Politicians for Hire-The Dilemma of Education and the Task of Research

Abstract

SCHOOLS of Public Administration and of Planning are in a quandary. What should be their curriculum? When asked what special expertise there to be taught they are hard put for an answer. The planner feels most comfortable, most secure that he really planning, when he at his drawing board. Yet he knows that physical planning by itself a woefully limited thing. Public administration most secure when it deals with personnel and budgeting. These are two distinct career lines for which it feels, with some assurance, it can prepare. But as with planning, what it can do well it feels to be, though undoubtedly useful, merely instrumental and hence of minor interest. Both public administration and planning are victims of high ambition. They wish to be concerned with policy, and high policy at that. Their adepts are to be generalists, not instrumental hewers of wood and drawers of water for others. However, they are both heirs to a tradition and a mystique that denies them an overt political role. The professions are supposed to produce experts, not politicans for hire. Their power supposed to be derived from expertise, not politics. Yet as their pretensions to general competence expand, the character of their expertise becomes more and more problematic. What it that they really know and what courses can teach this general knowledge? The distinction between the expert on things in general and the politician becomes more difficult to draw in theory. In practice it means he has been to school, carries an academic card, and appointed rather than elected to office. The problem as old as Plato and his poetic effort to distinguish the philosopher king from the inexpert mere politician. The source of the difference was )Educational preparation of policy generalists, the author contends, is scarcely a school for political eunuchs. The facts of our political life are at war with our political theory, and Professor Long finds the intellectual basis of public administration and planning professions to be disintegrating just when the demand for its practitioners at a peak. Noting parallels between the modem city manager and the medieval podesta and condottiere (Italian governors-for-hire and European soldiers of fortune), he challenges research and educational institutions to directly confront this core educational issue, not merely by scientific inquiry, but through a consciously held and critically examined political philosophy.