Notes
THE COLLEGE OF URBAN AFFAIRS AND PUBLIC POLICY
IN 1975, THE DIVISION OF URBAN AFFAIRS became the secretariat for the Council of University Institutes for Urban Affairs, initially comprised of the directors of urban affairs programs across the nation. Division Director Hal Brown helped create the organization, which became the Urban Affairs Association (UAA) in 1980, to serve as the leading international professional organization for scholars and researchers of urban affairs. Mary Helen Callahan, a professional staff member of the division, provided the central administrative support for the new organization and became the executive director in 1975, serving in that capacity through 2000.1 The University of Delaware’s leadership of the UAA contributed to the division’s reputation as one of the nation’s model urban affairs programs.
In 1976, the council’s national meeting focused on the prospects for the field of urban affairs. With state and federal funding and foundation support, often matched by university investment, urban affairs programs had mushroomed in number from a handful in the 1960s to several hundred by the mid-1970s.2 However, many of the social forces that gave rise to the field weakened. Proclamations of an urban crisis and strident demands for social justice and equality were replaced by calls from public officials and civic leaders for sounder fiscal management and greater efficiency in municipal services. Some members of the Council of University Institutes for Urban Affairs questioned the future viability of urban affairs programs when they were no longer a political priority and could not pull in the external funding they had attracted earlier. Indeed, any program’s prospects seemed to depend on both its self-reliance in generating resources and the continuation of its university administration’s support. That was the case for the Division of Urban Affairs.
BECOMING A COLLEGE
The late 1960s and early 1970s were turbulent times on the University of Delaware campus, as they were on many university campuses during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement. At UD, the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized anti-war rallies, challenged UD’s compulsory military training—a product of the institution’s land-grant heritage—and, in spring 1967, gained leadership positions in the Student Government Association.3 Led by the SDS and with the support of some faculty, students directly challenged university policies, particularly those related to student conduct. Amidst these turbulent circumstances, on June 10, 1967, UD President John Perkins resigned.
After serving as vice president for academic affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, E. Arthur Trabant became president of the University of Delaware on July 1, 1968. In the year since Perkins resigned, Provost John Shirley, who served as acting president, had presided over a campus that remained mired in controversy over student rights. Periodic anti-war protests continued, including a brief sit-in at the university administration building. Another sit-in was held at the student center to bring attention to ongoing civil rights struggles. All of this was happening as the university continued to grow dramatically. Undergraduate enrollment increased from 2,400 in 1957–58 to 6,500 in 1967–68, driven in part by dramatic increases in Delaware’s population.4 As a result, the university added academic programs, faculty, and facilities yearly.
From the outset, Trabant took a very different path from Perkins in charting the next stage of the university’s development. He called upon the students, faculty, and administration to create a new “Community Design” for the university’s future. He initiated a process headed by a Community Design Commission that engaged all university units in a multi-year process that resulted in the 1971 publication of a strategic plan entitled The Decade Ahead: The Report of the Community Design Planning Commission. The two-volume report described guiding principles for the university’s growth and included detailed plans prepared by each academic and non-academic unit. UD was predominantly an undergraduate institution, and the report indicated that expanding the university’s graduate programs was a clear priority. There was no medical school or law school, nor any likelihood of launching either, given the high costs of doing so.5 That created the opportunity, indeed the need, for other graduate and professional programs that might help enhance the university’s overall profile as a graduate institution.
Even before the strategic plan was completed, the Division of Urban Affairs staff began to design a graduate program. In 1970, the university approved faculty appointments in the division, anticipating that a graduate program would be approved and that the division would then become an academic unit. The Community Design Commission recommended that the division become a graduate college of urban affairs and included a detailed proposal for a new PhD program. As the 1971 report proposed, making the division a college would provide a place where students and faculty could engage in research, education, and service related to the contemporary issues of urban life. Social issues would be the “source and target” of these initiatives, which would “stress the interdependence between basic theory, systematic research, and the application of scientific knowledge to policy and practice.”6
L. Leon Campbell became provost in 1972, with a clear mandate to carry out the recommendations of the Community Design Commission. His efforts focused on moving UD from an undergraduate institution to a full-scale university with recognized strengths in graduate education and research extending beyond traditional areas of excellence. Campbell concentrated on areas where UD could excel. Two areas selected for priority were marine studies and urban affairs, leading to the creation of the College of Marine Studies and the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. Notably, both colleges reflected UD’s identity as an engaged university, and both were extensions of its public purpose, especially its land-grant identity.7 Also notable was that both colleges were established as graduate-only institutions, differentiating them from the university’s other colleges, all of which had undergraduate and graduate programs.
The university officially established the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy in 1976. Public policy was included in the name because the Division of Urban Affairs had already expanded to encompass a broader mission than that of the original unit supported by the Ford Foundation, emerging as a key resource of state and local government for a broad range of policy research and analysis. It also provided technical assistance for the design and delivery of public programs and services. Hal Brown, director of the division, was appointed as dean of the college. Dan Rich, the division’s associate director, became associate dean of the college. In 1978, when Brown was appointed UD vice president for employee relations, Rich became acting dean, and the university launched a national search for Brown’s successor.
In 1979, David L. Ames, professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Virginia Commonwealth University, was selected to become the college’s dean.8 After he started, he concluded that “the college was even better than I imagined. Hal Brown had systematically developed a superb urban affairs faculty with scholars from urban sectors of several social sciences.”9 The research and public service units had earned national recognition and were emulated by other universities. Moreover, the college had “solved the problem of being responsive to the needs of the community by creating public service faculty positions and supporting them with professional staff,” thereby creating the capacity to “respond to needs of the community as they arose and continue to work with them in an ongoing fashion.”10
AN INNOVATIVE ORGANIZATION
The organization of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy was distinctive. Many of the opportunities and challenges the college faced over the next two decades were the direct result of being organized and operated in a manner unlike most academic units. First and foremost, the college was not organized into academic departments. The directors of the new academic programs, the MA and PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy and the Master of Public Administration, reported to the associate dean through program committees. While most University of Delaware faculty had nine-month academic year appointments, the college’s faculty had twelve-month appointments. These extended appointments were justified because community challenges were continuous, so faculty and students would be participating in engaged scholarship and public service year-round. Also, all the faculty were affiliated with at least one of the college’s centers or institutes. They would be partially funded through work conducted with the centers, often supported by external contracts and grants. The centers also employed graduate students as research assistants on externally supported projects supervised by faculty or senior professional staff, some of whom had secondary faculty appointments.
Ames recalls that each research and public service center served a specific constituency in the state. Each had a professional staff with skills related to the work conducted for that constituency. The Census and Data System was the recognized source for population data and projections for state agencies and conducted surveys for governmental and private clients. The Delaware Public Administration Institute was devoted to the planning, management, and service-delivery needs of state and local governments. The Urban Agent Program in Wilmington was concerned with the needs of low-income and disadvantaged communities.11
The college also had a unique budgeting system, which granted it greater autonomy than a typical academic unit but required it to generate support from external grants and contracts. For a university with a modest externally funded research imprint at this time, most of which was in the sciences and engineering, this system was a bold step. The new college needed to generate sufficient external funding to support its graduate students, fund professional staff, and cover the cost of its extended faculty appointments. However, in exchange for receiving less funding from the university, the college had the freedom to generate and keep any positive balance at the end of each fiscal year. The college was also given the flexibility to add positions supported by external funds. The budgeting arrangement was a great advantage for the college and provided the incentive structure and flexibility necessary to generate and creatively use resources from diverse sources.
Beyond these organizational factors, the college was substantively different from others in the university because it valued and was designed to support interdisciplinary and applied scholarship and to prepare graduate students to carry out such scholarship. The college’s promotion and tenure requirements placed a premium on the integration of research, instruction, and service, and the demonstration of community impact as well as scholarly impact. As promotion dossiers made their way up from the college to the university level, they often looked different from the typical portfolios—and they often were different. As a graduate-only college, its teaching metrics looked different than those for faculty in units with undergraduate programs. Given the college’s interdisciplinary makeup, faculty published in a wide variety of outlets, many outside of traditional scholarly publishing networks. The idea of documenting public service and community engagement seemed foreign and often irrelevant to traditional faculty, who often thought of such service as a lesser responsibility and focused on contributions to the university or national professional associations. The university’s Faculty Senate did not officially recognize engaged scholarship in its promotion criteria until 2018.
A NEW GENERATION OF URBAN AFFAIRS SCHOLARS
The graduate program in urban affairs and public policy filled a knowledge gap in the social sciences. In the decades after World War II, the traditional social sciences—political science, sociology, economics—became embroiled in controversies about whether and how social inquiry should be more scientific and empirical. While some scholars researched emerging social and economic challenges, most focused on constructing their disciplines. Prodigious scholarly debates about the direction of each discipline arose shortly after the war and continued through subsequent decades.12 These dialogues were inward-looking, and by the 1960s and 1970s, the leading social science journals were largely barren of any consideration of substantive societal challenges or research-based policy proposals to address them. The result was the increasing isolation of scholarship. It was this, Irving Louis Horowitz pointed out decades later, that set the stage for the emergence of new, interdisciplinary fields of social science, including urban affairs and policy studies.13
The College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy’s graduate program sought to prepare a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars who would generate usable knowledge to inform public decisions. In retrospect, the search for such knowledge was both idealistic and naive. It focused on creating and using research and analysis to improve communities, but it was unclear how this knowledge could be translated into public policies and programs. Even so, the new graduate program, and others like it across the nation, projected confidence about the power of ideas to guide social action and social change.
Danilo Yanich (PhD, UAPP 1980), who was in one of the college’s first cohorts of doctoral students, found the program’s orientation to be precisely what he wanted based on his experience as a War on Poverty community organizer. He recounts that he knew very little about the people he was serving as a community organizer other than that they faced different degrees of poverty. He could not effectively advocate for them because he did not understand the forces influencing their lives. Yanich came to the graduate program because he wanted to “reconcile the disconnect between the world as I was experiencing it and the prevailing theories as I knew them. With its design to be different, challenging, and out-of-the-box, the program perfectly suited what I thought was needed in the messy world of social action.”14 After he graduated, Yanich joined the faculty and remained a part of the various iterations of the Biden School throughout his career. In 2006, he became director of the graduate program in urban affairs and public policy from which he had graduated.
The college matched a focus on urban affairs with the study of public policy and policy analysis. It also addressed the implementation of policy, understood variously as public administration by those with a governmental orientation and as theories and strategies of social change by those more focused on community-based action. Its program connected the interdisciplinary fields of urban affairs, public policy, and public administration. The faculty and students located themselves among these disciplines according to their theoretical orientation or, more often, to what seemed most valuable to their research on housing, education, poverty, service delivery, community and economic development, or the improvement of government programs, policies, and services.
In the early years of the program, there was a great deal of faculty debate and experimentation regarding how to meet objectives, as there were no established graduate programs of this type to serve as models. The program faculty came from specific disciplines, mainly sociology, political science, and economics. While they sought to create a truly interdisciplinary program, each spoke a different disciplinary language and used concepts and methods from their discipline. A continual problem was slipping back into those specific approaches rather than connecting them in new and intellectually productive ways.
The program relied on team-teaching of the core seminars, particularly the doctoral seminars, but it soon became apparent that putting an economist, sociologist, and political scientist together in the same classroom did not necessarily produce interdisciplinary discourse. Jeffrey Raffel describes the challenge: “The Ph.D. program was supposed to be interdisciplinary and to be based on interdisciplinary theories. Unfortunately, we found that whatever we named the courses, we were really teaching in the disciplines we had learned-political science, sociology, and economics.”15 Francis Tannian, an economist and one of the architects of the graduate program, recalls that there was no discussion of “how we would integrate various approaches.”16 In effect, the faculty asked the students to do something that the faculty themselves were largely unable to do.
Over time, the faculty developed more confidence in the program’s core structure, which took shape around their areas of research, often conducted in collaboration with the doctoral students. However, one of the issues that remained a challenge throughout the program’s development was evaluating the background and qualifications of prospective students.
The college maintained an outspoken commitment to the diversity of its student body in terms of academic background, race, ethnicity, experience, and professional objectives. The faculty also placed less emphasis on some standard indicators of student qualifications, such as Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores, than on factors such as motivation and prior experience that were not so tangible. Longtime professor Robert Wilson recalls that the first students were “a remarkable bunch: a former nun, a cab driver, and some idealists who wanted to be urban change agents.”17 In 1976, Clyde Bishop, who was in the initial group of students, became the first graduate of the PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy. A Black Delawarean who received an undergraduate degree from Delaware State University and a master’s degree in sociology from UD, Bishop worked in various jobs but could not decide on a career. He recalls that the new graduate program “interested me because it was a unique, interdisciplinary graduate program. It integrated economic, political, and social policy issues, and that made sense to me because it seemed to fit the way things are in the real world.”18 After receiving his doctorate, Bishop went on to a career in academia and the U.S. Foreign Service. In 2007, President George W. Bush appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the Marshall Islands.
FIGURE 13. Clyde Bishop, the first graduate of the PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, at the 1976 UD Commencement with his children.
Enrollments grew throughout the 1980s, with graduate student funding provided primarily through grants and contracts from faculty and professional staff, often working through the college’s centers. By the end of the 1980s, the PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy program was the largest doctoral program in the social sciences at UD. Its reputation grew as its graduates moved into faculty positions at other institutions and maintained connections with the University of Delaware as alumni and active members of the Urban Affairs Association, the secretariat for which remained at the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy.19
The students entering the PhD program after completing the master’s program were typically the best prepared for the demands of doctoral study. The MA in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, first awarded in 1973, was initially a point of entry leading to the PhD program. By the 1980s, however, the master’s began to attract more professionally oriented students who wanted a terminal graduate degree that prepared them for practice in planning, community development, nonprofit leadership, or historic preservation. More doctoral students entered the program with master’s degrees from other institutions and diverse disciplines. The diversity of student backgrounds and interests translated into a wide range of dissertation topics. Some topics were outside the realm of traditional social science scholarship but of great consequence to the broader community, such as poverty and racial and ethnic equality. The broad scope and varying scholarly content and methods reflected in the dissertations written by the college’s students remained a challenge for decades, as there was no consistent rubric for evaluating such diverse work.
In 1984, J. Barry Cullingworth, a senior faculty member and highly productive scholar, reviewed the college’s completed dissertations. He concluded that they were amorphous and difficult to conceptualize. Further, the overall faculty capacity in scholarly research was not sufficient in scope to support the diversity of the doctoral dissertations. Ames recalls having a different assessment: “We were in uncharted waters with no disciplinary canon or established research streams. The dissertations addressed issues that had not previously received academic attention. As for the number of people to serve on committees, we reached out throughout the university for dissertation committee members who were very strong.”20
The urban affairs and public policy graduate program became a bundle of programs wrapped up in a single package. That students attracted to the program had a broad range of social and policy interests could be viewed as a strength, but concerns grew about the resulting challenges. Student research areas ranged widely, including education, social services, energy policy, community development, and public management. Some students were looking for a professional doctoral program, and others were seeking a research degree. While most students were full-time, the program also served part-time students. The result was that the program was subject to increasingly different expectations. There was continuing faculty debate about the types of students in the program, the proper curriculum, the standards students should meet, and the best use of program resources, particularly student funding.
In 1987, an external review team appointed by the UD Faculty Senate to evaluate the program affirmed that it was among the best-known urban affairs programs in the nation.21 Still, it criticized the program for being too open-ended in the scope of its research and for accommodating students with too broad a range of backgrounds and scholarly interests. It recommended that the doctoral program be better defined to focus on a few established areas of faculty scholarship. The program was subsequently redesigned around specializations that reflected the faculty’s primary areas of scholarship: urban governance, planning, and management; technology, environment, and society; and social and urban policy. Ironically, this served to fragment the college’s entire program across these broad areas (and their various subfields as defined by the faculty) rather than reunify it around scholarship in the core field of urban affairs or affirm it as a graduate degree program in public policy and policy analysis.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
The University of Delaware had prominent scholars in public administration in the 1950s and 1960s but no established academic or research program. John Perkins was a nationally recognized political scientist specializing in public administration. While serving as University of Delaware president, he was the editor of Public Administration Review, the major journal in the field. In addition, the university had an endowed professorship in public administration held by Felix Nigro, chairperson of the Department of Political Science in the late 1960s. In 1969, William W. Boyer succeeded Nigro as department chair and Charles P. Messick Professor of Public Administration.22 Boyer received a commitment from university administration to start a Master of Public Administration (MPA) program, a step that an outside evaluation group had previously recommended.23 Soon after his arrival, Boyer concluded that the MPA program should be developed jointly with the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy: “Within only a few months, I became familiar with the urban affairs program and staff, including Jerome Lewis and his Institute for Public Administration, and research that Skip Loessner and others were doing for Delaware’s state and local government. And I came to the conclusion that the only way an MPA could become a reality was for our two units—political science and urban affairs—to offer and administer it jointly. I further concluded that Jerome Lewis should direct the MPA degree.”24 Boyer and Lewis garnered support on campus and from those across the state who would benefit from the program. The program was approved in 1976, and the first MPA degree was awarded in 1978.
While the program was being created, the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) adopted a uniform national curriculum and student service quality standards for the accreditation of MPA programs. The Delaware MPA was among the first such programs to align with the new national quality standards. In 1982, NASPAA formally reviewed the Delaware MPA and certified it as meeting the highest standards for such graduate programs, making it one of the first programs in the nation to be certified.25
The MPA was designed primarily as a full-time degree program, although it did admit part-time students and subsequently developed a mid-career option. What was distinctive about the MPA program from the outset was that it offered students the opportunity to work alongside the faculty and professional staff of the college on applied public administration projects throughout the state. From the program’s inception, the Institute for Public Administration provided ongoing leadership and support both for the program and its students. The role of the Department of Political Science was ultimately limited to a few faculty who taught courses for the program.
By the end of the 1980s, enrollment had grown to sixty students, most of whom were full-time,26 and the MPA program was well established within the college. The need to meet growing accreditation requirements from NASPAA led to a reorganization of the college’s faculty. While still avoiding the creation of separate departments, the college was organized into two separate program faculties, one for urban affairs and public policy and the other for public administration (with cooperation from the Department of Political Science). All college faculty had a primary designation in one program or the other, and the heads of each of the programs had some duties and responsibilities equivalent to department chairs. This model of separate program faculties and program directors continued when new academic programs were added.
EMERGING DIRECTIONS OF SCHOLARSHIP
The scope and impact of the college’s applied policy research and public service often overshadowed its more scholarly contributions, even though the scholarly research productivity of the faculty increased consistently over the 1980s. College faculty and staff increased their output, particularly in several specialty areas, including urban policy, energy and environmental policy, and historic preservation. The growth of work in these areas led to the creation of two new interdisciplinary centers: the Center for Energy and Urban Policy Research (renamed the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy in 1993) and the Center for Historic Architecture and Engineering (renamed the Center for Historic Architecture and Design in 1996).
In 1980, an informal Energy Policy Research Group began to plan for a new center and graduate concentration that would address connections between energy policy and urban policy. Led by John Byrne (PhD, UAPP 1980), the group included faculty members Young-Doo Wang (PhD, UAPP 1980), Dan Rich, and Francis Tannian. Members of the group had researched options to improve energy efficiency and household energy consumption and had worked with the Delaware Public Service Commission to examine a variety of electric utility policies impacting demand and possibilities for conservation. In 1982, the group was awarded a grant from the Unidel Foundation to support the development of interdisciplinary research and graduate education in energy policy. The research program grew rapidly and, in 1986, the Center for Energy and Urban Policy Research (CEUPR) was established, with Byrne as director. CEUPR supported interdisciplinary and collaborative research in energy, environmental, and urban policy, building on the work of the earlier research group. By the end of the 1980s, the center sponsored an area of specialization in the urban affairs and public policy graduate program and was attracting students internationally. In 1989, CEUPR provided financial support for sixteen graduate students who worked with center faculty and staff on research in the U.S. and, increasingly, in other countries.27
The second interdisciplinary research initiative focused on historic preservation. A working group led by faculty members David Ames, Bernard Herman, and Rebecca Siders collaborated with Art History, Art Conservation, and Civil and Environmental Engineering researchers. In 1982, the group received a grant from the University of Delaware Research Fund to support students working on documentation of historic resources. Two years later, their research program transformed into the Center for Historic Architecture and Engineering (CHAE). The center “grew out of a crisis on Delaware’s historic landscape in the early 1980s,” as rapid development across the state posed severe threats to historic buildings and the preservation of structures with cultural significance.28 Chandra Reedy, who became director of the center in 2017, recounts the original reason behind its establishment:29 “The impetus for its founding was an intense threat faced by the historic built environment of northern Delaware from rampant and uncontrolled development in the 1970s and 80s. The initial focus of the Center was on recording information on historic buildings and landscapes prior to their destruction, using measured drawings and photographs.”30 Initial work focused on documenting buildings in Wilmington and New Castle County “with drawings, photographs, and narrative research before they were demolished.”31 Center “faculty and staff quickly began expanding their research along the lines of the rapidly changing historic preservation movement in the United States, developing broader contexts to understand better the ways in which the past shaped the built environment of the mid-Atlantic region.”32 The center’s work also expanded to encompass the entire state.
FIGURE 14A Robert Warren, professor, 1975–2013, and FIGURE 14B J. Barry Cullingworth, professor, 1983–94.
Through a long-term cooperative agreement to document historic resources, CHAE became the first university center recognized by the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record.33 The documentation of historic buildings throughout Delaware became a continuing program of the center, engaging graduate students in the MA in Urban Affairs and Public Policy.34 The center focused on cultural resource planning and architectural history and documentation.35
Both CEUPR and CHAE actively engaged faculty, research professionals, and students from other colleges in their research programs, providing university-wide focal points for interdisciplinary research and graduate education. They broadened the scholarly identity of the college and of the university as a whole.
By 1989, the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy had several senior faculty with national recognition, particularly in urban affairs. An assessment of urban affairs scholarship ranked Robert Warren among the nation’s most cited scholars during the review period of 1986–89. Warren’s scholarly reputation attracted a significant number of doctoral students, and he played a central role in the overall development and visibility of the PhD program.36 The assessment of urban affairs scholarship also recognized J. Barry Cullingworth, one of the nation’s leading urban planning scholars.37 In 1989, the college’s faculty and staff published five books, three monographs, twenty-one journal articles, and fifteen technical reports.38
GROWING PAINS
Initially housed in two small buildings, Raub Hall and 5 West Main Street, with some offices in Willard Hall and other locations, the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy moved to Graham Hall on Academy Street in 1984, but not without complications. The pressures of assigning space in Graham Hall added to tensions within the college.39 In 1985, Timothy Barnekov was appointed associate dean with the explicit responsibility to improve administrative and operational practices and internal communication between the dean’s office and the academic program and center leaders.40 New managerial procedures were introduced, including an improved financial reporting system and more open and systematic communication.
By 1987, the college had fourteen faculty, sixteen professional staff, and twelve support staff.41 It had forty-eight PhD students, twenty-three MA students, and sixty-eight MPA students. It also had five research and public service centers.42 While the college was growing in size and reputation, the finances to support its operations did not keep pace. Changes in national and state priorities had shifted away from areas that previously generated external support, particularly those related to poverty, community organization, and social and economic equity. By the late 1980s, fiscal uncertainty became institutionalized as a chronic condition, as the college had no process for sharing resources across centers and programs to better manage the college-wide impact of the changes in external funding.
The growing pains reflected the college’s continuing transition and also the fact that the university was changing. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the University of Delaware grew dramatically, doubling undergraduate enrollments from 6,500 in 1967 to 13,000 in 1980, with continued growth through the 1980s.43 Graduate and research programs expanded, and so did the physical plant. President Trabant and Provost Campbell had led the university throughout that period of growth. In 1987, Trabant retired. Campbell resigned as provost in 1988, shortly after the appointment of Russell Jones as president on July 1, 1987. Jones immediately engaged the entire university in developing a five-year plan called Project Vision, but he never completed the plan. Jones came into conflict with the Board of Trustees, and on October 24, 1988, he announced his resignation. Trabant returned as president while a presidential search got underway. The search resulted in David Roselle becoming UD’s new president on May 1, 1990.44
FOCUSED PRIORITIES
By the time Roselle became president, the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy was well-established and nationally recognized for its distinctive graduate programs and applied research and public service. In 1992, a national ranking of U.S. graduate urban affairs programs ranked UD’s program fourth in the nation.45 The MPA program received a six-year reaccreditation from the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration. The growing number of alumni of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy led to the establishment of the United Alumni of Urban Affairs (UAUA), which hosted its first event in 1990 and initiated efforts to support the college and provide educational and professional development opportunities for current students. In 1992, the college awarded its first-ever Distinguished Alumni Award for outstanding achievement to Richard Schneider. A graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Schneider earned his PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy in 1985 while serving as executive officer of UD’s College of Marine Studies (later part of the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment). In 1985, Schneider became vice president for research at Drexel University and later was appointed interim vice president for academic affairs and senior vice president for administration. In 1992, Schneider became president of Norwich University, where he continued to serve as of 2021, one of the longest-serving college presidents in the country.46
FIGURE 15. Richard Schneider (PhD, UAPP 1985) received the first Distinguished Alumni Award in 1992.
In 1991, Dan Rich was appointed dean of the college, almost simultaneously with the University of Delaware initiating a series of campus-wide budget reductions. A significant turning point in the development of the college came the following year. Faced with budgetary pressures across campus, Roselle and Provost Byron Pipes called for a review of the college to assess its continued value and cost-effectiveness. A College Review Committee was established by the provost that was chaired by Professor Carol Hoffecker and included other UD faculty members. A key question was how the college fit with the emerging priorities of the university. When Roselle became president, he streamlined his predecessor’s unfinished Project Vision strategic planning process and called his new plan Focused Vision. He hoped to project clear priorities for the university’s development and expected the colleges to do the same.
The challenge for the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy was that there was no longer a shared vision for its future development among its faculty and professional staff. As the college grew and added programs and centers, the earlier focus on urban affairs had dissipated. Many faculty and staff worked in public administration, historic preservation, or a specialized policy field such as energy and environmental policy. At the same time, the centers were growing apart. Even within the graduate programs, the scholarly focus was becoming broader and more diffuse, with more faculty and students focused on scholarship in particular areas of specialization.
The College Review Committee cited the college’s graduate programs for earning a high national ranking and making significant contributions to the university, both in terms of students’ academic qualifications and achievements and the professional accomplishments of graduates. The committee’s report also pointed to the college’s high-quality public service programs and their importance to state and local government. Notably, the report drew attention to the cost-effectiveness of these functions and the synergy of public service, research, and graduate education, “the chief accomplishment of the college,” deserving of continuing university support.47 Recommending that the college remain an exclusively graduate degree-granting unit with a greater focus in areas of strength, the committee also encouraged the engagement of undergraduates in the college’s public service projects. It urged the college to become even more proactive in focusing on the most critical urban, social, and policy issues and bringing the expertise of faculty and students through out the university to bear on addressing these issues.
The committee’s report became the springboard for a strategic plan that aligned the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy’s development with university priorities. The central premise of the plan was that the college needed a stronger scholarly and intellectual center of gravity to underpin its graduate programs and a stronger alignment of those programs with its research and public service centers. In line with the plan, the MPA program faculty redesigned all areas of specialization. The Delaware Public Administration Institute was formally designated to provide direct support for students in that program. The MA also was modified to create a terminal professional degree track. Its program faculty approved new concentrations in areas that the college’s centers could support: community analysis and development, and nonprofit leadership (Center for Community Development); energy and environmental policy (Center for Energy and Environmental Policy); and historic preservation and planning (Center for Historic Architecture and Engineering).48 Similarly, the doctoral program further concentrated on a few areas of research: urban governance and planning; technology and society, with a focus on energy and environmental policy; and social policy, with a focus on education and health policy and community development. It began to focus on admitting students planning to study in those specific areas.
Overall, the college became more self-reliant, especially regarding its finances. Despite budget reductions from the university and increasing competition for external funding, the college carried positive balances between 1991 and 1995.49 It built a reserve account for salaries to provide start-up funding for new projects and carryover funding for professional staff between grants. It also established a reserve account for graduate student funding, enabling admissions committees to make early funding commitments to new students.50 A new overhead policy returned 50 percent of the college’s overhead to its units with the expectation that they would build up their reserves and rely less on the college for unplanned expenses. These changes encouraged the college’s growth through the 1990s.