Incorporating skill development into the MPA curriculum

This article recommends that MPA Programs not already doing so consider two ideas. First, explicitly include skill development as an important program objective. Second, use the strategy of incorporating skill development and reinforcement into existing courses rather than adding new courses. A process for identifying skills and deciding where to locate them in the curriculum is presented. A list often generic skills is suggested along with a discussion of how they might fit within an MPA core curriculum.     

Situating tenure,capital and finance in farmland relations: implications for stewardship and agroecological health in Ontario,Canada

Farmers in Canada are older and more capitalized than ever before. Meanwhile, farmland values continue to rise. These forces together are generating unprecedented shifts in farmland relations, marked by increasing reliance on rental tenure and the rise of hybrid owner–renter consolidating farmers. This paper explores these dynamics in Ontario and asks how they are impacting on-farm agroecological stewardship. To do so, we begin with a review of the land and property relations literature as well as farmland and agricultural change in Ontario. We then briefly review agroecological issues and concepts that are important for linking on-farm agroecological health to aformentioned farmland and agricultural changes. From here, we use survey, interview and soil sample data collected from grain farmers across Ontario to elucidate relatively new shifts in land tenure and use dynamics. We argue that this complex set of forces is interacting to produce an appealing set of conditions for financial investors, while restricting access to farmland for less-capitalized farmers. We then show how these shifts are divesting capital and attention from agroecological health. We conclude with a reflection on how the state has been mediating and contributing to these dynamics, and urgently call for land policy that prioritizes social and ecological principals.     

Conclusion: exploring the heart of civic darkness

This article is a synthesis of Volume II of Public Policy and Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective and an extension of the arguments found herein. And, it is an application of issues of ethics and morality to this volume. The author calls for a return to civility in public discourse and to Plato's conception of virtue, and particularly public virtue. New versions of civic space are important. The American emphasis on individualism must be tempered by a greater concern for the common good and the public interest. To achieve this public administrators must be both examples and representative citizens.

Cyrano: Perhaps I do exaggerate—a little.

Le Bret: You see!

Cyrano: But for the sake of principle.

Also in practice I have often found Exaggeration works extremely well.

—Edmund Rostand

Cyrano de Bergerac

And sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death.

—James 1:15

“Civic darkness” and “sin” are offputting words. “Offputting” is also an offputting word, but we must do what we can to follow Cyrano's advice to the Count de Guiche and color our discourse as but we can. Actually, sin is quite a useful word, meaning, as it does, transgression of a moral principle. Those whose sensibilities are offended when words such as sin are introduced, or react in anger at remembrances of the excesses of evangelical piety, would do well to revisit the idea of separation from the moral good and the consequences such separatilon has for persons and for societies. Such is the case with what I will call the sin of incivility, which I believe leads us into a civic heart of darkness, which is the deathtrap of American democracy. I will exaggerate—a little.

The word “moral” is also an attenuated word. It tends to conjure personal identity material and prejudgments about the authority, associations, and intent of the preacher or philosopher using the term. Fresh in my memory after twelve years is the aftermath of the publication of my article, “The Problem of Moral Reasoning in American Public Administration: The Case for a Code of Ethics,” in the Public Administration Review of January/February 1983. Of the nineteen letters I received about the article, five came from academic public administrationists wondering why a person of my background should now be joining the Moral Majority. I sent each of them a copy of my work exposing Jerry Falwell's problems with the Federal Trade Commission.

We have before us thirteen papers and twelve responses, each dealing with an important aspect of public policy. Are there common threads running through them? Do they highlight recurring themes in American public administration? Since they were written just before the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, was there anything prescient about them, or are they just historical artifacts, interesting enough in themselves but now overtaken by events?

There is a common thread, and that is a continuing commitment to the legacy of Mimowbrook I, understood as a post-positivist concern with social values. The most prophetic and, I believe, relevant statements of Minnowbrook I1 extended that understanding to the societal, organizational, and personal dimensions of communicative ethics, including the problem of the alienation of the self. I will elaborate that interest in my discussion of incivility below.

The old controversies were also there: in Willa Bruce's demand that Cynthia McSwain and Orion White translate their exercise in analytic psychology “into a practical application to real world problems,” for example, and in Gary Wamsley's passionate belief that public administrationists should “unmask the norms economists camouflage as science.” Complementarities were there, too, as when real world public administrator, Ray Pethtel, Virginia Commissioner of Transportation, said hurrah for egghead John J. DeIulio, describing him as “a scholar who recognizes the value of the public manager!” A pernicious theme that continued at Minnowbrook II, despite the efforts of conference organizers to diminish it through representation and structured dialogue, was that those who live more contemplative lives do not live in the real world. The truth is that most academic public administrationists are or have been heavily involved in workaday policy formulation and execution and that most civil servants reflect profoundly on what they do. Why, then, do we continue to use the language of separation?

Although there were arguments at Minnowbrook II, and I well remember the tension in the room after Bruce and Wamsley spoke, as on other occasions, we stayed well within the bounds of civility. That is what democracy does. It roughs and tumbles and postures and threatens and in the end stays within the bounds of civility. It finds a way we can live together. Minnowbrook II did not anticipate the degree to which incivility, manifested as displaced anger, separatist politics, and cultural isolation, would come to characterize public discourse in America in the 1990s and threaten the continued existence of democracy itself. Such a development demands careful analysis.

Plato would not have been surprised at any of this, as Dorothy Robyn pointed out in her paper about using cases for teaching public management. Since cases focus on how a process affected substantive policy questions, it is easy to ignore the inherent merits of the policy. Thus induction from fact replaces deduction from theory and leaves a large potential for casuistry and the justification of moral laxity. When discussion of a case begins with the postulate that at least one of the protagonists was unethical, the opportunities for recognizing moral ambiguity in the situation itself are limited. The temptation to reduce moral reasoning to laws and regulations tends to replace the abstraction of the public manager as a political being deducing his or her strategies from whatever ideal is being served. Deontological ethics become the analytical norm.⁽¹⁾

Plato's impatience with deontological ethics means that he is not a popular theorist among democrats today. Yet his critique of democracy remains the most powerful in philosophic literature, and I believe his analysis is particularly relevant for an American political environment of electronic sound bites and bored ignorance about the processes of government. There is a paradoxical way in which Plato's explication can deliver those of us who care too much.

The rhetoricians have their way in a democracy, Plato says. As they pursue their enthusiasms, trying to persuade the inattentive public here and there, misleading the people when necessary, they devise temporary solutions to fundamental problems. They consume as they encourage others to consume, leaving nothing in store. They live transient lives in mortal bodies. The worst thing about rhetoricians such as Gorgias, Plato believes, is that they misuse words. They often invert their meaning. Words are the vehicle of the dialectic that can lead us to transcendent truth, but in the hands of Gorgias, they produce only chaos and discord. In Plato's terms, the rhetoricians

once they have emptied and purged [the good] from the soul of the man whom they are seizing … they proceed to return insolence, anarchy, wastefulness, and shamelessness from exile, in a blaze of light, crowned and accompanied by a numerous chorus, extolling and flattering them by calling insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage.⁽²⁾

The deliverance inherent in Plato is the sure knowledge that virtue does not lie finally in what one can achieve in the political world, including the public good served in feeding the poor and bringing social justice to the disinherited. We work to achieve the good, yes; indeed, we may pour out our lives in service to democratic ideals. But virtue is a personal condition of the mind and spirit. In a calculous of inherent worth, prostitutes may be more virtuous than virgins. Virtue may be present in me while I endure any physical or temporal condition, including slavery, the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the trivialization of the Christian Church, or the collapse of the American Republic. Authentic freedom, and whatever wisdom has been given to me, exists in my being and only there. I can enslave myself, of course, and that includes slavery to any appetite, including the passion to be or do good.

Such reasoning is a useful antilogistic ingredient in dealing with the cascading series of manifestos in American public life telling us that we cannot live together; we cannot work together; we are not in this together; we are not Americans who have something in common, but racial, ethnic, gender, or sexually identified groups who demand to be recognized only or exclusively as different. I require that you recognize that we have nothing in common with one another. If goodness or greatness of soul is a capacity that each man and woman has, as Plato argued, then it is also true that each of us has a similar capacity for evil. The theologians of the Middle Ages called that capacity sin and defined it as separation from God, moral principle, and each other.     

Power and morality: a misleading dichotomy

This article critically addresses E H Carr's dichotomy of power and morality by demonstrating that all analytical languages used to articulate world affairs systematically refer to both power and morality, albeit in a different manner. The distinction between the two concepts is an analytical one, rather than a dichotomy of the kind that Carr constructs. Although Carr's dichotomy has recently resurfaced as a distinction between ‘communitarianism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, such an interpretation of his work remains problematic. This is demonstrated through a case study of President Jimmy Carter—whose policies manifest both realist and liberal approaches and combine power-centred concerns with moralistic ones. Therefore, in practical world affairs, there is no power-morality dichotomy; there are only different accounts of what both power and morality entail.     

In Defence of the West: General Lauris Norstad,NATO Nuclear Forces and Transatlantic Relations 1956–1963

In the history of NATO, lack of Atlantic communality is a recurring theme. Atlantic cohesion was constantly challenged. However, the discord among NATO members rarely threatened the very existence of the Alliance. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed such a rare occurrence. In Europe the question of nuclear sharing triggered the development of blue-prints for a step-by-step replacement of the Atlantic security co-operation by a European Security Community. These blueprints were discussed among the EEC member-states and within the forum of the WEU. This study analyses not only those concepts, but also the role of the SACEUR, General Norstad, in defending NATO from external threats and internal decay. By studying the leeway of the SACEUR, this study tries to establish whether the subsystem of the international system, formed by the nations of the North Atlantic area after the Second World War, should be characterised as a system of hegemonic stability or as a pluralistic security community. The article is based on recently declassified archival material from both sides of the Atlantic.     

Recent Education Policy and School Reform in Bavaria: A Critical Overview

This paper gives a critical overview of school reform measures in the German state of Bavaria in the aftermath of the OECD's PISA 2000 and 2003 studies. While the highly selective Bavarian school system has provided the best test results among the German federal states, its overall performance in an international context has been less impressive. In order to improve the Bavarian education system a range of initiatives has been introduced in recent years. While following pedagogically sound ideas in most cases, however, the projects have been hampered by fiscal restraints, ideological reservations against breaking up the traditional three-tier system of secondary education, prevailing bureaucratic restrictions, and a lack of improvements in incentives for teachers' involvement in reform. As a consequence, genuine, fundamental changes in the traditional system have not so far been initiated.     

Multivariate Comparison of Male and Female Adolescent Substance Abusers with Accompanying Legal Problems

Purpose

The factors that distinguish adolescent male and female substance abusers with and without legal problems were investigated.

Method

Youths (N = 4,071) admitted for substance abuse treatment were administered the revised Drug Use Screening Inventory (DUSI-R) to measure severity of health, behavior, and social adjustment problems.

Results

Legal problems were more frequent among boys; however, severity of disturbance was greater in girls on 9 of 10 scales. Substance abusing girls and boys with legal problems reported more severe behavior, substance abuse, family adjustment, and peer relationship problems than substance abusing peers without legal problems. Quality of peer relationship mediated the association of family dysfunction, substance abuse and behavior problems with legal problems in boys only.

Conclusions

Gender and legal status both need to be taken into account to potentiate treatment prognosis of substance abusing youths.     

Marijuana But Not Alcohol Use During Adolescence Mediates the Association Between Transmissible Risk for Substance Use Disorder and Number of Lifetime Violent Offenses

Aim

This study determined the extent to which alcohol and marijuana use during adolescence mediates the relation between transmissible risk for substance use disorder (SUD) and lifetime number of different types of violent offenses.

Methods

The transmissible liability index was administered to 359 10-12 year old youths who were tracked to 22 years of age. Past year frequency of alcohol and marijuana consumption was longitudinally tracked to age 22 at which time lifetime violent offenses was recorded.

Results

Rate of increase in marijuana use mediated the association between transmissible risk and lifetime number of different types of violent offenses. No association was found between past year frequency of alcohol use and violent offenses.

Conclusions

Prevention directed at lowering the psychological characteristics associated with transmissible risk for SUD may also reduce violent offending.     

Correlates of handgun carrying among adolescents in the United States

Weapon-related violence, especially the use of handguns, among adolescents is a serious public health concern. Using public-use data file from the adolescent sample (N = 17,842) in the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), this study examines the behavioral, parental involvement, and prevention correlates of handgun carrying. Overall, 3.1% of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 reported carrying a handgun in the past year. Results from a series of logistic regression models indicated that males, selling and using illicit drugs, were robustly associated with an increased probability of handgun carrying among adolescents. Furthermore, youth who carry handguns were significantly less likely to report a parent being involved in their lives and were significantly more likely to have encountered violence and drug prevention programming compared with youth who did not carry handguns. Implications of these results for prevention and policy are discussed.     

The Riddle of Charisma

The word “charisma” is widely and carelessly employed, without investigation or definition of the phenomenon. Rather than a singular attribute, charisma is complex, manifesting itself in at least three non-exclusive forms: innate charisma, achieved charisma, and the charisma of position. Given the human craving for leadership, understanding the different forms of charisma and their associated strengths and weaknesses helps us steer between, triumph, tragedy and travesty.