Paradigm Lost: Public Administration at Johns Hopkins University, 1884-96

Between 1884 and 1896, Herbert Baxter Adams, James Bryce, Richard Ely, Albert Shaw, and Woodrow Wilson, participated in one of the first attempts to build a curriculum specifically aimed at educating American public servants. Their approach to curriculum development did not concentrate on government structure or management skills, but on politics, economics, history, law, and ethics. Their efforts reflected a need to justify local administration, public service, and active government in legal, moral, historical, philosophical, and practical terms. More than 100 years later, their efforts seem both awkwardly archaic and curiously relevant.