What always amazed me was that Don Stone was a visionary: he was not an elder who devoted mind and time to reminiscing about the halcyon days of the New Deal or World War II; instead, he was always contemporary in charting where the field of public administration was going and should go. He galvanized others in confabs and colloquy to exchange views, to debate and deliberate over issues rather than just affirm his own priorities and preferences-although opinions he did have, with tenacity.

Hence, it is a daunting task to aspire to live up to this lecture-even a little bit-entitled after Don Stone's legacy and legend. But in partaking of that spirit of contemplating the future, several themes have crystallized for me-whether as an educator in critical reflection about my own school and others in the leagues of NASPAA and APPAM, or whether as a sometime-administrator in government, or whether as a citizen of this great, albeit complex, nation. Some three decades ago, another icon of mine, Dwight Waldo, penned a book entitled Public Administration in a Time of Turbulence. It does seem to me that public administration is always in a time of turbulence. It is a dynamic field that partakes of all currents of change coursing through our increasingly global nation state. Unlike many academic disciplines-even those in the social sciences-ours is a porous field imbibing as much in, as detaching from, the field of practice. As such, I exercise some license of authorship and deviate from the published title of this address. I trust I honor the spirit of the conference's banner, "The Power of Public Service."

Let me share with you a half-dozen on my sampler of changes and describe how our field has some special assets to embrace those changes even though there are deficits to remedy. My order does not confer any priority on these; they are all important and interrelated.

First, there is the globalization of our political economy, as is so popularly depicted these days and heralded years ago by the Stone lecturer of the year 2000, Harlan Cleveland. The interdependency of our political, economic, and social systems with nations around the world prompts me to rethink what had been an American-centric model of public administration and to reconstruct what we once called international relations. If there was a jolting message in Osborne and Gaebler's celebrated, albeit controversial, work on Reinventing Government over a decade ago, it was that some powerful reforms in state and local government did not always originate here. For inspiration on new models of conducting the government's affairs, other nations-in that case New Zealand and Australia-offered potent, penetrating lessons.

Similarly, issues of public policy transcend national boundaries and cultures, as in the case historically of national security and, more recently, of trade, of environmental pollution and protection, of immigration, and of virtually every other policy domain. Indeed, our State Department's ambassadors abroad do not just serve that agency and its role in foreign affairs; they serve all the departments of our federal government. Moreover, every agency-whether once considered domestic or not-has some kind of office of international affairs to infuse a more global perspective into its policy formulation, implementation, and operations. The world of practice has gone global-and so have our academic programs. More students from abroad-despite recent constraints from the former INS and now Department of Homeland Security-seek out American higher education, including public administration, in their zeal to learn about American democracy and capitalism. More of our own students reach out to understand their colleagues from around the world. Dealing with diversity is a corollary. Enduring concerns about equity, fairness, and justice assume new meaning and proportion in a multicultural context. | next |