to life the origins of the school for young students in a seminar I was teaching.

On both occasions, he held up a picture of an airplane in which, accompanied by notable public administrators of his day, he had hop-scotched from city to city in California to dramatize the launching at the University of Southern California (USC) of a new educational enterprise, one truly different from any then in existence on the historic campus, or for that matter anywhere else in the nation. How better to publicize a bold new venture than through association with the most glamorous happening of its time, travel by air.

Those of us who worked together in assembling and editing the papers which make up this book grew fond of Olson’s idea that the moving present always has both a remembered past and an anticipated future. That perspective encouraged a panoramic view as different time periods fell into place and both their continuities and disjunctions appeared in high relief. Initially, our focus is on the School of Public Administration (SPA); later we focus upon the School of Urban Planning and Development (SUPD) and then the early years of the School of Policy, Planning and Development (SPPD). My distinguished co-editors, Ross Clayton and Chester Newland, continue to use a version of Olson’s lens in the final, summing-up section of the book, naming this section Thinking in Time.

Memories

On a miserably smoggy day in 1952 I found myself struggling through endless red lights on a street leading from Chino to Los Angeles, squinting at a map on the seat beside me, trying to locate USC. A freeway was under construction; further congesting traffic at many intersections, but its opening was just something to dream about. A friend where I worked at the nearby state prison had told me about a doctoral program at USC in a field called Public Administration, and it had caught my interest.

I had newly arrived in Southern California, transferring from San Quentin where I worked as a psychologist, to a new open prison in Chino that was experimenting with bold and innovative ideas under the leadership of its superintendent, Kenyon Scudder. His book, Prisoners are People, was attracting international attention and appeared to offer the hope of new beginnings in a long and historically bleak field.

I had degrees in Law and Psychology and was looking for a doctoral program that would pull those disciplines together and focus them on tasks of real significance. Searching for something truly worth doing, I was skeptical of traditional academic programs. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife I adored and the miracle of a five-year-old son. I had experienced the great depression as a kid and made it back in one piece from four years of World War II army service. I had benefited from the healing uplift of the G.I. Bill and observed the revival of hope engendered by the Marshall Plan in war-devastated Europe. It was a heady time, following the darkness and danger of the war years; a time when all things seemed possible.

Edging into a parking space on Figueroa Street, I inquired my way to Bovard Hall, marveling at the lovely old campus which seemed like an oasis in the vast urban sprawl, and then climbed many stairs to the inauspicious location of the School of Public Administration. It didn’t seem like much compared to the elegant offices on the lower floor which housed the University president and vice-presidents. In fact, as if relishing its very plainness, the School setting conveyed to me an air of purposefulness, of serious work underway, of being rather than seeming.

Told to wait for a professor, I could see that faculty worked in cubicles, two desks in each one. It was very close quarters. There was a secretary-receptionist, an array of pigeon-holed mail boxes and at the back three small, glassed-in offices. Within the middle one I could hear a resonant voice rising and falling, which I would recognize much later as belonging to Henry Reining, Jr. who within a year would become but the second dean of the twenty-three year old School. The offices on either side belonged to founding Dean Emery Olson and the School’s even then widely noted scholar John M. Pfiffner. I did not meet any of them on that day in 1952, but I would come to know each one as a mentor, colleague and ultimately a valued friend in the decades that followed.

Soon after that initial visit I met with a young professor named Bruce Storm, to go over the requirements for the doctoral degree. It didn’t feel like a professor-student conversation. Storm combined obvious intellectual heft with a sly kind of humor and was nimble in areas I knew little about: How can we understand and explain the way life is carried on in large, complex organizations? What drives behavior, causes conflict, encourages or blocks change? I thought of the intricate society of inmates and staff where I worked at Chino, and realized these were the very questions on my mind, not as abstract concepts but as urgent, compelling concerns that needed to be addressed if our efforts were to succeed.

Most enticing of all, Storm seemed genuinely curious about the work world in which I was deeply immersed. Later I would come to see that his interest in the culture of an experimental prison reflected a value central to the character of the School of Public Administration and the faculty-student community that grew up around it. An attitude of reciprocity between teaching and doing, the expectation that each must help the other if both were to advance, seemed to animate the young, still formative USC School of Public Administration from my first encounter with it.

Walking toward my car on that first day at the USC campus, I felt amazement that this activity was happening in the cloistered heart of an old, prestigious university. A private university wrestling seriously with public problems! But it was also happening in the vortex of a huge mosaic of adjoining jurisdictions, spilling over with urgent needs demanding response from all levels of government: smog and crime; public works and fire-fighting; politics and administration. Some time would pass before I would begin a doctoral program at USC, but looking back I can see that the decision to do so was made on my first visit to the campus. And forever after, whenever I entered the quiet coolness of Bovard Hall, I never failed to think back to that day.

As I write these lines in 2010, 58 years have passed since my first visit to the USC campus and my first contact with the School of Public Administration. The School, though operating under different names and in different campus locations, has celebrated its 80th anniversary. I have experienced the roles of student, professor, dean, and now occupy that odd limbo known as emeritus status, within which one tends to reminisce with colleagues of similar vintage about the days that used to be.

Somewhat awed by the magnitude of an 80-year history, joined in the camaraderie of shared memories, a few of us started to discuss ways of preserving the history of an academic enterprise to which we all felt a deep attachment. Sharing stories of past times with colleagues Ross Clayton, Chester Newland, and John Kirlin, there was much to remember with laughter but also an underlying awareness of voices no longer heard. This mood was reinforced by the passing from life of Bruce Storm who had arrived at USC in 1949, just three years before I walked into his office as a prospective student, and who never found a persuasive reason to leave.

Other names you will encounter in the writings that follow, whose personal lives became intertwined with the life of the School, have long since left the scene. The trio already mentioned became nationally known figures in an emerging field in which they were leaders and pioneers: Emery E. Olson, the wise and prescient founding dean of the School of Public Administration; Henry Reining, Jr., who followed him in that role and became deservedly prominent as the School arguably became not only the first but the premier institution of its kind in the nation; John M. Pfiffner, who wrote book after book in the developing field and helped to make USC a center of conceptual discovery and refinement in the emerging literature on organization and management.

Informal conversations among those initially interested in preserving memories of the School led to the conclusion that it would be impractical to attempt a comprehensive history of the 80-year-old enterprise. One reason was that all involved had been participant observers rather than objective outsiders with the more detached perspective of the historian. Our special strength seemed to lie in the insights afforded by intimate involvement in the events described. Putting aside the idea of a conventional history, we began to see merit in creating a collection of papers addressing notable persons, events, relationships and locations of activity in the life of the school.

Major collateral relationships and programs were quickly apparent, beginning with urban and regional planning which had been conjoined with public administration at USC from the beginning, the school’s early commitment to city managers as well as police and fire administrators, and the varied international ventures that carried USC to distant countries and brought many hundreds of students to the Los Angeles campus from differing political and administrative backgrounds, their presence immeasurably enriching the classrooms and the informal life of the school and the university.

Outreach of teaching and research loomed large in the history of the School, carrying its activities to sites distant from the main campus: The Civic Center Campus in vibrant downtown Los Angeles which was integral to the personality of the school from its earliest days, to be followed in later years by the Washington and Sacramento Public Affairs Centers and other off-campus teaching programs of smaller scale.

My involvement in school activities, while often intense and demanding was also intermittent and at times peripheral. When Professor Alberto Guerreiro Ramos coined the term, parenthetical man, it made me think of my relationship to the School of Public Administration, for initially I was beneath looking up to those who would be judging my performance as a doctoral student, then looking in from the side during the six years when I headed the USC Youth Studies Center while also performing a teaching and faculty role in the school. During leaves in which I worked in administrative positions in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., I had a sense of looking back at my academic home from the world of action, and reflecting on how useful the literature and the classroom truly were when faced with the uncompromising trials of implementation.

Engaging memories of long-ago days is a task not to be undertaken lightly, for it can bring a sense of sadness as well as delight. It brings to mind persons who, quite miraculously it seemed, entered and shaped one’s life but now are irretrievably gone. The founding figures of the USC School of Public Administration, Emery Olson, Henry Reining and John Pfiffner evoke such feelings for me, and I will include a few memories of them in this book.

An 80–Year History: Themes and Challenges

Those of us who initiated and became editors of this book spoke from the beginning about the desirability of identifying themes that ran through the life of our USC schools, threads that connected successive eras with those that had preceded them, and values that shaped the personalities of the School of Public Administration, the School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) and later the School of Urban Planning and Development and the School of Policy Planning, and Development. These threads have endured across the decades of their existence. But as papers arrived from colleagues who had served in and headed the School of Public Administration during different periods, we could not fail to note as well the impact of persistent challenges, obstacles not only to the School’s ability to thrive but to its very survival.

Hoping the reader will indulge an admittedly fanciful reference, I can acknowledge being reminded of the classical collection of lyrical poetry published by William Blake in 1794 which he called, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The former captures the hope and optimism of the young, the latter the sobering demands of life beyond youth with change a constant companion. The School Public Administration seemed very youthful when I first encountered it in 1952, embracing opportunities with the eagerness that innocence allows. In reading the accounts of those who led the School in later years, one senses the recurring struggles and dilemmas that experience brings, both to individuals and organizations.

The attributes that shaped the School from the outset and continued on to form its distinctive character emerge clearly in the essays that make up this book. The openness to engagement with students and the reciprocity of teaching and learning are illustrated repeatedly. Students were seen as having much to teach, and teachers much to learn. The intensive class format which became dominant in graduate courses beginning in the 1960’s through the advocacy of Professor Neely Gardner reflected these values and at their best transformed classrooms into learning communities. A related focus on integrating theory with action ran through the life of the School. Theories were to be questioned and tested in the crucible of action, not kept sacrosanct in books and lectures. And the world of action was to be examined, challenged and illuminated as seen through varying theoretical lenses.

An attitude of eclecticism in drawing from an almost infinite range of fields and disciplines was a part of the School from its start, and became embedded in course curricula, thesis research designs and outreach programs for training administrators. The pioneering Delinquency Control Institute furnishes an excellent early example. There was borrowing and sharing with kindred developments in Business Administration, sought out connections with Medicine and Pharmacy, high interest in Anthropology as well as Sociology and Psychology. Whatever conceptual tools aided an understanding of organizations and their participants were sought and used by faculty and students.

The endemic challenges that confronted the School as the decades went by also come into high relief in the papers submitted by contributors to this book, particularly the narratives of those who served as deans and directors. Much of the action that dominated their days centered on efforts to generate essential funding, to reach budget targets insistently demanded by the university administration while continuing to preserve and add to a faculty with the stature required to maintain the national prominence achieved in earlier years.

Reading these accounts revealed at times a double-bind experienced by those who headed the School over the decades of its existence: An unrelenting pressure to produce income levels set by university officials through increased enrollments, combined with concerns from the same sources about the academic quality of the ventures undertaken to do so.

Shifting perceptions about the proper role of government profoundly affected the USC experience over the period we are addressing. Educational programs directed toward the public sector obviously are more vulnerable to such contextual changes than traditional fields like law and medicine, sometimes to their advantage but often the opposite. When the ruling political paradigm defines government as the source of problems rather than solutions, public sector education is not apt to flourish, especially in a private university deeply rooted in private sector support networks.

As this book was being assembled in the fall of 2009, however, the political context for educational programs designed to prepare students for roles in the public sector had turned more positive, and graduate schools in those fields across the country were reporting dramatic increases in student applications.

The October 26, 2009 issue of the USC Chronicle carried a headline noting that USC School of Policy, Planning and Development Dean, Jack H. Knott, had visited Capitol Hill in his role as chair of the Deans Summit for the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, reporting that he was joined there by more than 50 deans and directors of public administration and public policy programs from across the country in support of improving Federal internship and hiring processes. Knott was quoted as saying that interest in public service among graduate students has never been higher.

The issues involved in defining mission can be captured in the questions a new student might ask. What is public administration? What cohort do I join if I earn one of your degrees? Will it be marketable now and in the future? Related issues arise in seeking to define the knowledge domain legitimately belonging to the School. These issues surfaced during the life of the School around questions of what name to give it and what components to place within its orbit. More established professional fields as well as traditional academic disciplines have their own problems of domain definition, but I can think of none that go to the heart of institutional survival in a way that compares to that of schools of public affairs and administration.

Another theme deserves noting as running through the 80 plus year life of the School, one that can be seen paradoxically as both a strength and source of contention and acrimony. The School’s pattern of carrying its work to places far distant from the central campus resulted in some of its most impressive engagements with students. This can be said of the Civic Center campus and also the teaching and research centers established in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. It also applies in some degree to the international programs described in this book.

These same ventures, however, were often seen as dubious by senior university officials and as drawing precious resources such as tenured faculty positions and named professorships from the Los Angeles campus by many resident School faculty. Relationships between the home campus and the outpost centers generated powerful tensions that were at play over many years in the history of the School.

Changes over time in the internal governance system of the School also can be seen as presenting both achievements and challenges. The most extreme contrasts appear in noting that the first forty years of the School depended primarily on a powerful dean and an inner circle of tenured faculty, as compared to the 1960’s and 1970’s when walking the talk of participative management led to the dispersion of power as reflected in a plethora of committees and the creation of the Forum as an ultimate decision-making entity. These shifts paralleled trends in the evolving literature on organization and management as well as paradigm shifts in the surrounding society.

The historic connection between the School of Public Administration and the program in Urban and Regional Planning, while harmonious and beneficial to both in the early decades of the School’s life, became problematic in later years. The increased power base achieved by joining the two entities within a single administrative structure committed to the public sector was an obvious and powerful driving force. It offered the appeal of a unified critical mass coupled with a coherent and easily communicated definition of mission. Yet there were restraining forces within the faculties of both Planning and Public Administration that resisted such an arrangement, mounting arguments for independence and autonomy of their respective units.

With the establishment of the von Klein Smid Center for World Affairs in 1966, Henry Reining had assumed a larger role as dean of a Center which included the School of International Relations and the Department of Political Science, as well as Public Administration, Planning and Urban Studies. Frank Sherwood became the first director of the School of Public Administration in 1967, to be followed later in that role by David Mars. Alan Kreditor became Director and later dean of the School of Urban and Regional Planning. It was a loose confederation that accommodated the different interests involved fairly harmoniously until Reining retired in 1972.

In 1973, during the time I served as dean, and building on the support of Vice-President Zohrab Kaprielian, the USC administration agreed to create a Center for Public Affairs including both entities under a single dean. Speaking in his office to faculty in Public Administration and Planning, USC President Jack Hubbard described the joinder of the two as a marriage made in heaven. The new Center was established and continued for several years with a Center dean at the top, a second dean of public administration, and a director/dean of planning and urban studies. While complicated, this structure maintained the public sector identity of the enterprise and was congruent with the names given to the Sacramento and Washington Public Affairs Centers.

When Hugh Flournoy, the last to hold the position of Dean of the Center for Public Affairs, left that role to join the USC Center in Sacramento, the School of Public Administration continued with its own Dean and the program in Urban and Regional Planning went on under the leadership of a Director. The present School of Policy, Planning and Development, ten years in existence at the date of this writing, once again brought public administration and planning together within a single structure and under a single dean, adding real estate development to the mix.

The transition leading to the creation of the School of Policy, Planning and Development took place within the deanship of Jane Pisano. An interim period followed during which Robert Biller returned to that post and managed the change. This was a landmark event in the 80-year history of the school. It aroused strong emotions, for the names given to academic entities carry powerful symbolic meaning and set the course for what follows. The papers in this book touch upon that event at many points and reflect the differing opinions held by participants.

Overview of Book Contents

Recognizing that narratives on different time periods and locations of activity over the 80 plus year history addressed can be confusing to readers, we have included a chronology of major milestones in the initial pages.

The book continues with a section on the early days of the School of Public Administration, telling the story of the founders and their time. It includes statements by each of those we have designated as a founder: Emery Olson, John Pfiffner and Henry Reining, Jr. interspersed with these accounts in their own voices are revealing biographies of each individual written by their friend and colleague, Frank Sherwood.

Olson’s narrative looks back on the first two decades in the life of the school and was written shortly after he had stepped down as dean and been given emeritus status. It conveys an unmistakable sense of pride and accomplishment. Reining’s narrative, written not long after he was hand-picked by Olson as his successor, looks forward optimistically to an exciting and expansive future for the school. Together they led the school for almost half of its 80-year history.

The essay by John Pfiffner, The Metamorphosis of a Mind, is a candid and intimate description of his emergence from what he portrays as his prosaic, middle-America beginnings into the life of a nationally noted scholar and writer.

My strongest memory of founding Dean Olson is how completely the man fitted his deanly role and how becoming the role was to him and to his wife, Freda, who was equally devoted to USC. When I became dean of the School, he was tirelessly albeit always modestly present to offer suggestions and personal assistance in a multitude of ways. Robert Biller has a