CHAPTER NINE

LEGACIES AND POSSIBILITIES

THE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION is “an exemplar of a new form of comprehensive public affairs school.” That was the assessment of James L. Perry, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the O’Neil School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, nearly a decade before the Biden School was named and approved to be a freestanding professional school. Perry recognized that the University of Delaware’s school was “on the cutting edge of integrating traditional scholarly research, education for professional leadership, and public service.”¹ That assessment is more accurate now than ever before.

The history of the Biden School demonstrates that its emergence as a leading school of public affairs was by no means inevitable. At several critical junctures, the school might not have survived. The Division of Urban Affairs might not have continued after the Ford Foundation funding ended or after the change in university presidential leadership in 1968. The value of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy was challenged during another UD leadership transition in 1990, only to be reconfirmed for university support and defined as a model for other units. The school’s future was also in doubt after the dissolution of the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy in 2010. That challenge was also overcome, although the school went through a period of faculty contraction. Over its first sixty years, the school has operated under five different organizational arrangements and many different names. The Biden School has been a model of innovation, engagement, and resilience.

While the school’s long-term future was never a foregone conclusion, school leaders and engaged faculty, staff, students, and alumni have always been committed to its mission and values and determined it would succeed. Together, they have demonstrated remarkable adaptability to the changing organizational forms of the school and the shifting expectations of university leaders. This adaptability is not surprising. The school was created to be an agent of organizational and social change. Particularly in its early decades, it attracted administrators, faculty, staff, and students who self-selected to be part of an innovative, change-oriented enterprise. Many possessed the knowledge, skills, and experience to be effective community and policy leaders. Leadership responsibilities extended beyond the school’s administrative heads to include center and program directors as well as faculty, staff, and students. Many were experienced in responding to fluid public policy environments and the emerging needs and demands of the communities they served, and that experience of working as change agents outside academia was an asset when changes to the school were required. Most of those who have worked in the school throughout its history, particularly those who have led it, never viewed it as a finished product.

Even with strong and inclusive internal leadership, the school would not have survived or prospered without the support of university leaders at various junctures. President John Perkins took the opportunity to launch an experimental interdisciplinary, action-oriented program, the Division of Urban Affairs. President E. Arthur Trabant transformed the non-academic division into a new graduate College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy. President David Roselle placed the school in a leadership position in the reorganization of five of the university’s colleges into two. President Dennis Assanis recognized the potential of the Biden School and confirmed its priority in UD’s development as a twenty-first-century engaged research university. The development of the Biden School over its first sixty years is thus a case study in higher educational leadership at both the university and program levels.

In some regards, the school’s development has been a bellwether of the changing higher education landscape. It updated the nineteenth-century land-grant concept to address the needs and challenges of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Biden School’s dedication to interdisciplinary scholarship, its commitment to diversity as a dimension of quality, and its role in bridging the world of ideas and the world of action were ahead of their times.

DIFFERENT BY DESIGN

The Biden School was different by design. The Ford Foundation grant that led to the creation of the Division of Urban Affairs required that it be different from other academic units in its interdisciplinary identity and in the collaborations it supported between the university and the communities it served. When the division became the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, it was again designed to be different. It was one of only two graduate colleges in a predominantly undergraduate institution. Those two graduate colleges were given budgetary independence and responsibility far beyond that of any other academic unit.

The school’s commitment to recruiting a graduate student body diverse in orientations and backgrounds was also built into its design. Candidates have been evaluated for admission based on professional experience and a commitment to using knowledge for social change as well as more traditional factors. Diversity has been an essential facet of the school’s interdisciplinary approach and community focus. Beyond promoting racial diversity, the school’s student composition has reflected increasing levels of gender diversity, with women outnumbering men among both undergraduate and graduate students. Notably, the school has also promoted geographic diversity, recruiting international students and promoting global research.

To carry out its mission, the Biden School has relied heavily on its centers and institutes, which have had a level of influence and independence not typical of most other academic units. That influence has been amplified because of the strength and continuity of the leadership of some of the centers. Leaders, as well as many faculty and staff, of the centers have sustained personal and institutional networks over time that have helped maintain these units’ success in the face of changing economic conditions and shifting university priorities. The school has adopted policies and practices supporting the centers’ and institutes’ work and addressing their needs and priorities. This approach has had some unusual implications since the centers’ and institutes’ staffs and fiscal resources were at times greater than those of the school’s academic programs, but the capacity of the centers and institutes has enabled the success of the Delaware Model of public affairs education.

The Biden School was also different from the mainstream of the university because it was designed to be engaged in applied research and service and to promote action based on the knowledge it created. The applied orientation of its programs and people has not always fit well with the prevailing academic structure or the embedded reward system that sustains that structure both at UD and across academia more broadly. Confronting this mismatch has been a continuing challenge for the school. After reflecting on the school’s history, long-time faculty member Danilo Yanich concludes that “being different by design was a key to the school’s success and also a key to its ongoing struggles.”²

Because of its mission-based orientation, the Biden School has employed many non-tenure track faculty, most of whom were appointed to contribute to its applied research and public service mission. In some periods, the number of non-tenure track appointments has exceeded the number of tenure track faculty. Within the school’s culture, the distinctions between tenure track and non-tenure track faculty have not been considered significant. The focus has been on what individuals contribute rather than on their titles or standing in the typical academic hierarchy. However, this has been at variance with the prevailing reward structure of the university. As a result, the differences in treatment between non-tenure track and tenure track faculty have remained an occasionally contentious issue of consequence for the university as a whole well into the twenty-first century.

Throughout its history, the school has grappled with how applied research and public service should be evaluated in promotion and tenure decisions. The school’s approved criteria for these decisions has placed greater value on these activities than most other units. The school has also emphasized the importance of integrating teaching with research and public service. As a result, the Biden School has often needed to justify its decisions regarding faculty advancement and explain the importance of an integrated model of engaged scholarship to its identity as a professional and interdisciplinary school of public affairs.

The Biden School has employed many research and public service professionals, most of whom have worked in the centers and institutes and many of whom played vital roles in the overall development of the school, including its academic and research programs. While some have held secondary faculty appointments, most have not. When the Biden School became freestanding, it had more research and public service professionals than faculty. More than a dozen of these professionals had been serving in the school for decades. The professional staff have contributed exceptional expertise and experience in research, analysis, and public service delivery.³ Supporting their success required targeted policies, such as the creation of a career ladder through which they could be promoted based on their research and public service accomplishments.

ADVANCING INQUIRY AND EDUCATION

The earliest iteration of the Biden School, the Division of Urban Affairs, was in the vanguard of interdisciplinary programs that created the field of urban affairs. Some of the division’s faculty shaped the field through their scholarship and publications. The division also became the organizational hub for the Urban Affairs Association, which supported urban affairs pro grams across the country. Since the next iteration of the school, the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, had one of the first doctoral programs focused on urban affairs, its graduates created and led urban affairs programs at universities across the U.S. and beyond.

Some of the doctoral program’s graduates were hired to join the faculty and professional staff of the school, a practice generally avoided in most traditional fields but one that made great sense for the development of the school’s research, instructional, and public service programs. For example, John Byrne, Danilo Yanich, and Young-Doo Wang joined the school’s faculty soon after completing their PhDs in 1980. Later in the school’s development, other homegrown scholars joined the faculty and staff. As of July 2020, ten Biden School faculty members and twenty-one of its professional staff members had a doctoral or master’s degree from the school.

For four decades, the focus of the school was exclusively on graduate education. Most of the graduate students were full-time and were supported through their work on the school centers’ applied research and public service projects. The Delaware Model of public affairs education grew from this arrangement, enabling students to connect what they learned in their classes with how they could use that knowledge to improve communities and institutions. Years after he left the Biden School faculty, Robert Denhardt reflected on the impact of the Delaware Model: “What has been called The Delaware Model of combining classroom experiences with real-life engagement with public issues has set a high standard for public administration and public policy programs around the country. What’s been done at Delaware is a more comprehensive integration of theory and practice in the student’s experience than perhaps at any other school in the country.”⁴

When the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy developed undergraduate programs, it incorporated features of the Delaware Model. The undergraduate majors offered students educational opportunities parallel to those available to the school’s graduate students.⁵ However, the best representation of the integration of graduate and undergraduate education was in the development of 4+1 programs that enabled highly motivated and talented undergraduates to combine study under one of the school’s undergraduate majors with the pursuit of one of its master’s degrees in an accelerated program, providing students with opportunities typically only available to graduate students. Between 2015 and 2020, half of the university’s Warner and Taylor award winners for the outstanding man and woman in the senior class were Biden School students.⁶

In an opinion article in The News Journal in 2012, Kristin Fretz and Neil Kirschling, two of the first graduates of the undergraduate Public Policy program, affirmed the value of an interdisciplinary public affairs education and their commitment to careers of public service: “The problems society faces are ever-changing and will affect all of us. They require an interdisciplinary approach and the combined engagement of all members of the community, especially those who will one day inherit these problems. If you dream of making a difference in the world, then you should act on that dream [and] together we can learn how to turn our dreams into careers that change the world.”⁷ The value of the Biden School’s distinctive approach to public affairs education was also recognized by U.S. Senator Chris Coons, who proposed that what stands out about the school is “its interdisciplinary approach to learning with faculty committed to helping its students bridge the community of ideas and the community of action. Students are prepared to make a real difference in a wide range of areas including education, energy, budget, and healthcare.”⁸

DELAWARE FIRST

Unquestionably, the most dramatic societal impact of the Biden School over its first sixty years has been in the state of Delaware. Indeed, this impact has been confirmed by external evaluation teams throughout the school’s history. In 1961, when the Division of Urban Affairs was established, Delaware government agencies had little capacity for research, analysis, planning, and evaluation. Delaware state and local governments used virtually no data or policy analysis to inform decision-making, had no professional planning capabilities, and employed very few trained personnel in state or local service delivery. They also lacked officials with professional managerial experience to deal with the increasing demands for government services and the expansion of government agencies. For more than half a century, the Biden School’s programs helped state and local governments and agencies develop these capabilities. In important respects, the governing capacity of the State of Delaware and the programs of the Biden School grew together, and in many areas became mutually dependent. That interdependence was greater than anything imagined when the Division of Urban Affairs was created.

One of the most important effects of the Biden School has been the professionalization of Delaware’s public and nonprofit sectors. This began almost immediately after the Division of Urban Affairs was created, with its advocacy through the Greater Wilmington Development Council of hiring a professional planner for the City of Wilmington. Far beyond engaging in advocacy, however, the division developed programs that provided professional expertise: the Census and Data System, the Delaware Public Administration Institute, and the Urban Agent Division. These units offered government and community institutions professional policy, planning, program, and administrative services. While the initial focus of the division was on Wilmington, the scope quickly expanded across the state. All of its original programs expanded over the next half-century to become important units of the Biden School in 2021. New centers were added over the years in areas of emerging need in energy and environmental policy, historic preservation, and disaster science and management.

Early on in its development, the Biden School became the default research arm of Delaware’s public policy decision-making system, ranging from providing projections of public school enrollments to evaluating the needs of senior citizens, from tracking the distribution of broadband capacity to studying the continuous improvement of transportation, energy, environmental, and social services. In a few cases, the Biden School has been officially designated as the agent of the State.⁹

Beyond providing enhanced research and professional services to local, county, and state government agencies, the Biden School’s centers and institutes have also given direct technical assistance. For over half a century, many Delaware municipalities have relied upon the school’s assistance to meet growing federal and state data and technical requirements and help develop proposals for federal and state funding. That assistance has most often been delivered by the Institute for Public Administration and the Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research. A similar pattern of assistance exists at the level of community development, particularly regarding neighborhood development in Wilmington. Those contributions began with the Urban Agent Program, expanded in the 1990s with the Wilmington Community Development Partnership, and continued through the first two decades of the twenty-first century through the Center for Community Research and Service’s leadership of the Blueprint Communities program. All of these initiatives were focused on building community capacity for sustainable development, and all helped develop generations of community leaders and advocates.

In 2011, George C. Wright, Jr., the executive director of the Delaware League of Local Governments, explained that “eighty percent of Delaware’s municipalities have populations under one thousand and have limited staff and resources. [We] consider IPA an essential partner in providing direct support and critical services to many of the state’s local governments.”¹⁰ Wright’s successor, Carl Luft, reflecting on that partnership, highlights IPA’s role: “It’s really hard to imagine how towns and cities in Delaware would address regulatory challenges and other issues . . . without IPA support. I don’t know how they’d do it. Even some of the bigger municipalities have ‘grown up’ with IPA’s assistance.”¹¹ A similar sentiment has been expressed by James Baker, former mayor of Wilmington, who recognizes that faculty, staff, and students from the school “are an integral part of the Wilmington community and have been for decades” and have supported improved “services and community initiatives that have greatly benefitted our City’s diverse population and neighborhoods.”¹²

From its inception, the Division of Urban Affairs worked closely with the leadership of the Delaware business community, initially through collaborations with the Greater Wilmington Development Corporation. The alliance of business, government, and education leaders had a significant impact on creating the College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy. In the 2000s, the School of Public Policy and Administration worked closely with the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce and its associated think tank, the Delaware Public Policy Institute, to collaborate on health, education, and economic development issues. This collaboration led to further knowledge-based partnerships and a Knowledge-Based Partnership conference series used to leverage initiatives on crucial policy issues and launch new UD initiatives, including the Delaware Energy Institute, the Partnership for Public Education, and the Partnership for Healthy Communities.¹³ Notably, all of these initiatives were university-wide, demonstrating the school’s continuing role as a catalyst for UD innovation, especially in mobilizing the university’s growing capacity for interdisciplinary, policy-oriented research. The contributions of the Biden School to Delaware over its first sixty years have been diverse and sustained.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Biden School alumni have become leaders across all sectors of the First State, most especially in state and municipal governments and in nonprofit and community institutions. At the time it became a freestanding professional school, those alumni included some of the state’s most prominent elected leaders. John Carney was sworn in as governor of Delaware on January 17, 2017.¹⁴ Lisa Blunt Rochester made history in 2016 when she was elected as Delaware’s member of the House of Representatives, the first woman and first person of color to represent the state in Congress.¹⁵ Michael Jackson (MPA, 1998) served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2017 to 2021, and Michael Morton (MPA, 1986) has been Delaware’s Controller General since 2012. While both in office, they represented the chief budgetary officials for the executive and legislative branches of the state, and their staffs also included Biden School alumni. The same pattern holds with other state agencies. The school’s Legislative Fellows program has provided the Delaware General Assembly with essential staff support. Many assembly members and leaders of state agencies are alumni,¹⁶ and Delaware’s county and local governments have also recruited a steady stream of Biden School graduates.

The Biden School has had a comparable impact on the Delaware nonprofit sector through its alumni, including those that graduated from its nonprofit management certificate program. Paul Calistro, an alumnus of the program and executive director of the West End Neighborhood House in Wilmington, indicates that he and other nonprofit leaders have made the program mandatory for their staff. The alumni of the school’s degree programs and those who have participated in its professional development and certificate programs have formed a growing network of public and nonprofit professionals who have continued to work with the school long after graduation.¹⁷

Beyond the Biden School’s contributions to the First State, its faculty and staff have cultivated extensive and growing national and global collaborations. At the national level, the school in its various iterations has worked with congressional offices, federal agencies, and institutes, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and professional organizations such as the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration, the American Society for Public Administration, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and the Urban Affairs Association. The research and analysis conducted by members of the school has influenced federal programs and practices in areas such as urban policy, energy and environmental policy, criminal justice, disaster science and management, and government administration.

The Biden School has also worked with diverse international organizations, including the Salzburg Global Seminar, the South African MISTRA think tank, the International Research Society for Public Management, and universities all over the world. In addition, the school faculty have participated in extensive global research collaborations on such issues as climate change, energy policy options, disaster mitigation and response, public sector leadership and administration, and historic preservation. Starting in the 1980s, the school attracted a steady stream of highly talented international students who returned to their countries after graduation and made their marks in academic, government, and global nonprofit institutions. The school has sponsored Fulbright students, Muskie Fellows, and students from partner universities in Asia, Europe, Africa, and South and Central America.

POSSIBILITIES

The Biden School has enlarged and amplified the public purpose of the University of Delaware, acting as a catalyst for the development of UD as one of the nation’s most engaged research universities. As a freestanding professional school, the Biden School now has the mandate to be an agent of change that will further enhance UD’s overall impact on scholarship, education, and society.

Two facets of the school’s historic mission will almost surely remain the same: the commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry on critical societal issues and the commitment to engaged scholarship that connects the world of ideas and the world of social action. At the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century, there is increasing recognition of the mismatch between the interdisciplinary knowledge required to address societal issues and the embedded disciplinary structure of universities. The prevailing organization of university faculty, a product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century development, is not aligned with the generation and dissemination of knowledge on some of the sociopolitical topics of greatest contemporary importance: energy, environment, urbanization, climate change, disaster mitigation, globalization, and the social determinants of health, education, and community development. The Biden School is organized not only to generate knowledge about such complex issues, but also to translate that knowledge into policies and programs.

The Biden School is organized to support UD’s development as a research university. An underlying premise of all research universities is that investment in research serves a public purpose. Therefore, engaged scholarship is fundamental to the success of a twenty-first-century research university. In this regard, the Biden School will be an increasingly valuable asset for the University of Delaware. Engaged scholarship is built into the design of the school, and its continued development should strengthen UD’s identity as one of the nation’s leading engaged research universities.

In 1961, Joe Biden entered the University of Delaware as a freshman, becoming a Blue Hen. In the same year, UD launched the program that now bears his name. As Biden pursued a lifetime of public service, the school became a leader in public service education, preparing future generations to serve the constantly evolving needs of America and the wider world. The most enduring association between Joe Biden and the Biden School lies in shared values of civic engagement and public service. When Biden first met with the school’s faculty shortly after the creation of the Biden Institute, he outlined areas of public policy for which the expertise of America’s universities was needed: “civil rights, the justice system, the Constitution, violence against women, environmental sustainability, and the access and affordability of higher education.”¹⁸ Beyond any specific policy needs, however, he focused on the necessity of promoting civic engagement in the democratic process and informed civil discourse on critical policy issues. In many regards, that was already the mission of the Biden School.

In 2021, the Biden School’s mission statement was reaffirmed, reflecting values and priorities that had guided the school’s development for sixty years:

Named for the 46th President of the United States, the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware prepares students with the knowledge and skills necessary to engage in research and public service activities to improve the quality of life in communities around the world. Our faculty, staff, students, and alumni create and use interdisciplinary, nonpartisan research and empirically-based analysis to inform effective decision-making and policy and to improve leadership and administration. We partner with organizations from all sectors to discover innovative and equitable solutions to the critical challenges of our time.¹⁹

In the long arc of history, President Joe Biden and UD will be inextricably interconnected. The University of Delaware will always be recognized as his alma mater. The school that bears his name will be the proud exemplar of that association.