Right On, Helmut!
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12658 |
| Author | Mark H. Moore |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
Right On, Helmut!
Mark H. Moore
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
As I read Helmut Anheier’s essay ‘On the Future of the
Public Policy School’, I had the somewhat uncomfortable
feeling that someone had been crawling around inside my
head asking the same fundamental questions, carrying out
the same diagnosis and coming to the same conclusions
about public policy schools that have pre-occupied me over
the last 40 years.
This startled me a bit. While I have known Helmut over
the years, while there were some important parallels in our
careers (we both spent time studying the voluntary sector
as well as teaching in public policy schools), and while we
had carried on several very useful discussions about the
challenges of building excellent public policy schools, I had
no idea how closely his experience, perceptions and ideas
paralleled my own.
It was not that I had been silent about or reluctant to
share my views. It was more that my lack of success in per-
suading others of those views was forcing me to come to
the conclusion that I was probably wrong.
So, it came as a welcome, but somewhat unnerving thun-
derbolt, to read such a clear, accurate, important and tren-
chant evaluation of the challenges facing public policy
schools as they sought to live up to their claims, and their
apparent potential that echoed my thought so precisely.
To be clear, I am a child of the public policy movement. I
was in the very first class of master of public policy students
at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) in 1969. I believe I
received one of the first PhD’.s in public policy in 1974. After
spending two demanding years working for the US Drug
Enforcement Agency, I spent the rest of my professional
career as a professor at the Kennedy School pursuing my
ambition to make the HKS a great public policy school. At
the Kennedy School, I established and led an applied
research program in criminal justice policy and manage-
ment, chaired the development of the Kennedy School’s
executive education programs, headed the ‘strategic man-
agement’cluster of the Kennedy School’s faculty, became
the founding Director of the School’s Hauser Center on Non-
profit Organizations, and ended up in the Ash Center work-
ing on ‘innovations in government and governance’.
As I travelled this path, I kept running up against signifi-
cant cultural and institutional constraints that seemed to be
deeply embedded in the cultures of research universities
that made it difficult for the public policy schools they spon-
sored to achieve the goals they set for them.
Helmut’s extraordinary accomplishment is that his ‘five
major reforms’take precise aim at those particular con-
straints, and if undertaken, could, conceivably redeem an
effort that seems to be going astray.
In this commentary, I would like ‘hum along’with Helmut,
following his lead and making adding a few improvisational
riffs on each of his suggested reforms.
Challenge 1: Revisit the politics-analytic link by ... introduc-
ing political philosophy into core teaching to compensate for
the normative vacuum and lack of vision in curriculum domi-
nate by political economy.
Anheier is quite right to start with this challenge. Indeed,
I think the commitment that public policy schools made to
emphasize ‘analytics’over ‘politics’is the original sin that
continues to hang over the current and future of public pol-
icy schools. The error has everything to do with having
staked much too much on the assumed power of the meth-
ods of academic social science to improve political policy
making, and through that, to improve individual and social
conditions, and too little emphasis on the key question of
how to strengthen politics and public management. Here
are my riffs on this theme.
1. Anheier is right to point to the ‘normative vacuum and
lack of (political?) vision in public policy curriculum’, and
to attribute that to the dominance of what he describes
as ‘political economy’. But I would say that the problem
is not the dominance of ‘political economy’, but the
dominance of ‘micro-economic theory’. What economists
describe as ‘political economy’actually has very little ‘pol-
itics’in it! As my colleague Dutch Leonard once
explained to me, its only nod to politics is to develop the
micro-economic theory of government. That theory
A Response to ‘On the Future
of the Public Policy School’,
Helmut K. Anheier
*
*Anheier, H. K. (2019), ‘On the Future of the Public Policy School’,
Global Policy, 10 (1), pp. 75-83. First published online: 08 October
2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12599
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12658
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 1 . February 2019
92
Response Article
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