Emphasizing Service
by Carol Chetkovich

WHEN WE IN PUBLIC POLICY PROGRAMS want to distinguish what we do from the more established professional schools of business or law, we highlight our commitment to the public interest. Our educational mission is training for public service, ensuring that those who do the work of government and the nonprofit sector are as well prepared for their responsibilities as those who do the work of business.

The process for accomplishing this mission has been to select students who want to make the world a better place, equip them with analytical tools for assessing policy alternatives, sensitize them to political and organizational contexts of policymaking, and train them to communicate their ideas persuasively. Graduates are expected to apply these lessons by working in the public interest, primarily but not exclusively in government. The process seemed reasonably successful until graduates began to shun government employment in increasing numbers.

Central to their choice is the following dilemma. Students care about policy, want to affect it, and see government as the place where policy is made. But they don’t see government as a place where they can have an impact, because serious influence is reserved for the highest officials, who are either elected or appointed rather than being career civil servants. In other words, the very thing that motivates many to come to policy school makes them reluctant to enter government service.

To the extent that we agree with this perception of limited opportunity in government, what should our response be? Proposals range from promoting entrepreneurialism throughout the public sector — thereby increasing opportunity at many levels — to somehow targeting our efforts to those students most likely to attain the highest positions. The aim in any case is to ensure that our graduates attain positions of sufficient authority and autonomy to realize their visions. What we tend not to question very actively is the assumption that effective public service is ultimately a matter of realizing one’s own policy agenda. This assumption may work in the nonprofit sector — with some caveats — but in government it is highly problematic. In a democratic society, the authority to define the public interest rests with the polity, not the individual public servant.

Given this reality, perhaps the training we offer should be a little less about how to “get your way” (as one instructor said in an MPP orientation) and more about how to identify and work with the objectives of the community. The aim would be to produce analysts, advocates, and managers who were also skilled practitioners in the arts of democracy (as the term is used by Frances Moore Lappé and Paul Martin Du Bois). In particular, they would be prepared to engage in public dialogue, conflict management and resolution, public education on complex policy problems, collective problem solving, and group facilitation. They would be familiar with many different models of deliberative public participation, knowing when and how to employ particular approaches.

Improving public dialogue and deliberation is arguably a central task for public servants in any context, but is especially critical in the United States today, with our growing political polarization. In a 1985 essay about the future of policy schools, Aaron Wildavsky noted that when values expressed by elites diverge substantially, the “analytical enterprise, which depends on taking most things for granted so others can be analyzed, becomes precarious.” An integral part of the policy analyst’s job in these circumstances is to work with people to identify common ground, so that the analytic effort can go forward. As the center fails to hold, he suggested that policy schools “will become more reflective in trying to understand the conditions of democratic life that would make schools like them possible. And they will also become more meliorative in trying to (re)create these conditions.” We haven’t really, but we should.

Carol Chetkovich teaches public management and qualitative research methods at the Kennedy School. She studies organizational and social change and is the author of Real Heat: Gender and Race in the Urban Fire Service.