| BY MIKE UNGER
Willliam LeoGrande
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Twenty years ago, armed with a master’s degree in public administration from American University and little else other than his eagerness and determination to learn, David Humpton ’85 began his career in public service—as an intern. Relying on his work ethic, intellect, and the educational pillars AU provided him, Humpton rose from the bottom rungs of Gaithersburg, Maryland’s city government to its upper echelon. City manager for the past nine years, Humpton is charged with running the day-to-day operations of a government with 250 full-time employees, 700 additional part timers, and an annual budget of about $35 million. “Every [AU] professor had some influence on how I do my job today,” Humpton says. “AU laid the foundation for me to be successful, and now I’m one of the longest-tenured city managers in the state.” The School of Public Affairs has been churning out top-rate graduates, more than 13,000 of them in fact, since it was established in 1934 at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt. Now at the spry young age of 70, SPA is garnering accolades it never before has attained. The proof lies in more than just its eye-catching No. 10 ranking in U.S. News & World Report, higher than the likes of Georgetown, Columbia, NYU, and more than 200 others. SPA’s successes are demonstrated every day in the corridors of municipal buildings in Washington and government towns large and small throughout the country, where its graduates routinely draw on their educations to enable them to effectively and efficiently serve the public. Kelly O’Meara helps monitor performance for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. The master of public administration degree she earned in 2001 “absolutely” prepared her for her career, she says. “The curriculum and the professors are very familiar with the current trends in public administration in both local and federal government,” O’Meara says. “I learned things that people who have been in government for 15 or 20 years haven’t quite caught on to.” Spearheading SPA’s charge to the forefront of academic renown is William LeoGrande. A 27-year veteran of SPA, LeoGrande has been dean since January 2003. “I think he’s brought a great deal of qualifications and leadership to the role of dean at the school,” says Pamela Deese ’80, ’83, chair of the SPA Advisory Council and a member of AU’s Board of Trustees. “He understands the need for our development efforts and the need to reconnect the alumni to the school. He is a huge supporter of having a talented faculty in place and recruiting top students for graduate programs.” LeoGrande aims to continue shaping SPA as one of the best in the nation, a better, not necessarily bigger, entity.“ We try to combine the academic understanding, the theoretical understanding of how political processes work, with as much hands-on experience as we can give to our students,” he says. “The quality of the faculty gets better all the time. The young people we’re hiring now are coming from the very best programs in the country. They’re publishing their research at really an exemplary rate. I’ve tried to take another step forward in the last couple of years in terms of providing resources to faculty to make it possible for them to do high-quality research. And then that research gets published, and that raises the profile of the program. That’s how you strengthen the place, slowly but surely.” Perhaps no one is positioned as perfectly to observe SPA’s growth as Bernie Ross. A professor in the Department of Public Administration, Ross has been with the school for 38 years. “We’re recruiting better students,” he says. “The nucleus of faculty here has stuck together. We know each other, we respect each other.” SPA attracts the attention of prospective students in a variety of ways. In addition to the impressive U.S. News rankings, which includes a No. 3 rating for the school’s justice program—tied with Harvard—SPA’s centers and institutes are extremely relevant in their respective fields. The Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies and the Women in Politics Institute draw students, working professionals, and media focus to campus. “We’re especially good at taking advantage of our location in Washington,” LeoGrande says. “It’s not just that we’re here, which is nice, but we have built into the curriculum ways of taking advantage of the location by bringing the expertise of Washington to campus.” This is personified in the school’s distinguished adjunct professor program. “We take people who are retiring from senior positions in the federal government and [give them] a half-time appointment,” LeoGrande says. “They teach several courses a year for us. They essentially bring to us a career’s worth of experience working in government and make that available to our students.” Distinguished adjunct professors include NAACP chairman Julian Bond, and former IRS assistant commissioner for planning and research Anita Alpern, now a member of the dean’s Advisory Council. “We have people on the faculty who are outstanding scholars in their respective fields, and who have also done consulting work with one or more agencies of government,” Alpern says. “Washington is our laboratory. We use the government as living laboratories of what we’re teaching. We’ve exploited it at AU, unlike, in my judgment, any other university.” LeoGrande also lauds the diversity of the faculty’s backgrounds. “We can cross-pollinate the way the disciplines are represented in the school,” he says. “Most schools of public policy have one or two disciplines. We’ve got a lot of political scientists and a lot of people with degrees in public administration, but we have sociologists, and historians, and philosophers, and attorneys. I think that’s a real strength.” As SPA rolls toward its centennial, its faculty remains focused on its core mission. “I’ve lectured at a number of universities, and to me American is the most uplifting, forward-looking in upholding traditions of the nobility of serving the public,” Alpern says. Humpton still calls upon the knowledge he acquired while taking classes from Alpern; Provost Neil Kerwin, a former SPA professor and dean; and others.“ Everything I do is process oriented, and what they taught me was to use the processes to your advantage,” Humpton says. “They taught me the ins and outs of what I had to face when I came to local government. It was huge in my career.” top |
