CHAPTER THREE

POLICY PARTNERSHIPS AND THE DELAWARE MODEL

THROUGHOUT THE 1980S AND 1990S, the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy developed partnerships with public and nonprofit institutions to collect and analyze information, evaluate policies and their alternatives, develop management systems, plan for future needs, and train managers and community officials. While most partner institutions were in Delaware, a growing number were national and international. Predominantly supported through the college’s centers, these partnerships represented an extensive network of clients and collaborators.

By the end of the 1980s, the college was annually serving 150 public, private, and nonprofit agencies.¹ That number increased through the 1990s. As of 1992, in addition to state and local organizations, clients included fifteen foreign or international organizations, sixteen federal government agencies, and four national nonprofit organizations.² The broadening intellectual scope of scholarship in the college engaged some of the emerging state, national, and international challenges in energy and environmental policy, historic preservation, and urban economic development. By 1995, the number of program partners annually served by the college increased to over two hundred.³

As the number of partnerships grew, so did the staff of the college’s centers. Some staff members were recent graduates from the college’s academic programs, and others were established professionals with experience and specialized skills in applied research and analysis. By the end of the 1980s, there were more research and public service professionals in the college than faculty members. The number of faculty members was increasing, although more slowly than the number of professional staff. New faculty were encouraged to have extended contracts that included appointments in the centers intended to support external contracts and grants.⁴

Graduate students served as research assistants on virtually all partnership projects. The research assistantships funded their education and enabled them to work alongside faculty and professional staff applying what they learned in the classroom to actual policy, planning, and administrative challenges. These funding and experiential learning opportunities attracted an increasing number of graduate students through the 1980s and early 1990s. Between 1991 and 1995, graduate student financial support more than tripled, reaching $1.6 million; the number of funded students increased from forty-two to ninety-two. Virtually all of the increased funding came from college-generated sources, including an increase in externally sponsored research and public service from $1.5 million in 1991 to $3.5 million in 1995. By 1995, overall graduate enrollment was 185, with particular increases in women, minorities, and international students.⁵

What became known as the Delaware Model of public affairs education was a product of this success. It developed over two decades and grew from foundations set long before the model was fully described and publicly promoted. The key ingredient was the growth of the research and public service centers and the partnerships they supported.

INFORMING DELAWARE DECISION-MAKING

A consultant to the University of Delaware in the mid-1980s, reviewing the interdisciplinary policy-oriented work carried out by the college’s faculty, professionals, and graduate students in collaboration with community members and decision-makers, noted: “No other university undertakes these kinds of activities to such a great degree.”⁶ A 1987 report for the national land-grant universities association (NASULGC) evaluating public service at land-grant universities cited the college as “a model . . . responsive both to external clients and to internal disciplinary concerns . . . and to the needs of the state within the academic context of the university.”⁷

Through the 1980s and 1990s, the centers established during the Division of Urban Affairs’s formative years expanded their capacities, enabling the accelerating formation of partnerships. The Census and Data System had emerged as the critical source for Delaware-related data and data analysis. It maintained an active survey research capacity and designed and developed databases drawn from clients’ files. It also used an array of information system technologies to offer ready access to data required for decision-making.⁸ Personal computers were introduced, while punch cards and the statistical sorter disappeared. In 1986, the Census and Data System installed one of the first local area networks on the University of Delaware campus, enabling data sharing and work with larger datasets. The system continuously supplied up-to-date information on critical areas of Delaware policy, including health, education, transportation, and economic development. In 1988, the Census and Data System changed its name to the Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research (CADSR).

During this same period, the Institute for Public Administration (IPA) emerged as the primary source of technical assistance to local governments and agencies on planning, policy assessment, and improvements in services. IPA initiated legislative training seminars and policy forums, and undertook municipal management training programs. It also carried out policy and program evaluation projects sponsored by state agencies or the Delaware General Assembly on such issues as senior center formula funding, public employee compensation reform, the economic impact of tourism, and options for health care financing.

Throughout the 1980s, other centers and individual faculty carried out applied research and public service projects. Jeffrey Raffel became the state’s chief expert on Delaware’s court-ordered metropolitan school desegregation. The Center for Energy and Environmental Policy worked for the Delaware Public Service Commission, analyzing utility demand and energy efficiency. College faculty and professional staff researched such issues as homelessness, historic preservation, metropolitan services in New Castle County, substance abuse reduction, local economic development, and poverty in Wilmington.⁹ In virtually all cases, graduate students worked alongside faculty and professionals to carry out these projects. In addition, by the end of the 1980s, over two hundred graduate students from the college had served as interns for city, county, state, federal, and nonprofit agencies.¹⁰

Communities throughout Delaware depended on the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy’s expertise for guidance in the development of municipal plans, the organization and performance of administrative operations, the effective delivery of municipal programs and services, the planning of new schools, hospitals, and other service institutions, and the evaluation of policies and practices. Concurrently, collaborations with state agencies also grew. The Delaware General Assembly relied on the college to support its operations and provide staff support for task forces and commissions. Most data and analysis used in public decision-making in Delaware were supplied by or in partnership with the college and its centers.

THE WILMINGTON COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIP

On November 3, 1992, James H. Sills, Jr., was elected the first Black mayor of Wilmington. Sills had been the founding director of the Urban Agent Division, established during the early years of the Division of Urban Affairs. At the time of his election, he was an associate professor in the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. As a faculty member, he taught courses on urban management, community development, and human services delivery. Sills also had been president of the Christina School District Board (the largest school district in Delaware) and had been a member and president of the Wilmington NAACP. From 1983 until he was elected mayor, he served as a representative to the Delaware General Assembly. In these roles, Sills expanded the college’s partnerships with the educational community and the State of Delaware. He was the leading champion for the development and funding of a new program of public service and applied research that served to support students working alongside faculty and professionals on projects focused on state priorities. That program, later called the Public Service Assistantships (PSA), became a critical component of the college’s graduate programs and public service contributions. When Sills was elected mayor, he took a leave of absence from his faculty position to practice what he had been teaching.¹¹

In his inaugural address, Sills announced a new partnership between the city and the University of Delaware that university president David Roselle endorsed. The goal of the partnership was for UD to help the city government meet the needs and promote the development of Wilmington neighborhoods. Known as the Wilmington Community Development Partnership, the new initiative would use the expertise of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy and other parts of the university to meet this goal. Roselle said this “new relationship formalizes university outreach to the Wilmington community that has existed for some twenty years and builds upon it to extend our research, public service, and graduate education in community development. At the same time that we are providing these services, our faculty and students will be working and learning in a most exciting ‘laboratory’—the largest city in the State.” Sills added, “The Wilmington Community Development Partnership is an important opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the people of Wilmington.”¹²

The partnership was to be led by the college’s Urban Agent Division, renamed the Center for Community Development (CCD) in 1993, concurrent with the launch of the new partnership.¹³ From the early 1980s up to 1987, the Urban Agent Division had been led by Babette Johns. She was succeeded by Steven Peuquet, who had joined the staff of the center in 1983. In 1991, as a cost-saving measure and to better integrate the Urban Agent Division with other programs in the college, the unit moved its primary offices from Wilmington to the main university campus in Newark. A small suite of offices was maintained on the university’s Wilmington Campus. By 1993, the newly named Center for Community Development’s contributions included a growing set of programs and services for nonprofit institutions in Wilmington and across the state, such as the Nonprofit Management Certificate Course, which started in 1990, and over subsequent decades would be responsible for training hundreds of nonprofit managers. CCD also provided direct support for a new interdisciplinary graduate specialization in Community Development and Nonprofit Leadership. In 1994, Timothy Barnekov became CCD’s director, and Steven Peuquet returned to a staff position to continue his research and public service work on homelessness, housing, and community information systems.¹⁴

The first efforts of the center on behalf of the new Wilmington partnership focused on providing technical assistance to public, nonprofit, and community organizations. The center assisted with the analysis of community conditions, development of neighborhood plans, and training of community leaders. Barnekov describes the focus of the work as collaborating with community members, often at the neighborhood level, to build their capacity to address the challenges they faced. In that vein, Sills anticipated that the new Wilmington Community Development Partnership would help him strengthen the city’s planning department to undertake research and analysis to identify what options might best address the city’s challenges. He also called upon the university to help him improve city employees’ professional knowledge and qualifications.

The most notable work of the Center for Community Development in support of the partnership focused on capacity-building in Wilmington neighborhoods specifically aimed at strengthening support for collaborative community development programs. This work was already underway when the new partnership was established. A tool of federal government policy during the anti-poverty programs of the 1960s, community-based development gradually lost appeal with the increasing emphasis on privatism and free-market solutions in the 1980s. Despite the withdrawal of federal support, community development organizations in Wilmington and other cities continued to focus on alleviating poverty through action-oriented programs. These organizations constructed new houses and rehabilitated old buildings, created new locally owned businesses that offered employment within the community, improved local community services, and attracted investment in local communities.

Accordingly, the Wilmington Area Community Development Project was one of the major initiatives under the partnership. The project focused on four of the most economically and socially distressed neighborhoods in the city. The impetus came from the Speer Trust Commission, a local foundation, and two area churches that sought to determine the most efficient ways of utilizing their resources to aid the poor. Raheemah Jabbar-Bey, a community development specialist in the Center for Community Development who had previously worked with Sills through the Urban Agent Program, led the project. It began with forums conducted in each targeted neighborhood to involve residents directly in the revitalization effort. These and other mobilization efforts led the Speer Trust to create a community organization fund to benefit emerging neighborhood groups. The project was a harbinger of the community development work that the center would continue into the twenty-first century.

In 1994 and 1995, CCD became one of only a handful of university units in the nation to receive both the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Outreach Partnership Center grant and the U.S. Department of Education’s Urban Community Service grant. The funding was used to support a Community Development Resource Center and expand a Housing Capacity Building Program. CCD also initiated a training program in community-based development and received grants from the Longwood, Welfare, and Crestlea Foundations to establish DiamondNet, an online community network. In 1994, the center inaugurated the Community Development Certificate Course to help improve the leadership of community organizations that address the needs of low-and moderate-income neighborhoods. Over its first three years, over sixty community leaders completed the program.

The center also focused on supporting programs to address the issue of homelessness and increase the supply of affordable housing. These efforts predated the Wilmington Community Development Partnership and were initially supported in the late 1980s by the Gannett Foundation, the Delaware General Assembly, the Salvation Army, and the City of Wilmington. The center carried out the first statewide study of homelessness. It also sponsored the first statewide conference on the topic, which included 130 national and regional housing leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Its work on homelessness and housing grew in the 1990s and beyond, with the center assisting in building new institutional capacity, including the Delaware Homeless Planning Council and the Homeless Management Information System.¹⁵

CCD’s focus on housing and homelessness complemented its work in support of neighborhood-based community development. It also aligned with its work with nonprofit institutions, many of which carried out programs and services related to housing and homelessness. Marvin Gilman was a housing expert, homebuilder, and national leader in affordable housing initiatives who worked with the college and CCD for eighteen years. He applauded the center’s initiatives in housing because they were “rooted in real-world issues and challenges” and “because they focused on appropriate and practical solutions for the problem of providing affordable sheltering of all American families.”¹⁶

The collaboration between the Wilmington mayor’s office and CCD grew through Sills’s second term in office. The center’s neighborhood and community development work and its housing initiatives remained the staples of its efforts. However, some Wilmington Community Development Partnership objectives, including the initial expectations of enhanced professional development for city employees, were not fulfilled. The partnership did not continue after Sills left office.

THE EXPANDING GLOBAL REACH

By the 1990s, the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy had developed a series of international associations that reflected the broader networks formed by faculty and staff, as well as the influence of the international students attracted to the college’s graduate programs. Students came from China, Ghana, Greece, India, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, and Germany.¹⁷

The growing global reach of the college is reflected in the story of two of the college’s graduates who were responsible for long-term and substantive partnerships with universities and policy institutions in South Africa. Sibusiso Vil-Nkomo was forced to flee South Africa in the 1970s because of his resistance to Apartheid. He met Renosi Mokate at Lincoln University, where they both completed undergraduate degrees and taught before marrying and joining the graduate program in Urban Affairs and Public Policy. Mokate received her MA in 1983 and PhD in 1986, and Vil-Nkomo received his MA in 1983 and PhD in 1985. They remained in the U.S. until the release of Nelson Mandela. In 1991, he called them home to help establish the new government. Mokate became the chief executive officer of the Independent Electoral Commission, which in April 1994 administered South Africa’s first democratic, multiracial election. Vil-Nkomo became the head of the South African Civil Service and later the first Black dean and then rector of the University of Pretoria. Mokate later became South Africa’s representative to the World Bank and executive dean of the School of Business Leadership at UNISA (University of South Africa). Vil-Nkomo later became chairman of the board of the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), a national think tank advising President Cyril Ramaposa and other South African leaders on implementing reforms to achieve greater social and economic equality.

The growing enrollment of international students brought changes in the college’s degree programs, research activities, and public service efforts. Many faculty became more internationally oriented, incorporating global themes into graduate courses and developing partnership programs with institutions in other parts of the world. Geographic area specialists—often from other colleges—were included on dissertation committees. The college regularly sponsored international speakers and visiting scholars. In addition, it often developed formal ties with universities and agencies in other nations through its centers, and faculty, staff, and students regularly participated in collaborative comparative international research. The growth of the college’s international programs was also encouraged by an increasingly global outlook at the university. There was no central office of international programs, though, so between the 1970s and the 1990s, most international associations and programs were developed by individual faculty and specific departments, centers, or colleges.

Global networking by Biden School faculty can be traced to initiatives in prior decades. For instance, starting in 1975, the college’s faculty began sponsoring graduate study abroad programs that focused on opportunities for students to learn how other nations were addressing the issues they were studying in their classes. The study abroad programs took advantage of relationships that grew out of the partnerships developed by the college’s faculty and professionals. The first program, led by Arno Loessner and Jerome Lewis, enabled graduate students to study planning and intergovernmental relations models in London, Paris, and Amsterdam, leveraging relationships Loessner had cultivated with local government agencies.¹⁸ Shortly after being appointed university secretary and chief of staff to UD’s president in 1978, Loessner also initiated a partnership with the Salzburg Seminar, a nonprofit that convenes scholars and practitioners from across the world to address critical global challenges. That partnership provided opportunities for college faculty and staff to participate in week-long workshops with the convened seminar participants. The seminars were held at the program’s headquarters in Austria and focused initially on policy issues related to the relationship between the U.S. and European nations, later engaging more global issues.¹⁹

By the 1990s, study abroad became a feature of the college’s graduate programs for which the University of Delaware and the college provided partial scholarships. The college was among the first public affairs programs in the U.S. not only to offer and support international educational opportunities for graduate students, but also to build these opportunities into the design of the curriculum. Starting in the 1990s and expanding later, formal partnership agreements with universities and public agencies in other nations supported study abroad programs in the Netherlands, Scotland, Romania, South Africa, and South Korea. Many faculty and professionals in the college took advantage of these programs, which also led to visiting scholars spending time at UD, extending relationships and partnerships that remained active through the subsequent history of the Biden School. For example, the college had a long-standing relationship with the Centre for Planning at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. The two institutions hosted faculty exchanges, beginning with a visiting faculty position at the center for Barry Cullingworth. This collaboration also created opportunities for student exchanges. Additionally, teams composed of faculty and staff from both programs coauthored publications.²⁰ One multi-year collaborative project borne of this relationship focused on comparing urban policy and planning in the US and the UK.²¹

The college’s centers were also actively engaged in international programs. IPA created an office of research and training to deal with global issues. In 1996, the University of Delaware, supported by IPA, and the International Union of Local Authorities, the worldwide association of local governments based in The Hague, Netherlands, signed a partnership agreement. Their newly created program became known as the International Union of Local Authorities-Office for Research and Training or IULA-ORT. It offered seminars for local government officials and elected leaders in Mexico, Africa, Eastern Europe, Korea, and Panama.²² The Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research also became engaged in international programs through the work of Edward Ratledge. He participated in a seven-year comparative study of prosecutorial decision-making across the world’s criminal justice systems.

The college’s faculty and professionals also were called upon as international consultants: Bernard Herman worked with the U.K. Commission on Historic Monuments, and Robert Warren was an advisor to cities in Japan on the use of telecommunications in urban development. In 1990 alone, the college hosted a dozen visiting scholars from Cameroon, Finland, Korea, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and Syria.

The most extensive and consistent international focus came from the faculty, staff, and students in the Center for Energy and Urban Policy Research, renamed the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy (CEEP) in 1993. The center was one of the nation’s earliest academic research and teaching centers to focus on the interrelated areas of energy and environmental policy and to do so through an interdisciplinary and policy-oriented research framework.²³ The center’s work concentrated on the political economy of energy and how it could be changed.

In 1990, the center received funding from the World Bank to study alternative institutional approaches to help four Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand) pursue economic objectives in environmentally sensitive and energy-efficient ways.²⁴ The study recommendations influenced the practices of both the World Bank’s and the United Nations’ development programs and the policies of the four countries. Center Director John Byrne led such global research. He argued that this work was a natural extension of the mandate that led to the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy’s creation and inspired its development for thirty years: “[T]he issues of urbanization, poverty, and inequality are global, and it is essential that our college be able to grapple with them. We need to address the crises of energy, environment, and urban development that are affecting the lives of people all over the world with the same urgency that we sought to address American urban policy issues.”²⁵

In 1997, CEEP became an official observer organization to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which enabled the submission of briefing papers that became part of the official record; ultimately, CEEP submitted ten briefing papers.²⁶ CEEP also oversaw an Energy and Environmental Policy Series, publishing books focused on critical global issues in the political economy of environmental and energy policy.²⁷ This series involved faculty from several disciplines and attracted graduate students who wanted to work on the global issues of climate change, energy transformation, renewable and nonrenewable energy options, environmental justice, and later smart cities and sustainable development.

The faculty engaged in this global research proposed a new interdisciplinary master’s and doctoral degree program in Energy and Environmental Policy, known by its acronym ENEP.²⁸ The ENEP program was approved in 1997, with the first official enrollments in 1998. The first graduates received their Master of Energy and Environmental Policy (MEEP) in 1999, and the first ENEP PhD graduated in 2001. Young-Doo Wang, associate director of CEEP, became the ENEP program director, a position he held until 2014. The program drew upon faculty from many colleges and, because of its global orientation, attracted most of its students from outside the U.S. Many students were from China, India, South Korea, and other nations where CEEP already had ongoing research partnerships. The graduates from the ENEP program thus became part of a growing network of global research collaborators focused on energy and environmental policy, sustainable development, and climate change.

THE DELAWARE MODEL

The growth of the research and public service centers and the partnerships they supported provided the foundation for what became known as the Delaware Model of public affairs education. In 1995, Robert Denhardt joined the college as the Charles P. Messick Professor in Public Administration. He soon became an advocate for writing about and promoting the Delaware Model, wanting to increase its visibility to the national public administration community. He hoped that writing about the success of this unique model would stimulate a rethinking of the typical structure of public affairs programs.

Denhardt, Jerome Lewis, Jeffrey Raffel, and Dan Rich undertook a series of publications and presentations at professional meetings about this distinctive approach to public affairs education. The Delaware Model was most fully examined in a jointly authored article by the four faculty members in the Journal of Public Administrations Education in 1997.²⁹ Recognizing that the dichotomy between theory and practice had “haunted the field of public administration,” including public administration education, they proposed that a new educational approach that engaged students in the integration of theory and practice as a fundamental part of their learning experience was needed. Enabling that approach required more than a simple redesign of the curriculum. Instead, programs should be designed in terms of the total experience of students, such as it was at Delaware: “The University of Delaware College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy has developed a model of public administration education that seeks to build upon the student’s total experience in such a way that theory and practice are fully integrated.” This effort, they pointed out, was not only based on the curriculum but also part of the design and operation of the college itself.³⁰

They described the features of the college that enabled the Delaware Model to thrive, pointing out that all faculty and professional staff were expected to reflect the integration of theory and practice in their own contributions and engage graduate students to participate with them in the programs and projects that required such integration. As a result, the educational experience was not limited to students’ classroom activities but also included daily involvement in researching important policy issues, preparing training and development programs for those in public agencies, and interacting with officials at all levels of government and in nonprofit organizations of all types. Students were fully involved in projects—gathering and analyzing data, organizing conferences, and writing and presenting policy recommendation reports. Typically, the students were funded by assistantships supported by grants and contracts from government or nonprofit institutions. The article’s authors argued that the result was a student body well prepared to enter responsible positions in public service and make substantial contributions from the outset. In the long run, the integration of theory and practice that students experienced in their MPA program would make them more effective learners able to adapt to change throughout their careers.³¹

The Delaware Model benefited from the annual funding the university received from the State of Delaware General Assembly, which supported graduate students working on public service and applied research projects of vital interest to Delaware’s communities and agencies. The Public Service Assistantship program (PSA), which began receiving funding in 1985, had its funding increased in the 1990s, helping to support the expansion of the college’s graduate programs, particularly at the master’s level. PSA funding was often used as match support for small grants from public agencies and community organizations, enabling partnerships that otherwise would not have been possible or would have been much smaller. The 1994 PSA budget allocation, for example, supported graduate student work with college faculty and professional staff on forty projects. PSAs assisted the Wilmington Housing Authority, the Governor’s Public Utility Regulation Task Force, the Delaware Community Reinvestment Action Council, the Delaware Superior Court, the Delaware Division of State Service Centers, and the Delaware Domestic Violence Council.

Another program that embodied features of the Delaware Model was the Legislative Fellows Program. The program, a partnership between the Institute for Public Administration and the Delaware General Assembly, was established in 1985 and grew through the 1990s. Graduate students and later also advanced undergraduates were annually selected through the program to serve as legislative staff and provide research and operational support to legislative committees, task forces, and caucuses. The General Assembly provided funding for the program with supplemental support from the university. The students selected received a full-tuition scholarship and a stipend to support living expenses, and enrolled in a course on state government while they worked in the legislature. IPA Director Jerome Lewis describes the program, which continues as of 2021 as a co-sponsored effort with Delaware State University, as “a hands-on learning experience for students” through which they “are able to observe and contribute to the decision-making process while working with individuals with diverse views and values such as state and local government officials, business and community leaders, and concerned citizens.”³²

The staff of the Delaware General Assembly is small compared to legislatures in other states and, as a result, Legislative Fellows have played a more central role in legislative activity than typical interns.³³ The program has also led many fellows to pursue careers in public service, particularly in the Delaware state government. The General Assembly has hired some of these students upon their graduation.³⁴ John Carney (MPA 1986), who became the Seventy-Fourth Governor of Delaware in 2017, has described his time as a Legislative Fellow while completing his MPA degree as a “transformational experience. . . . It helped me determine that the best way for me to help others and improve the community was through politics and public service.”³⁵

In 1996, a review committee appointed by the provost concluded that the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy “has moved into its third stage of development with national ranking as a ‘purposeful’ college for the 21st Century.” The committee report pointed to the Delaware Model as a primary reason for the college’s success: “The integrated model of education, policy research and public service, using centers as designated areas of specialization has served the college and the state well.” The report also proposed that this integrated model “improved the quality of academic programs” and contributed to greater national and international distinction for the college’s programs while also strengthening the work of its research and public service centers. The report applauded the “improved quality, visibility, and recognition of college’s research and public service programs in the state, the nation, and the international community,” and argued that the university should ensure that the “college’s unique integrated model of teaching, research, and service and its productivity be expanded.”³⁶