Notes
THE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION had been on a growth trajectory as a result of the new vision Assanis announced for its development in 2015. Even before SPPA was officially renamed the Biden School, new faculty positions were approved that aligned with the priorities described in Dan Rich and David Wilson’s 2016 white paper. The faculty increased from twenty-four in 2014 to thirty-five in 2019, with additional faculty positions committed as part of the approved hiring plan. The number of joint-appointment faculty increased when the school expanded its collaborative programs with other academic units. Scholars from policy analysis, public administration, and urban affairs were joined by colleagues in engineering, physics, law, geography, philosophy, public health, environmental science, and education.
Upon being named the Biden School, its four previously affiliated centers and institutes—the Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research, Center for Community Research and Service, Center for Historic Architecture and Design, and Institute for Public Administration—were joined by the Biden Institute and the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy. Two additional units were also affiliated with the school: the Disaster Research Center and the Community Engagement Initiative.1 Each of the new units expanded the scope of the school’s programs and engaged the participation of additional faculty, professionals, and students.
GROWTH OF THE ACADEMIC PROGRAMS
The new faculty hired after 2015 expanded the scope of the school’s interdisciplinary research and strengthened its academic programs. They also increased capacity in the core areas of public policy and public administration and substantive areas of education policy, health policy, energy and environmental policy, and disaster science and management.2 Many of the veteran faculty were also engaged in emerging policy research areas.3
Equally important, some new faculty took on leadership positions in the expanding graduate programs. Sarah Bruch became director of the PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and the program was renamed the PhD in Public Policy and Administration to align with the name of the school. Katie Fitzpatrick led the newly launched Master of Public Policy program, one of the essential degrees for a comprehensive school of public affairs. Kimberley Isett led the policy side of the new Master of Public Health (MPH), jointly offered with the College of Health Sciences. Daniel Smith directed the MPA program until he was appointed associate dean for the social sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences in July 2021.
FIGURE 54. Joe Biden with members of the Biden School faculty after the naming of the school, December 11, 2018.
FIGURE 55A Sarah Bruch, director of the PhD in Public Policy and Administration; FIGURE 55B Katie Fitzpatrick, director of the Master of Public Policy program; and, FIGURE 55C Daniel Smith, director of the MPA program.
Other graduate leadership roles were filled by veteran faculty. Joseph Trainor, who was leading the Disaster Science and Management graduate program, became the school’s director of doctoral studies, overseeing the coordinated development of its PhD programs. Ismat Shah, a materials science and engineering professor with a joint appointment in the school, directed the energy and environmental policy graduate program. Danilo Yanich continued to serve as director of the MA in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, a position he held since 2006.
The MPA program developed an online option to serve part-time students recruited nationally through a partnership with Wiley, one of the nation’s leading online services platforms. Maria Aristigueta recalls several meetings with Wiley’s representatives, who suggested that there might be significant demand for an online MPA program. She explains, “I embraced that option because the school needed to draw paying professional master’s students, and we had not experienced much success bringing part-time students to campus. The commitment was made to have the full-time Biden School faculty develop and teach the courses, thereby maintaining the quality of the program and meeting accreditation requirements.”4
The online MPA and other new programs significantly impacted the School of Public Policy and Administration’s masters-level enrollment. Master’s degree enrollment had declined through 2015, but it rebounded and increased by 2019. The scholarship program approved by Dean George Watson in 2015 reduced the cost of tuition for Delawareans and those working in the public and nonprofit sectors. In March 2021, the University of Delaware trustees reduced graduate tuition in the school and other units by 50 percent, bringing it in line with rates at peer institutions. Among other factors, this increased fall 2021 enrollment in the Biden School’s master’s degree programs and raised total graduate enrollment to two hundred.
While the school had been oriented toward graduate programs for much of its history, by 2019, it offered undergraduate majors and minors in Organizational and Community Leadership, Public Policy, and Energy and Environmental Policy, as well as a minor in Public Health (offered jointly with the College of Health Sciences).5 The number of undergraduates increased steadily and dramatically, from 110 majors and minors in 2009 to 569 majors and minors in 2019. While most of the school’s faculty taught undergraduates in addition to graduates, some focused mainly on the undergraduate programs. This focus was particularly true for the faculty working with the Organizational and Community Leadership program, which had been the first undergraduate program in the school in 2004. Karen Stein continued to serve as program director, working with James L. Morrison, Anthony Middlebrooks, and Jane Case Lilly (PhD, UAPP 2008).
FIGURE 56. Danilo Yanich (PhD 1980), professor (1985–2021) and director of the MA in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, with research assistants Allison Becker (MA 2015) and David Karas (PhD 2017).
FIGURE 57A Karen Stein (PhD, 1984), director, Leadership Program, 2005–9, and director, Organizational and Community Leadership Program, 2010–21; and FIGURE 57B Breck Robinson, director, undergraduate Public Policy Program, 2015–21.
As the Public Policy major grew, more of the school’s faculty played a role in that program. Breck Robinson served as program director from 2015 to 2021, and Nina David, Erin Knight, Andrea Pierce, and Philip Barnes played central roles in instruction and advisement. In addition, doctoral students served as teaching assistants and course instructors, which provided those students with funding support and experience in teaching and student advising, and supplemented the undergraduate teaching capacity.
By 2019, excellence and innovation in undergraduate education had become part of the institutional signature of the Biden School. Perhaps one of the best examples of this was the establishment of 4+1 options for highly qualified Public Policy, Organizational and Community Leadership, and Energy and Environmental Policy undergraduates.6 By 2021, a dozen 4+1 programs enabled undergraduates in majors as diverse as English, Economics, and Women’s Studies to complete one of the Biden School’s master’s programs on an accelerated schedule.
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
To some extent, the immediate impact of the Biden School’s transition was overshadowed by the challenges of the COVID-19 health crisis. For the University of Delaware and the Biden School, like other educational institutions, the year 2020 was unsettling, fraught with uncertainties, different from any time in the past, and ultimately transformative. The crisis unfolded in a series of waves, beginning with a sudden and almost total transition to online instruction in the spring semester and extending to a series of budget cuts and personnel actions that grew in scale and consequence through the fall.7 The campus closed in mid-March and remained closed for the remainder of 2020 and through the spring and summer of 2021. The dominant medium of university life became videoconferencing on Zoom. The new motto for the entire Blue Hen community became “Protect the Flock!”
On April 27, 2020, President Assanis sent a message to the UD community summarizing the university’s response to the evolving crisis and its fiscal consequences and indicating that, for the spring semester, the unforeseen impact on the campus budget was calculated to be more than $65 million. The university administration adopted a series of cost-cutting and efficiency measures to address these budget impacts, including an immediate university-wide hiring freeze, a travel ban, a deferral of some previously approved capital projects, a moratorium on approval of new projects, a suspension of discretionary spending, and staff realignments to support greater efficiency.
In this turbulent and unprecedented environment, the Biden School’s transition proceeded, mainly on schedule, but under circumstances quite different than previously anticipated. The hiring freeze indefinitely suspended the school’s approved faculty hiring plan. The additional professional staff needed to support the operation of a freestanding school would not be hired for the foreseeable future. The crisis also created practical challenges for the school’s applied research and public service programs, particularly those that required active engagement with external institutions. Faculty, staff, and students alike faced immediate challenges to carrying out their research, including dissertation research that required travel or the gathering of data directly from the wider community. Many scrambled to revise their research designs to accommodate the limits posed by the pandemic.
As of July 1, 2020, when the Biden School became a freestanding unit, UD’s fiscal situation was still in flux, and no units had confirmed budgets for the new fiscal year. The university was implementing a new budgeting model before the onset of the health crisis, and some of its details had still not been confirmed. The Biden School faced the additional complication that it was transitioning from a budget that had been part of the College of Arts and Sciences to one that was independent.
The fall 2020 semester began on September 1, almost entirely online. By then, the fiscal forecast for UD had worsened. Assanis announced further actions to mitigate the budget shortfall.8 UD would not resume primarily in-person instruction and other operations until the opening of the fall 2021 semester.9
IMPLEMENTING THE SCHOOL’S TRANSITION
Despite the COVID-19 crisis, the Biden School’s position as an important pillar of the University of Delaware’s future had not changed. Even so, the crisis changed many plans, including the school’s leadership plan. By 2018, Maria Aristigueta had served two five-year terms as the School for Public Policy and Administration’s director and, at the request of President Assanis, agreed to stay on for two additional years to facilitate the transition to a freestanding Biden School. In September 2019, when Provost Robin Morgan met with the faculty to discuss the prospect of that transition, she expressed her intention to initiate a national search for the dean of the Biden School as soon as the University Faculty Senate confirmed its support for the transition. However, in May 2020, after the public health crisis gripped the campus and a hiring freeze was put in place, Morgan confirmed to the school’s faculty that a national search was not feasible and that an interim dean would be appointed. To expedite the selection process, she solicited nominations, including self-nominations from the faculty. After the nomination process was completed and a few candidates were interviewed, Morgan told the school’s faculty that the selection process had demonstrated very strong support for Aristigueta. On August 13, after confirmation by the Board of Trustees, President Assanis and Provost Morgan announced the appointment of Aristigueta as the founding dean of the Biden School. The “interim” notation was dropped.10
FIGURE 58. Maria Aristigueta appointed Dean of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration, August 15, 2020.
Dean Aristigueta’s first act was to gain approval from Provost Morgan to fill out the school’s leadership team with the appointment of two associate deans: Kimberley Isett and Joseph Trainor.11 Both faculty members were already playing key leadership roles. Isett had facilitated the review process for the school’s transition plan, led the policy track for the new Master of Public Health program, and worked on initiatives to increase faculty research productivity. Trainor had been director of the Disaster Science and Management graduate program and served as the school’s director of doctoral studies. Isett was appointed associate dean for research, and Trainor was appointed associate dean for academic affairs. The fourth member of the school’s central administrative leadership team was Nicole Quinn, senior business manager. Her role was expanding in line with the Biden School’s transition to freestanding status, particularly as college-level financial, human resources, and other operational responsibilities were now the school’s direct responsibility.
With the support of the faculty, Aristigueta confirmed to Morgan that the top priority for the school was to implement its transition effectively. That translated into developing new school policies, plans, and practices, enhancing undergraduate and graduate student services, implementing a new model for graduate student funding, and changing some of the operating guidelines for the school’s centers. All this was to be achieved despite the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. The school’s leadership team was also charged with improving scholarship and research output, promoting greater external recognition, and developing new collaborative programs with other academic units.
The relationship between the Biden Institute and the school was clarified during the transition. The institute was to be fully integrated as a unit of the school. One immediate sign of the benefits of that integration was the support that the Biden Institute staff provided to the school, which was even more critical in the environment of resource scarcity resulting from the pandemic.12 The institute’s integration with the school was also reflected in Aristigueta’s invitation to its vice chair Valerie Biden Owens to be a member of the school’s Board of Advisors and reliance on institute Executive Director Catherine McLaughlin to help restructure the board.13
As the school’s transition progressed, another external issue affecting the entire university and the nation besides COVID-19 commanded attention. Growing societal demands for racial justice in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and other African Americans focused the attention of faculty, staff, and students on what the university should be doing to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in its own operations and in the community. President Assanis already had identified inclusive excellence and increasing student and faculty diversity as UD priorities. Now there were growing expectations of the university to act more aggressively in those areas.
FIGURE 59A Kimberley Isett, Associate Dean for Research; FIGURE 59B Joseph Trainor, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs; and FIGURE 59, Nicole Quinn, Senior Business Manager.
Diversity has been a priority of the Biden School’s identity in its various iterations since its inception. However, some school faculty, staff, and students felt that it had not been a high priority in more recent years and that the school needed to reestablish its leadership role in that area. A town hall dialogue sponsored by Aristigueta in the summer of 2020 identified a series of issues to be addressed, including concerns about a lack of sustained efforts to recruit, support, and retain students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds and insufficient consideration of equity issues and racial justice in the school’s academic programs.14 In July, Aristigueta established an informal working group to examine the issues raised.15 With the support of the faculty, she also revived a standing committee on diversity, with faculty member Nina David as chair.16 Aristigueta planned to work with that committee to implement recommendations for action and monitor ongoing progress.17 The school joined the Community Engagement Initiative and other units in sponsoring a year-long speaker series on racial justice that focused on opportunities to enhance the university’s support for inclusion and diversity through community engagement. The series became the focal point for a grassroots, university-wide initiative on antiracism that attracted faculty, staff, and students.18
In December 2020, the Biden School working group issued an interim report that outlined areas for strengthening diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A key theme of the interim report was the need to institutionalize increased and ongoing support for DEI across the school’s programs and policies. Though the report projected the submission of final recommendations by the end of the academic year, the working group was disbanded before submitting those recommendations and the responsibility for pursuing DEI initiatives then fell to a revived standing committee working with the dean. The standing committee subsequently proposed two new initiatives: the creation of a Biden School summer institute to recruit and support diverse undergraduate and graduate students, and the provision of funding for faculty and graduate students of color to undertake innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship related to core issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Both initiatives were supported by Dean Aristigueta and endorsed by the UD Office of Institutional Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. As of the end of 2021, the school had not yet obtained funding for these initiatives.19 Even so, one sign of the renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion was the faculty’s decision at its December meeting to eliminate the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) as an admissions requirement for all Biden School graduate programs. The decision was based on the faculty’s view that GRE scores are not a reliable indicator of the ability of students to succeed in their graduate programs and that the exam discriminates against both minority and mid-career applicants.20
BIDEN HALL
The fall 2021 semester marked a return to on-campus instruction and a resumption of most in-person operations. The university mandated vaccinations for students, faculty, and staff with other provisions instituted to maintain health and safety. Despite the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, fundraising efforts for the Biden School continued, including a sustained campaign to generate funding for the new building that would house the Biden School and Biden Institute and eventually become Biden Hall.
The plan for the new building, originally conceived in 2010, had evolved and changed many times over the subsequent decade. When the school was named for Biden, it was confirmed that the Biden School would anchor the building. As conceived, Biden Hall would enable the school to grow and become “an interdisciplinary intellectual hub to convene students, faculty, leaders, practitioners, and community members from a diverse range of disciplines, political ideologies, and sociocultural-economic backgrounds all under one roof.”21 The new building would occupy the last remaining plot of land on the university’s historic Green, next to the Morris Library. The school would move from its current home, a former public elementary school built in the 1940s, to what was described in the fundraising proposal as “a grand Georgian-style building that will stand proudly on our campus for many centuries to come.”22 The school’s location in the new building would reinforce its identity as a freestanding professional school and provide the programming space needed to carry out key activities in support of the school’s and the university’s priorities, including public programs undertaken by the Biden Institute featuring major national and global figures.
CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND CIVIL DISCOURSE
From the outset, the Biden Institute focused on promoting civic engagement and civic discourse in the national political dialogue. It sponsored events and programs featuring political and policy leaders who approached issues from diverse perspectives. On October 17, 2017, Vice President Biden led an event entitled “Bridging the Divides,” cosponsored by the Biden Institute and the Center for Political Communication. The event featured a conversation between Biden and Ohio’s Republican governor John Kasich about the value of political cooperation and consensus. They agreed that the increasing polarization of political discourse threatened the democratic system. “The system itself has been breaking down on base politics,” Kasich said. “The whole system is polarizing.” Biden warned that it is “not possible for this country to function without reaching a consensus.”23 The Biden Institute also was committed to increasing University of Delaware students’ civic engagement, particularly by encouraging their participation in the democratic process and informing them on policy issues. One of its programs was sponsoring a voter registration drive that engaged UD student volunteers.
FIGURE 60. Student Volunteers at the National Voter Registration Day program on the Green, September 24, 2019.
The school’s work in civic engagement and civil discourse had begun with the creation of the Democracy Project, an Institute for Public Administration program initiated in 1998 that remained active when the Biden School became freestanding. Designed as a summer professional development institute for teachers, the program was cosponsored by the Delaware Office of the Secretary of State and the Delaware Heritage Commission. Joe Biden and his staff have been regular participants in the project over the years.24 Participating teachers meet with public officials to learn about the workings of government and gain practical knowledge, including how to create lesson plans for teaching civics. After two decades, over four hundred Delaware teachers have participated in the program.
In addition to spearheading the summer institute, the leaders of the Democracy Project, Ed Freel and Fran O’Malley, worked with Bonnie Meszaros from the UD Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship to develop a course modeled on the Democracy Project for UD students preparing to become teachers. The course became a breadth requirement for all Elementary Teacher Education students, and since its inception in 2003, it has enrolled more than 2,500 students. Expanding on the vision of the Democracy Project, Freel initiated a winter session program in 2012 for UD undergraduates to study public affairs in Washington, DC. They learned from government leaders and served as interns for public and nonprofit agencies. After a few years under Freel’s guidance, the program expanded in 2016 to an entire semester. Jointly offered with the Colin Powell School of Civic and Global Leadership at City College of New York, its chief instructor in 2019 was Mike Donilon, managing director of the Biden Institute, with Leann Moore from IPA providing operational support.25 In 2019, IPA hosted the Delaware Summit on Civics Education, which focused on the need to develop a new vision for civics and civil discourse. “I think all Americans, regardless of ideology, can agree that the degrees of divisiveness, polarization, and incivility, coupled with increases in phenomena such as fake news, beg for improvements in the nature of civics education,” said Fran O’Malley, director of The Democracy Project.26
The Biden School’s commitment to promoting civic engagement and civil discourse was strengthened in May 2021, when the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) provided a grant for the Biden School to launch a new program called the SNF Ithaca Initiative. The initiative is designed to support innovative instruction in civic engagement and civil discourse for Biden School students and engage college students across the nation to work in partnership to develop policy solutions to societal problems. The SNF Ithaca Initiative also sponsors new course offerings focused on civil discourse and funds graduate and undergraduate student scholarships, as well as providing support for the Biden Institute through subsidizing a series of new programs and special events, and sponsoring a bipartisan cohort of resident and visiting fellows. The Ithaca Initiative also supports Catherine McLaughlin in leading a national student dialogue on civic engagement and Valerie Biden Owens in offering a seminar series enabling students to hear from public servants across the political spectrum. Dean Aristigueta describes the overarching goal of the Ithaca Initiative as empowering “students with not just a firm grasp on their civic duties as citizens, but also their responsibilities within a diverse, multi-partisan civil society.”27
FIGURE 61. Joe Biden meets with the Washington Fellows and program leaders Ed Freel and Mike Donilon, 2019.
FIGURE 62. Philip Barnes (PhD, UAPP 2015), faculty director, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca Initiative, teaching his class on civic discourse and democracy on the Green, September 21, 2021.
The SNF funding supports a new endowed and named professorship in the Biden School, and a national search was launched to fill the position. While the search process was underway, Philip Barnes (PhD, UAPP 2015) was appointed faculty director of the initiative.28 A professional staff member of the Institute for Public Administration and a faculty member in the Biden School, Barnes had already taught courses related to civil discourse and public policy. In the fall of 2021, he taught a course that focused entirely on this subject and was designed to become a foundational requirement for all undergraduates in the Biden School.29 Barnes describes some of the prospects looking forward:
The Biden School now offers an entire 3-credit course that explores the intersection of public policy, civil discourse, and citizens in democratic societies. This course is just the beginning, and I expect there will be a sequence of courses, possibly building into a minor. Students in these courses will learn the critical skills of civil discourse—listening, perspective taking, building mutual respect, critical reasoning—and then practice and apply them to contemporary public policy deliberations. We are, in effect, training future public affairs professionals on how to navigate and operate in an increasingly diverse democracy. But we recognize that we cannot be content only to educate and train Biden School students and future public affairs professionals. The skills of civil discourse are needed across all realms of professional and civil life, meaning that we hope the Ithaca Initiative will extend across the entire university.30
The SNF Ithaca Initiative will enable civic engagement and civil discourse to become signature features of a Biden School education for both undergraduates and graduate students, and, in the longer term, signature features of a University of Delaware education.