CHAPTER FOUR

THE SCHOOL OF URBAN AFFAIRS AND PUBLIC POLICY

EARLY IN THE 1990S, from almost the beginning of his tenure, President David Roselle questioned whether the configuration of the University of Delaware’s colleges matched the university’s priorities for the future. Most of UD’s ten colleges, including the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, were small. Some colleges were organized to address needs that were pressing during an earlier period in the university’s history, so the mix of programs in some colleges no longer had a compelling logic. Roselle was also concerned with the administrative cost of maintaining numerous small colleges, each with a dean and dean’s staff, and with redundant expenses to support services for a modest number of faculty, staff, and students.

Beyond campus considerations, external pressures also influenced the reevaluation of the college configuration. The Business Public Education Council (BPEC), a coalition of business and education leaders, formed in 1990 and openly advocated for greater university involvement with public education. Many Delaware public schools, particularly those in Wilmington, were struggling. Roselle believed that a merger of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy with the College of Education would connect the experience in applied research and public service on state policy issues provided by the former with the expertise in best practices in education and teacher preparation cultivated by the latter.

The responsibility for orchestrating the reconfiguration of colleges fell to Provost Melvyn Schiavelli.¹ In September 1995, Schiavelli charged the deans of the colleges likely to be affected with determining if UD was organized in the best way to maximize program strength and achieve the greatest possible intellectual synergy between related programs. In response, the deans concluded that the current organization of colleges was inadequate and in need of change. The option they recommended was a consolidation of five colleges into two new colleges. One consolidation would include the colleges of Education, Human Resources, and Urban Affairs and Public Policy. The other consolidation would include the College of Nursing, the College of Physical Education, Athletics and Recreation, and related health and fitness programs.²

The process moved forward swiftly based on the deans’ recommendation. On July 1, 1997, the College of Human Resources, Education and Public Policy was launched. Two years later, the name changed to the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy, known by its acronym CHEP. The former College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy became the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, one of six academic units in CHEP.³ The administrative leadership of the new college came from members of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. Daniel Rich was appointed the first dean and served until he became university provost in August 2001. He was succeeded as dean by Timothy Barnekov, who had served as associate dean of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy.⁴ Both were inclined to apply features of their former college to CHEP.

As the new college was taking shape, Rich described it in terms that echoed the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy’s mission. CHEP would become “an interdisciplinary, professional, service-oriented college that would address some of the central and interrelated intellectual challenges of our times . . . a tangible 21st-century expression of a dynamic, responsive and innovative land-grant institution enriched and extended beyond any other model to date.”⁵ CHEP’s mission and objectives, developed by a faculty and professional staff group during the transition to the new college, focused on creating and applying “knowledge about the interconnected challenges facing children, families, schools, communities, the environment, and public, private and nonprofit organizations.”⁶ CHEP would also prepare professionals to assume leadership positions in public, private, and nonprofit organizations and promote collaborations that encourage more effective policies and management in all sectors.

While CHEP was being created, the Kellogg Commission on Higher Education, working on behalf of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, advocated a new university model, the engaged university. The commission’s work was motivated by changes in the global political economy of higher education, including those pertaining to resources, technologies, and public expectations. Through reports over five years in the mid-1990s, the commission proposed that the engaged university would address emerging social needs and priorities by creating and using knowledge to better serve the community.⁷ As advocated by the commission, the engaged university would establish broad societal impact as a benchmark of achievement. It was anticipated that increased public funding would be attracted to support that effort.⁸ This was a vision of the land-grant tradition writ large. It defined a campus-wide mission that would mobilize students, faculty, staff, and university leaders to make community engagement a central part of institutional operations and scholarship. The commission stated: “Engagement must become part of the core mission of the university,”⁹ echoing the mission of UD’s new college.

THE EXPANDED STATE PARTNERSHIP

The College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy was the vehicle for an expanded partnership between the university and the State of Delaware designed to mobilize the new college’s applied research and public service capacity to support state priorities. The key to this partnership was CHEP’s center-based strategy, an extension of the research and public service model of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy that focused on issues regarding public education and services to children, families, and low-income communities.

The creation of CHEP aligned with the priorities of then-Delaware Governor Thomas Carper. He had created the Family Services Cabinet Council to focus on integrating programs and services across state agencies, particularly those addressing education, human and social services, community development, and the needs of children and families, especially those in poverty. The alignment of priorities translated to increased state resources to support the work of the new college. Starting in 1997, and for the next decade, the university annually submitted requests for additional state line-item funding for CHEP programs above the state allocation that supported general operations. Most of those requests were approved.¹⁰ Before the college merger, the programs that became a part of CHEP collectively received less than one million dollars in designated state line support. Most of this funding went to programs in the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. By FY2001, recurrent state line funding for CHEP increased to nearly $4.4 million. The increased funding was targeted at specific programs, but the benefits were college-wide. For example, state funding doubled for the Public Service Assistantship program, a crucial component of the Delaware Model.

The new partnership between the state and CHEP focused largely on strengthening the university’s support for improving Delaware public education and providing direct assistance for educational reform. In addition to enhancing programs for teacher education, UD expanded professional development programs for teachers, educational administrators, and others who served Delaware schools and children. Most of these efforts were undertaken by CHEP, although they involved collaboration with secondary education programs in the College of Arts and Sciences and education-related programs in other colleges.¹¹ CHEP launched new and expanded programs in early childhood education and development, disabilities studies and special education, parenting, school board training, school finances and management, and education policy evaluation, and increased support services for children and families.

The state partnership also led to the creation of four new CHEP research and public service centers to support the improvement of public education. The Math and Science Education Resource Center (MSERC) and the Delaware Center for Teacher Education (DCTE) were created to strengthen teachers’ professional development. The Delaware Education Research and Development program, which had been part of another unit, was established as an independent center within the college to provide information and analysis about the condition and performance of the educational system in the state. The fourth new unit was the Center for Disabilities Studies (CDS), which focused on improving public and private services for individuals with disabilities and their families.¹² Each center received direct state funding to supplement support from the university and from external contracts and grants.

The new state partnership significantly impacted the centers that had been part of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. The Institute for Public Administration became the home of the Delaware Academy of School Leadership, which provided professional development and technical assistance for district and school administrators. IPA’s Office of Conflict Resolution assisted in the mediation of disputes in schools and communities. IPA also initiated programs in education management training and school finance and infrastructure planning. IPA’s Democracy Project, headed by former Delaware Secretary of State Edward Freel, offered a unique professional development opportunity in civics education for Delaware social science teachers, enabling them to engage with government and community leaders at all levels. The Delaware Social Studies Education Project, which sponsors in-service professional development for teachers, was initiated by a partnership between the IPA and DCTE.

Other centers added programs complementary to the new partnership. The Center for Community Development was renamed the Center for Community Development and Family Policy to engage the faculty and students in CHEP’s Department of Individual and Family Studies. It became the home of the Delaware Kids Count program, supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which tracks the health and well-being of Delaware’s children. The center also launched a Nonprofit Capacity Building Program to strengthen the contributions of Delaware’s nonprofit sector to the overall improvement of communities throughout the state. The Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research developed a new database for school finance information, conducted regular statewide surveys that covered education and human service issues, and provided demographic data supporting enrollment projections for Delaware school districts. CHEP became the primary research, planning, technical assistance, and professional development arm for Delaware’s public education and human service agencies. The college forged new education partnerships in all parts of the state.¹³

CHEP also served as the administrative home for other state and community program initiatives. Public Allies Delaware (an AmeriCorps program) joined the Center for Community Development and Family Policy, and DCTE sponsored the Delaware Mentoring Council. CHEP centers regularly convened public policy forums and conferences to address key Delaware policy issues, especially in education and social services. The college also issued policy reports and evaluations of state practices. Many of the programs launched through CHEP’s partnership with the state continued for the next two decades, especially those focused on improving Delaware public education and services for children and families.

SUAPP

By the late 1990s, all of the leading comprehensive public affairs programs across the U.S. were professional schools. The former College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy faculty wanted the University of Delaware program to have the same designation. Thus, when the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy was created, the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy (SUAPP) became the first new school approved by the university since the trustees’ decision in 1964 to convert all previous schools to colleges.

Jeffrey Raffel became the founding director of the newly designated school and served in this capacity for the next decade. Raffel had joined the Division of Urban Affairs in 1971 after completing his PhD at MIT. Before serving as SUAPP director, he had been the director of the MPA program. From the outset of his appointment, Raffel focused on strengthening the school’s reputation. Some of his efforts focused on marketing the school’s programs, which had not been done earlier in any methodical way. The school developed a new newsletter, the first school website, and a branding of the Delaware Model under the slogan “Make a Real Difference,” which became the centerpiece of the school’s graduate recruitment efforts. However, the larger objective was to gain greater national recognition for SUAPP among peers in the public affairs education community. The school systematically pursued that objective during Raffel’s tenure, and, over the next decade, its reputation as one of the nation’s leading comprehensive public affairs programs grew.

The orientation of CHEP was aligned with the school’s priorities, and the school benefited from the addition of resources to support the new college. Raffel discovered, however, that not all facets of the new college helped the school. When CHEP was created, the centers and institutes from the merging colleges remained at the college level. The rationale was that they were the bridges between the university and the communities it served. This arrangement created a challenge for the school. The academic programs and faculty appointments were in the school itself and under the administrative responsibility of the school director. However, the centers that generated funding to support SUAPP’s academic programs and the Delaware Model were operating college-wide, and their directors reported to the dean.¹⁴ The school director held the same responsibilities as a department chair and, as Raffel recognized early on, lacked the authority over the centers the earlier leaders of the program held when it had college status. In his reflections on that period, Raffel declares that his most difficult day-to-day challenge was the school’s dependence on centers that were not under his authority.¹⁵

This split structure led to cumbersome ongoing negotiations between the SUAPP director and the center directors.¹⁶ Even so, the funding support provided by the centers for graduate students in the school increased continuously over the new college’s first five years, a product of the increased funding of the centers from the state and the growth of external grants and contracts. In addition, a university policy adopted in 2003 provided a matching tuition scholarship for students on a graduate research contract who received their stipends from an external grant or contract, so long as overhead charges were applied to the stipends.¹⁷ This doubled the dollars provided for graduate student support. Raffel recalls that this “was the Golden Age of the school’s student financial aid almost certainly unequaled in public affairs graduate programs in the nation.”¹⁸ By September 2005, the school had over one hundred graduate research assistants and fellowships, most funded from external grants and contracts.¹⁹ Under the new arrangement, the Delaware Model was flourishing.

DRIVING DIVERSITY

Building on the original mandate of the Division of Urban Affairs, enhanced during its years as an independent college, the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy was a university leader in promoting racial and ethnic diversity. The early foundations for this role were established with the initial staffing of the Division of Urban Affairs and notably the Urban Agent Program led by James Sills. By the early 1990s, the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy’s graduate program had been recognized for its leadership in minority enrollment and retention. In 1993, the MPA received a special citation from the university’s Commission to Promote Racial and Cultural Diversity for its success in “the recruitment and retention of African-American graduate students and for, consistently over the years, leading the university in the percentage of graduate students who are African-American.”²⁰ The previous year, the provost’s review committee had confirmed that “the MPA program consistently attracts more Black Americans and Hispanic students than any other graduate program.”²¹ The committee added that “the college’s three graduate programs collectively account for about 20% of all minority graduate students at the university.”²²

One of the primary reasons for SUAPP’s success in minority recruitment, retention, and graduation was the consistent personal effort put forth by faculty, staff, students, and administrators. James Sills and Betty McCummings, who led the MPA program in the early 1990s, were both graduates of historically Black colleges and interested in urging undergraduates from those colleges to attend the University of Delaware for graduate study. Beyond recruitment, there was a consistent focus on student development, a feature of the Delaware Model. Many graduate classes focused on policy topics related to the intersecting challenges of poverty, race, community development, and social justice. In addition, the graduate programs were notable for gender diversity. When the school was created, most of its graduate students were women.

In 2000, as the result of a successful development effort, the university established the endowed Louis L. Redding Chair in Law and Social Policy in the school. Redding was Delaware’s premier Black civil rights leader and the lead attorney on the case that resulted in the desegregation of the University of Delaware. He was also the lead attorney on two Delaware cases that became part of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public education unconstitutional. Leland Ware was hired as the first Redding Chair, with the explicit mandate to strengthen SUAPP’s research and instruction on civil rights issues and racial and ethnic equality. Ware, a Boston College Law School graduate, had worked with the U.S. Department of Justice and was on the Saint Louis University Law School faculty. His scholarship focused on civil rights and segregation. One of Ware’s first initiatives was the Redding Young Scholars, a year-long academic enrichment program that paired high school students with UD undergraduate and graduate student mentors to prepare participants for leadership roles in law and public service. Ware’s appointment, Raffel recalls, “reinforced the school’s engagement in Wilmington and the minority community and brought a senior legal scholar to the school. Ware also helped with the recruitment of minority students.”²³

Ware became an outspoken advocate for the school’s leadership role in increasing diversity at the university. He later reflected on that role: “[The school] has long been a leader in promoting diversity on UD’s campus and in the surrounding communities. The composition of [the school’s] faculty and student body make it the most diverse academic unit on UD’s campus. Our students and faculty work closely with several community organizations that serve African American and Hispanic constituencies.”²⁴ In 2001, SUAPP’s strategic priorities affirmed its commitment to diversity as a shared value and a core dimension of quality. In that same year, the UD Commission to Promote Racial and Cultural Diversity selected the school to receive the Louis L. Redding Diversity Award for its effectiveness in recruiting and supporting diverse students and faculty and for addressing issues of racial and cultural equity in its instruction, research, and public service programs.

PUBLIC SERVICE FACULTY AND PROFESSIONALS

Most senior professionals affiliated with the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy contributed to its instructional programs and engaged in research and public service through the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy’s centers; many had secondary faculty appointments. In 2001, those senior professionals carrying out faculty responsibilities were converted to non-tenure track public service faculty, and became members of the faculty collective bargaining unit, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The conversion worked well for the school since it formally recognized the critical role of the senior professionals in the success of its academic programs. The problem, however, was that the funding for their positions often depended on defined responsibilities for applied research and public service rather than for academic instruction or longer-term scholarly research. Barnekov recalls that the non-tenure track public service faculty often sought extensive involvement in teaching, advisement, and thesis and dissertation supervision in the academic programs.²⁵ Many of the professional staff in the school who were not converted to non-tenure track faculty also had solid backgrounds in research, and many were interested in teaching. As the graduate programs grew, more were called upon to teach master’s level classes and supervise students, including many students who worked on externally funded projects.

For some professional staff, these circumstances created a conflict between their applied research and public service assignments and their desire to teach, supervise students, and publish in academic journals. In 2002, Barnekov, with the provost’s support, proposed that at least 10 percent of the workload for professionals with secondary faculty appointments be designated for scholarly research. While implementing this proposal was an official acknowledgement of the issue, the action was largely symbolic. In practice, this modest allocation did little to alleviate the conflict in roles and responsibilities SUAPP’s senior professionals were facing.

CHEP’s practice of placing new tenure track faculty on extended appointments to its centers posed a different but related challenge. In addition to their traditional nine-month academic year contract, these faculty received two months of summer support to participate in externally funded research and public service. The expectation was that the extended appointments would eventually be self-supporting since the new faculty would become more active in developing external grants and contracts.²⁶ However, the difficulty in engaging faculty in the centers’ applied research and public service programs became more acute as UD developed a stronger identity as a research university. Faculty success measures increasingly emphasized refereed publications and scholarly citations over projects focused on improving communities or policies. While some new faculty worked across teaching, scholarly research, and public service domains, most made limited contributions to public service and applied research. The idea of an integrated orientation toward scholarship that connected teaching, research, and public service was not consistent with the university’s incentive structure for faculty promotion and tenure.

THE NEW UNDERGRADUATE MISSION

Proposals for the school to develop a role in undergraduate education long predated the creation of CHEP. For example, the 1992 university-level review of the then-College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy had called for its faculty to play a role in undergraduate education by teaching some courses and offering applied learning opportunities to undergraduate students. Still, the review affirmed that the college should not offer a major or minor and should remain a graduate unit. Now that the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy was part of the second-largest undergraduate college at UD, the university leadership’s expectations were quite different. The occasion to support an undergraduate program came from a reorganization within CHEP.

When the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy was formed, it included the Department of Consumer Studies, a unit of the previous College of Human Resources. The department focused on undergraduate education and had two separate program areas: Consumer Economics, and Apparel Design and Fashion Merchandising. Each area had dedicated faculty and degree programs, and the two programs were developed along quite different pathways. Recognizing that the new college offered opportunities for program reorientation and redesign, and with a growing faculty scholarly interest in the field of leadership, the Consumer Economics faculty in 2001 redesigned their major to become Leadership and Consumer Economics. They also added a minor in Leadership. In 2004, at essentially the same time as the department reorganized, the major’s name was changed to Leadership. The provost and the CHEP dean then proposed that the Leadership program and its faculty should join SUAPP, as the undergraduate program was developing in ways aligned with graduate programs in the school that focused on public and nonprofit leadership.

To Raffel, the proposed move seemed like an excellent opportunity for the school. He recounts, “In short, this was a way to get seven new faculty or faculty lines instantly, have a successful undergraduate program,” and get the administration “off our backs” for not playing a sufficient role in undergraduate education.²⁷ Despite these advantages, some of SUAPP’s faculty considered adding the undergraduate program to be incompatible with the school’s focus on graduate education. Ultimately, despite some dissent, the move of the Leadership program was approved by the faculties of both units. The head of the program, Karen Stein (PhD, UAPP 1984), argued that students majoring in Leadership would have expanded opportunities through the school. These benefits would include “more prospects for conducting undergraduate research because of the ready access to a larger faculty, the availability of more internships, and SUAPP’s numerous partnerships with governmental and nonprofit agencies.”²⁸

The addition of the Leadership undergraduate program launched a new phase in the school’s development. Within ten years, SUAPP would have over five hundred undergraduate students pursuing three different academic majors and four minors. The school also would become a leader in combined programs that enabled highly qualified students to complete a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in five years.

EXEMPLIFYING THE ENGAGED UNIVERSITY

Reflecting on the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy’s development after his second five-year term, Raffel recalls being pleased by what had been accomplished. He was particularly proud of the improvement of student recruitment, the addition of an undergraduate program, and the growth of the graduate programs. “We were graduating over 60 graduate students annually.”²⁹ Beyond its specific accomplishments, SUAPP was becoming better recognized as one of the nation’s premier comprehensive public affairs schools. Raffel had set this as a priority at the outset of his tenure as director. While some of the school’s faculty continued to be active in urban affairs, Raffel and others participated more in the national public administration associations, the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA).³⁰ The latter was significant since it was the accrediting association for public affairs programs, having a tremendous impact on the reputation and recognition of those programs, and included the directors of all of the major public affairs programs across the nation. Raffel joined its accreditation commission for master’s programs and chaired it from 2003 to 2005. He later served as chair of the accreditation standards revision committee and became NASPAA vice president in 2008 and president in 2009.³¹ Other SUAPP faculty became regular contributors to NASPAA and ASPA programs and remained engaged with the Urban Affairs Association.

Robert Denhardt had been instrumental in building the school’s reputation in the 1990s by making the Delaware Model better known and appreciated within the national public affairs field. He left the school in 2000 and vacated the endowed Charles P. Messick Chair in Public Administration. The same year that Raffel was appointed founding director of SUAPP, he was also appointed the new Messick Chair, a position he held until his retirement, after which it was awarded to his successor as director of the school, Maria Aristigueta. A provision of the original Messick endowment was that a portion of it would support a distinguished visiting scholar each year, designated the Messick Fellow, who would come to campus for a short period to deliver lectures and work with faculty and students. Those subsequently appointed Messick Fellows became part of a growing network of distinguished affiliated scholars that further enhanced recognition of the school.

By 2002, U.S. News & World Report ranked SUAPP among the top fifty public affairs schools in the nation. The school retained its high ranking as seventh in the nation in urban policy and city government. The school also gained recognition in nonprofit management, which led to a national ranking in that specialization in subsequent years. The School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy’s reputation as a nationally ranked, comprehensive school of public affairs was indisputable.

By 2006, in many ways, UD exemplified the model of the engaged university. In that year, Rich addressed the national meeting of the Consortium of University Public Service Organizations hosted at the university. He titled his presentation: “The University of Delaware as an Engaged University.” He argued that UD was among the most public universities. This was not because of state funding but because of UD’s impact across the First State. UD was a land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant, and urban-grant institution, and the only comprehensive research university in a small state. It was called upon to fulfill responsibilities that would have been met in larger states by government agencies, quasi-governmental institutions, or many different universities.³² UD was an indispensable partner of state and local government agencies and of nonprofit institutions in providing expertise and technical assistance to improve the quality of life in communities across Delaware. In particular, Rich pointed to the contributions of SUAPP and CHEP as exemplifying the model of a twenty-first-century engaged university.³³

On May 23, 2006, David Roselle announced that he would step down as UD president at the end of the next academic year, marking seventeen years of service. Roselle had been the architect of the modern University of Delaware. Under his leadership, UD was transformed from a good-quality regional institution into one of the nation’s finest public universities. For the Delaware community, the most critical transformation was that the university was now serving more Delawareans with a broader array of programs than ever before, and both the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy and the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy were instrumental in that change.³⁴ Roselle’s tenure had strengthened UD’s role as an engaged university.