PSU Magazine Fall 1996

···il'I·~ £t;. I' . or more than 20 years, Portland State University and Lewis & Clark College have teamed up to I ',\ . - educate government administrators. Starting this fall, PSU will have the honor of doing it all. Recognizing Portland State's preeminence in urban and public affairs, Lewis & Clark has agreed that PSU should be the one home of the graduate Public Administration degree program that both schools had cooper– ated on for the past two decades. This will greatly enhance PSU's position in the field, and will allow Lewis & Clark to focus on its core liberal arts program. The transfer of an entire program from a private to a public institution is rare in higher education. The six full-time faculty members who headed Lewis & Clark's master's program in public administration have moved to PSU. "It's an exciting thing for us to be involved in. It's good for PSU, the students, everybody," says Ron Cease, who founded PSU's program in the mid-1970s. Along with its master's degree program, Portland State will gain Lewis & Clark's Executive Leadership Institute and Institute for Nonprofit Management. Both organizations link students and faculty with public administrators around the state through workshops, conferences, and other outreach activities. Through the years each college has developed its own areas of exper– tise in public administration. PSU specializes in health management and administration, personnel, and collec– tive bargaining. Lewis & Clark is bringing to Portland State a specialty in nonprofit management and natural resources policy and management. The two programs have also differed in the size of their respective student bodies. Lewis & Clark grad– uated 27 master's students this past spring; PSU graduated 65. PSU public administration gradu– ates have included Charles Moose, Portland chief of police; Dan Noelle, Multnomah County sheriff; Tanya Collier, Multnomah County commis– sioner; and Jean Thorne, federal policy coordinator for Gov. John Kitzhaber. The programs have also dealt with different funding issues. Lewis & Clark faculty was under constant pressure to raise money for their program-a problem PSU, as a publicly funded state school, did not have, says Cease. Cease is excited about nearly doubling PSU program's faculty from 7 to 13, giving it greater visibility. And he expects that Lewis & Clark's faculty will feel at home at PSU, where public administration is a firmly entrenched piece of the University's overall urban mission. Both schools began in the 1960s to explore the possibility of teaching public administration. At Lewis & Clark, political science Professor Lewis & Clark's Public Administration program moves to the Park Blocks. By John Kirkland Don Balmer was able to get a program proposal approved, but it remained dormant for years. Those same rumblings were happening at PSU under Cease. Then in 1972 the Federal Executive Board, a committee of federal personnel officers, noted that Portland was the largest city in the country without formal postgraduate education for federal managers, says Balmer. The two colleges formally estab– lished public administration programs in 1976, and continued in coopera– tive fashion-sending faculty and students between the two institu– tions-until the recent decision by Lewis & Clark. PSU expects to run a small deficit during the initial stages of the trans– fer. Paying for the first year will be a matter of PSU raising money in outside contracts and keeping tuition money that ordinarily would have gone to the Oregon State System of Higher Education. "You can't do that very often, but this is a new program and we're in the middle of a biennium," says George Pernsteiner, PSU's vice presi– dent of Finance and Administration. Whatever costs are involved, they will seem a small price to pay for Cease, who has watched both programs evolve and grow for more than two decades. "We'll have more marbles to play with and more opportunities," he says. "There's general happiness all around." D FALL 1996 PSU MAGAZINE 13