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III. Undergraduate Training for the Public Service

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

James W. Fesler
James W. Fesler*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

Along with its obligations to train men and women to serve as useful citizens, to carry on the cultural heritage of the past, and to take their places as productive members of private professions and occupations, the American university recognizes a responsibility to train students for service in federal, state, and local governments. The dimensions of this responsibility are best illustrated by the finding in 1939 that of the men graduates of the University of Minnesota between 1928 and 1936, 41.3 per cent either were or had been in government employment; for the women graduates, the proportion was 66 per cent.

A relatively small proportion of students find their way into the judiciary through the avenue of law-school training and practice of the law. Another small proportion become legislators through a variety of avenues, but with the law schools again predominant in the training. The bulk of university graduates who are public servants will be found in administrative agencies. Consequently, undergraduate training for the public service places its principal emphasis on the training of students to contribute effectively as officers and employees of administrative agencies. The university, therefore, is obligated to acquaint students with the opportunities for administrative service and to guide them into courses that will prepare them for such service.

Type
Undergraduate Instruction in Political Science
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , June 1947 , pp. 507 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1947

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References

1 Short, Lloyd M. and Pehrson, Gordon O., A Survey of University Graduate Employed in Government Service (1939)Google Scholar. Although the depression played its part in increasing the relative opportunities for government employment, the figures seem too impressive to be lightly dismissed as evidence of but a passing phenomenon.

2 U.S. President's Committee on Civil Service Improvementa, Report (1941), p. 12Google Scholar.

3 Lloyd M. Short and Gordon O. Pehrson, op. cit., p. 10.

4 Of course, the urgency of including a course in national, state, or municipal government varies with the governmental level where employment is expected.

5 One member of the Committee on Undergraduate Instruction differs with this paragraph on two points. First, he feels that the undergraduate curriculum in public administration should include many, rather than few, required courses, as the first two years of college education should be largely prescribed to assure acquisition by the students of the elements of a general education. The writer, on the other hand, has not felt it appropriate in this brief article on a restricted topic to open up the whole subject of freshman and sophomore curricula for a general education.

Second, the Committee member would substitute a logic course for the statistics course, assuming the number of courses is restricted to seven. The argument is that logical analysis is central to the administrator's job, and cannot be provided by employing a logician on the administrator's staff. In contrast, the administrator weak in statistics can turn to a statistician on his staff for aid. The writer grants the argument, but believes that analytical abilities are developed in well-taught courses in the social sciences; statistics, on the other hand, can best be studied in a special course devoted solely to statistics.

6 This will vary with universities and with subject-matter fields. Engineering, some fields of agriculture, and veterinary medicine are examples of fields that produce many public servants, but have insufficient curricular flexibility to assure inclusion of the seven core courses proposed in the text.

7 One member of the Committee dissents from several passages in this and other paragraphs that discount 'general principles' of public administration. The writer recognizes that any purported science must point toward the formulation of propositions having wide applicability. He simply feels that political scientists have too glibly formulated 'general principles' and that students trained to slavish following of such principles make poor administrators.

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