Richard J. Stillman

Racial Unrest in the Military: The Challenge and the Response

Like the American society in general, the U.S. armed forces were rocked in the late 1960s and early 1970s by numerous racial incidents at overseas bases such as Tiensha and Longbinh, South Vietnam; Heidelburg, Germany; Rota, Spain; and on stateside assignments such as Camp Pendleton, California; Great Lakes Naval Base, Illinois; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Laredo Air Force Base, Texas; Fort Knox, Kentucky; Kaneohe Marine Air Station, Honolulu; and Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as well as aboard ships at sea: U.S.S. Constellation, U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, and the fleet oiler, Hassayampa. While the intensity and causes of the racial disturbances varied from place to place, the July 20, 1969, Marine Corps Camp Lejeune incident and the October 12, 1972, outbreak aboard the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk were two of the most severe conflicts and present something of a classic pattern of racial unrest in the U.S. armed forces.

Toward a New Agenda for Administrative State Research?: A Response to Mark Rutgers’s “Traditional Flavors?” Essay

Mark Rutgers’s (2001) “Traditional Flavors?” article is seminal and provocative and therefore deserves wide readership and discussion. Today, unlike most other scholars in our field, Rutgers dares to take a new look at a central, possibly the central, yet too long neglected dilemma within public administration, namely, what is the modern administrative state and what are its implications for administrative study? His article has done an important service for our field by focusing academic attention on that key conundrum, which, in turn, continuously vexes our ability to analyze and possibly resolve other thorny theoretical dilemmas such as, What is public administration? Its basic values? Methods? Role in society? and so on. Curiously, prior to the l930s, “state” was a topic of rich, thoughtful debate among many of America’s foremost administrative academics. Recall that Woodrow Wilson’s second book, The State (l889), offered a comparative, historical overview of that topic. W. W. Willoughby’s first publication, An Examination of the Nature of the State (1896), presented an in-depth, organic perspective. Mary Parker Follett’s The New State (19l8) introduced “interest groups” as the basis for state making. Arguments over state came naturally to turn-of-the-century social scientists because many had been trained by Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, John W. Burgess at Columbia, and Francis Lieber at South Carolina (later Columbia), who themselves were products of the mid-nineteenth-century German staatslehre university education. So it was hardly surprising that

Changing European States, Changing Public Administration: Introduction

How do these external and internal forces forge new tasks and responsibilities for European states? In the process, how do they serve to restructure and redefine their administrative systems? Will these changes shift European priorities and alter the content of activities that European public administrators perform? How well – or poorly – do they carry out their new roles?

“Where you Stand Depends on Where you Sit” (or, Yes, Miles’s Law also Applies to Public Administration Basic Texts)

Rufus Miles was a distinguished federal administrator who served in numerous high-level jobs from the days of FDR’s New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society. However, today he is probably best remembered for coining Miles’s Law. When he worked for the Executive Office of the President, he once noted what a remarkable change in personal views took place in one of his colleagues as he moved from the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) to a position in a federal agency. At BOB (now the Office of Budget and Management [OMB]), his friend had been an ardent, hard-nosed costcutter, but in his new post he suddenly transformed into a red-hot advocate for more funding. What happened to him? The man was obviously still the same person but with his new assignment came new responsibilities, expectations, and roles. Hence, Miles’s Law: “where you stand” (or what viewpoints you are most likely to advance) “depends on where you sit” (or the position you occupy in an organization will shape your perspectives decisively). Many public administration textbook authors write about Miles’s Law as part and parcel for explaining how bureaucracy and bureaucrats operate, yet I doubt few of them think that such a “law” could possibly apply to themselves and their books.