INTRODUCTION

ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2018, at the semiannual meeting of the University of Delaware Board of Trustees, President Dennis Assanis announced the establishment of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration (the Biden School). The announcement reflected the close, productive, and long-standing relationship between the forty-seventh Vice President of the United States and the University of Delaware (UD). Biden earned his bachelor’s degree at the university in 1965 and was a dedicated Blue Hen throughout his public life. During his thirty-six-year tenure as a U.S. Senator, he frequently visited the campus, giving speeches on critical issues, including a passionate address to the university community after the 9/11 terrorist attack. Biden delivered four commencement addresses (1978, 1987, 2004, and 2014) and received an honorary doctoral degree from UD in 2004. In 2012, the university became the repository for his senatorial papers.

There also were strong ties between the Biden family and the university. Biden’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden, received an undergraduate degree from UD in 1975 and earned her doctoral degree in educational leadership from the university in 2006. Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, was UD’s 1965 homecoming queen and graduated as a dean’s scholar in 1967.

Even before Biden was elected vice president, there were many proposals for how the university should recognize and celebrate its most distinguished alumnus. Once he completed his vice presidency, given the recognition that Biden had already received from the university, it was not obvious what further recognition of his public service would be most meaningful.

Shortly after Dennis Assanis was appointed University of Delaware president on November 18, 2015, he concluded that the best tribute to the former vice president, with the most lasting impact on the university’s future, would be to add Biden’s name to the School of Public Policy and Administration. The school was already a nationally recognized comprehensive school of public affairs, and naming it for the vice president would affirm the school as a priority for the university. “This is an exciting time for public policy education at the University of Delaware,” Assanis explained. “By naming our school the Biden School, we not only recognize and honor our most esteemed alum in public service, but we also reinforce our commitment to elevating our school’s academic excellence and stature to be among the very best public policy programs in the nation.”¹

A white paper commissioned by Assanis concluded that naming the school for Biden would help propel it to the nation’s top tier of public affairs programs.² It also would reaffirm the school’s historical mission of addressing some of the nation’s critical challenges. For more than half a century, the university programs that became the Biden School had carried out this mission. Naming the school signaled the priority of supporting that mission and extending the school’s contributions.

HISTORY OF THE BIDEN SCHOOL

This book reviews the history of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration from 1961 to 2021. The focus is on the school’s accomplishments over its first sixty years, how they were achieved, and why they are significant. The analysis describes the challenges and opportunities that shaped the school’s development and its emergence as one of the nation’s leading public affairs schools.

The book is organized into three parts, representing key periods in the school’s sixty-year history. Part I chronicles the school’s early history from the founding of the Division of Urban Affairs in 1961 through the two decades (1976–96) when it was the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. In this period, key programs of applied research and public service were developed, and the Delaware Model of public affairs graduate education was created and refined. Part II describes a period of transformation between 1997 and 2014. A college merger in 1997 led to a new designation as the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, a unit within a larger, newly amalgamated college. During this period, the school’s programs and identity broadened, including the addition of undergraduate programs, and it became a comprehensive school of public affairs. Part III focuses on the period between 2015 and 2021. This period was marked by rising expectations driven by a new vision of the school’s development as a pillar of the university.

Each period was characterized by distinctive achievements, many of which were cumulative and influenced the school’s long-term development. The Division of Urban Affairs, created through a Ford Foundation grant in 1961 to address the emerging problems of urban America, embodied a new model of university public service and applied research. Between 1961 and 1975, the division developed innovative, community-focused centers that generated and used research-based knowledge to inform public policy. While the initial focus was on Wilmington and the surrounding metropolitan region, the scope of the division’s contributions rapidly expanded across the state of Delaware. The programs developed by the division in the 1960s and 1970s became part of the core infrastructure underpinning the school’s development over the next half-century.

The creation of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy in 1976 represented a critical decision to establish one of the nation’s first colleges focused on urban and policy issues. Like the Division of Urban Affairs from which it evolved, the new college was different by design. It was a graduate college in a predominantly undergraduate institution. It was also an interdisciplinary unit carrying out applied research and public service in a university primarily organized around established disciplines and traditional forms of scholarship. The college advocated for greater racial, ethnic, and international diversity in its student body and faculty before university policy fully reflected those values. It accomplished its mission using a unique model of faculty responsibilities, a non-departmental structure, a reliance on centers and institutes to carry out much of its mission, and an innovative budgeting system. These attributes were a source of the college’s creativity and, in some regards, enhanced its longer-term contributions to the university.

The college’s interdisciplinary, community-focused, and policy-oriented scholarship was pathbreaking, helping to create the field of urban affairs and positioning the various iterations of the Biden School to serve for decades as the professional hub for programs in that field. The school’s graduate programs focused on developing a new generation of scholars capable of identifying creative solutions to community problems and translating those solutions into public policies and community services. By the 1990s, the college was carrying out projects with hundreds of local, state, national, and global partners. These collaborations helped to modernize and professionalize Delaware state and local government, improve the performance of nonprofit and community organizations, and strengthen the delivery of public services in domains as diverse as land-use planning and community health, and the provision of social programs for children, families, and neighborhoods. The college brought data, analysis, and professional expertise to governmental decision-making, influencing public policy on issues ranging from educational equity to energy conservation.

The college’s research and public service programs and its network of community partnerships supported the development of a distinctive model of public affairs education. The Delaware Model enabled graduate students to work alongside faculty and professional staff to apply what they learned in their classrooms to concrete public policy challenges. The model has gained special recognition in the field of public administration because it integrates theory and practice in ways not typical of most public administration programs. When the school later offered undergraduate programs, those students also benefited from the Delaware Model, having access to experiential learning opportunities usually available only to graduate students.

In 1997, when the college became the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, it joined a new larger college created to increase the impact of university programs in the community. The following decade was notable for the expanding scope of the University of Delaware’s engagement in public issues. In many ways, UD became an exemplar of an engaged university, an institution organized to use knowledge to enrich the overall quality of life in the communities it serves. During the 1990s and early 2000s, aspirations for the school focused more explicitly on it becoming a comprehensive school of public affairs. Early in the twenty-first century, it ranked in the top tier of such schools.

In 2011, the school changed its name to the School of Public Policy and Administration to better reflect its broadened scope. After a reorganization, it joined the College of Arts and Sciences. The Great Recession of 2008 and the complications of the school’s changing institutional location resulted in a contraction of resources. Even so, when the school celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, its impacts on the university, on public affairs education and research, and on communities across Delaware were well-documented. Many of the school’s earlier graduates had risen to leadership positions in public and nonprofit institutions, while others carried out scholarship on critical policy issues.

In 2015, President Assanis announced a new vision of the school’s role in the university’s overall development. That vision included naming the school for then-Vice President Biden. After the vision was announced, the school expanded. The faculty grew from 24 in 2015 to 35 in 2019.³ The number of Biden School graduate students also increased, reaching an enrollment of 200 in fall 2021.⁴ Another essential step followed in 2020 when the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration became the first freestanding professional school at the university, placing it on an institutional level comparable to the nation’s other leading public affairs schools. As of this book’s writing, the school offers five doctoral programs, six master’s programs, three undergraduate majors, and four undergraduate minors. It has six research and public service centers, including three core units created a half-century earlier. It also includes the Biden Institute, for which Joe Biden was the founding chair.

The Biden School’s history is instructive beyond its importance to those who have been part of the school or benefited from its research and public service programs. The school has been an innovator in its organization and curricula. Throughout its history, the school has faced demands to become more aligned with traditional academic structure and norms. At several points, the future of the school was at risk. In each case, the school prevailed. The history of the school is thus a story of institutional innovation, perseverance, adaptation, and resilience.

The Biden School’s journey also provides a case study of organizational leadership in higher education. Most studies of higher education leadership describe the contributions of one or a few university leaders, typically in a single period in an institution’s history. The Biden School has engaged many leaders within the school and the university over more than a half-century. The school’s directors and deans, and center and academic program leaders, some of whom served for decades, have made key leadership contributions. Equally important, intellectual and creative leadership from faculty and staff has generated new approaches to public affairs education and research and a comprehensive, novel model of university public service. The Biden School’s long-term success was also made possible by critical commitments from university administrators at key points in its history. Without those commitments, the school might not have survived, much less thrived. The history of the school chronicles the influence of many types of leaders and forms of higher education leadership over more than half a century.

The Biden School has always engaged in “translational research,” using the knowledge it generates to address the wider community’s challenges, bridging the world of ideas and the world of action. What began in 1961 as an experimental program supported by a single external grant emerged six decades later as one of the nation’s leading comprehensive schools of public affairs. That transformation unfolded during one of the most dynamic periods in the history of higher education, when the public purpose of universities was debated and eventually expanded.

THE PUBLIC PURPOSE

The Biden School’s history is deeply intertwined with the University of Delaware’s emergence as one of the nation’s premier engaged research universities. Over more than half a century, the school expanded UD’s public purpose. That purpose is reflected in the university’s mission, which describes it as “an institution engaged in addressing the critical needs of the state, the nation, and global community.”⁵

Founded in 1743, the university expanded its mission when it became a land-grant institution. When the Morrill Act of 1862 was enacted, the United States was still predominantly a rural and agricultural nation. The legislation ceded federal lands to states with the provision that proceeds from selling that land would fund collegiate programs in such “useful arts” as agriculture, mechanics, mining, and military instruction. In addition, the “land-grant” funding would “promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”⁶ The 1862 law granted Delaware an allocation of ninety thousand acres of federal land. The funds from selling that land created an endowment for Delaware College, which later became the University of Delaware.

The university, which had been struggling financially, “was not only saved by financial support from the Land Grant Act but given a mission of public service that would bind it to the people of our State forever.”⁷ The land-grant designation marked the beginning of its dual public/private identity, which remains a crucial part of its institutional character. While becoming the flagship public university of the state of Delaware, the University of Delaware retained features of its initial status as a private institution, most notably in its governance by a self-selecting board of trustees.

For most of the hundred years after the Morrill Act went into effect, the land-grant identity of the university centered on its programs in agriculture and engineering, then known as the mechanical arts.⁸ The provision of the Morrill Act to expand education to “the industrial classes” (such as factory workers) had little impact. When it became a land-grant institution, the students served were white men, 75 percent of whom came from Delaware. The Women’s College was not established until 1914. The University of Delaware was a racially segregated institution. The second Morrill Act in 1890 led to the establishment of Delaware State College (later Delaware State University), a land-grant institution for African Americans that shared in the land-grant resources that came to the state. UD remained segregated until a ruling by Judge Collins Seitz in the case of Parker v. University of Delaware in the Delaware Court of Chancery eliminated formal segregation in 1950.⁹

Most land-grant colleges and universities, including the University of Delaware, were modest-sized institutions until after World War II. Following the war, U.S. higher education underwent a dramatic expansion driven by a redefined public purpose. Government leaders proclaimed higher education as the pathway for millions of citizens to join a prosperous middle class and believed that a college-educated labor force is essential to U.S. economic prosperity and national security. Federal and state investment fueled the rapid expansion of colleges and universities.¹⁰ John Thelin calls the period from 1945 to 1970 “higher education’s golden age.”¹¹ One of the key drivers of this growth was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (popularly known as the G.I. Bill). The legislation enabled returning veterans to pursue higher education rather than enter the postwar labor market. The result was a remarkable growth in enrollments at colleges and universities.¹² In 1939–40, UD reached its highest prewar enrollment of 939 students. Right after the war, in 1946–47, the number doubled to about 1,900; nearly two-thirds of those students were returning veterans.¹³ Student enrollments at the university continued to grow for the next seventy years, reaching over twenty-four thousand in 2020.

The federal government also expanded the public purpose of universities through investment in research and advanced graduate and professional programs. In the decades after World War II, universities were viewed as having a central role in helping to solve critical social and economic challenges—ranging from the Cold War to the War on Poverty. National security was the core argument driving the ramp-up of federal funding for research and development. Recognizing that the mobilization of university scientists and engineers could help win the Cold War, federal government leaders expected that those scholars should be relied upon to help preserve the peace. Universities accordingly invested in programs, research facilities, and infrastructure to attract federal funding. Annual federal funding of research and development at institutions of higher education doubled from $9 billion to $18 billion between 1970 and 1990. It almost doubled again to $32 billion by 2008, with much of this investment going to a concentrated group of research universities, which Clark Kerr called “federal grant universities.”¹⁴

The University of Delaware became a major research university later than many state flagship institutions. Through the 1990s, most of its externally funded research was in a few science and engineering departments or units that received funds because of the university’s designation as a land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant, and, for a short while, urban-grant institution. UD remained a predominantly undergraduate institution with limited externally funded research activity. There was a strong tradition of engaging undergraduates in research at UD because there were few graduate students with whom research-oriented faculty could work. There was also a relatively modest externally funded research program to support graduate students. Graduate programs did not expand significantly until the 1960s and 1970s, and even at the start of the 1990s, the university’s full-time graduate enrollment was still barely more than 1,500. From the 1960s through the 1990s, UD’s investments in expanding its research and graduate profile were highly selective, focusing on areas that were likely to gain the university national prominence. The creation and expansion of the programs that would become the Biden School were a product of that selectivity. However, the initial impetus for these programs was much more than the opportunity to gain prominence in an academic field.

The programs were also a response to an external invitation to address the growing challenges of the nation’s cities and do so by bringing together scholars from many disciplines to work directly with the communities to be served. The Biden School’s beginnings reflected UD’s decision to become a more engaged university, one committed to interdisciplinary, action-oriented scholarship. From the outset, the Biden School represented an expansion of UD’s public purpose. That expansion continued, helping the University of Delaware become one of the nation’s most engaged research universities during the first sixty years of the school’s history.