Citizen Conversation With…John Donahue
by Matt Bieber, News Writer on November 14, 2009 in Citizen Conversation with..., Features
Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, News Writer, MPP’11
John D. Donahue is the Raymond Vernon Lecturer in Public Policy and faculty chair of the HKS Case Program and the SLATE teaching initiative.His teaching, writing, and research mostly deal with public sector reform and with the distribution of public responsibilities across levels of government and sectors of the economy, including extensive work with the HKS-HBS joint degree program. He has written or edited ten books, including Disunited States (1997), The Privatization Decision (1989, with four translations 1990-92) and most recently, The Warping of Government Work (2008). He served in the first Clinton Administration as an Assistant Secretary and then as Counselor to the Secretary of Labor. Donahue has consulted for business and governmental organizations, including the National Economic Council, the World Bank, and the RAND Corporation, and serves as a trustee or advisor to several nonprofits. A native of Indiana, he holds a BA from Indiana University and an MPP and PhD from Harvard.
You’ve spent an awful lot of time at the Kennedy School. You’re an MPP, a PhD, and you’ve spent the bulk of your career here. How do you think the school is doing? In particular, how has it changed since the time you were an MPP, and what challenges is it facing right now?
Harvard had really lousy luck in when it decided to launch the Kennedy School – or rather, when it decided to scale it up – in that it went from being a small program to an avowedly large-scale initiative meant to create a new profession in the late 70s. (1979 is when the current building was built.) That was just about the time the bottom fell out of public service in the United States. Right at the point when the relative economic rewards of public service collapsed, and right when trust in government and the status of public service declined. So we couldn’t have done worse.
I always think it’s important to think of that background in calibrating how we’ve done relative to the mission. Given how strongly the tide has been running against us, we’ve been doing pretty well. Had the Kennedy School been started in, let’s say, 1941 or 1946, or maybe right now, I think it might have been a smoother launch. So that affects how I set par in my mind.
If I could push a little further on that in particular, what do you see as the legacy of a stumbled launch thirty-odd years later?
Any institution, if it doesn’t have a strong external constituency to keep it on track with its intended mission, will follow a path of least internal resistance and find something else to do. One thing about the Kennedy School is that there’s a strong gravitational pull exerted by the faculty of Arts and Sciences. Most of us come from there. We all respect the elegance of what they do. Without some other strong force offsetting that gravitational pull we end up—instead of orbiting at an appropriate distance around the arts-and-sciences world—getting pulled completely into it.
The Law School, the Medical School, and the Business School all benefit from the discipline imposed on them by a pretty robust and well-defined labor market they’re feeding into. Because we don’t have that, we’ve got to work extra hard to become something distinct from just a branch of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Do you think the Kennedy School has a clear picture of what it wants its students to leave the Kennedy School having learned? Is there a clear vision of a successful student?
Some parts do. I admire the MPA/ID initiative because of the clarity of its mission. I think it’s kind of a niche mission, but they know what they’re doing. I think the intentionality of the MPP program ebbs and flows. There are times that we have a clear fix on what we’re trying to do and we build it into the curriculum, and there are times when we sort of drift away from that.
We always do come back. This is a conversation that we always have, over and over again. It would be easier, again, if we had a thousand public-service organizations around the world that know exactly what they want in an MPP to keep us honest if we start to depart from that. In the absence of that external discipline, we need a little bit more internal focus.
Which areas of the MPP curriculum and of the MPP profile are well defined right now and which ones could use some work?
I think the pieces are well defined, but the whole is not as much greater than the sum of the parts as it ought to be. To the extent that the MPP offers something distinctive, it’s the reliable capability to integrate and apply the different disciplines in real world practice. I wish we did a better job at that. You get some practice at it in Spring Exercise, you get some practice at it in your PAE. In my ideal conception of the Kennedy School, we’d devote more time to this kind of integrated policy analytic work throughout the core, but that’s hard to do.
We all have so much within our areas that we think it’s urgent for you to learn. I’ve got my stuff I want you to learn in management, and other people have their stuff they want you to learn in economics, statistics, ethics, and so on. It’s a collective action problem, making way for the common curriculum of integrated policy analysis.
I’ve been impressed in the moments when our syllabi are coordinated – so that we’re talking about topics that integrate material that we’re learning in multiple classes at once. But I can imagine that doing that thing on a large scale is really hard to arrange.
You bet. It pays off big-time. If I had my way, that would happen closer to 90% of the time, instead of 10% of the time. But again, it’s a lot of work to get that done.
I actually have an ambition – not this year and not next year but probably the year after that – to do some experimentation with a single cohort that does a little bit more consistent integration and see if we can demonstrate the value of that.
Is that tied into your efforts to improve professional pedagogy more generally? And can you provide some background on that effort for our readers?
The case program was broken and we had to close it or fix it. The dean asked if I would become the faculty chair to try to help fix it, and I said okay. Then about a month later, the dean said, “While you’re at it, can you do something about faculty training and assessment?” I said, “Not by myself, I can’t. But if you will help me line up some reinforcements, maybe collectively we can..”
So we recruited two fabulous colleagues – Dick Light and Dan Levy—who joined with me as the core faculty team. Anne Drazen had been the head of IT at the Kennedy School and was sort of bored with running a mature process and raised her hand to do be the staff head of the effort. And we recruited Lee Warren, an ace teaching coach, to be the director of professional pedagogy.
We have an advisory board, chaired by Derek Bok, who understandably turned down everything else Harvard wanted him to do after his second time as president, but said yes to us because he cares so much about this mission. The dean, the executive dean, the academic dean are all strongly behind it.
What does the content of the training look like in particular? What gaps are you seeking to fill?
Well, case teaching for one thing, but not just the case method strictly speaking. The term we use is problem-based learning, which includes cases, but also includes exercise and simulations, and all kinds of teaching methods that have the students actively engaged in the learning experience, rather than passively receiving lessons from the professor.
We just finished the first case teaching seminar for faculty who wanted to use the method but didn’t know how. This past August and September we just did our second round of new faculty orientation for people to introduce them to the idea that this is a professional school, and what that institutional distinction means for how they might approach teaching.
When the school was small, when I was an MPP student, there were only around 25 people on the faculty. The Tom Schellings and Dick Neustadts and Fred Mostellers of the world were able to informally impart the ethos of professional-school pedagogy to the new folks. Then the school got big and that model didn’t work anymore. It took us a while to figure out that we needed a more structured institution to replace it. To their credit, this leadership team recognized that, set out to fix it, and is putting tons of support into the effort. It’s going to take five or ten years to see if it’s going to make a big difference, but so far, things are going very well.
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