by
HEINRICH REINERMANN(1)
German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer
(in: Public Administration Quaterly, Vol.2/1990, pp. 209-229)
Higher education in the field of public administration has been the concern of quite a few educators in recent years, (1) but comparatively little is known about administrative research and teaching by institutions outside the regular university system. Such institutions are more prevalent in Europe than in the United States, and some of the most well-known institutions are the Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris, the School of Public Administration in Dublin, and the Akademie für Staat und Rechtswissenschaft (Academy for State and Legal Sciences) in Potsdam-Babelsberg, East Germany. Comparable to these is the Post-Graduate School of Administrative Sciences, Speyer, Federal Republic of Germany. This paper discusses the scope, mandate and functions of the Speyer School.
One might ask the question: why do we need to provide education in administrative science in the first place? A few years ago Andrew Hacker in Harpers magazine presented his conclusion that graduate schools are wastelands because they are teaching our future doctors, lawyers and administrators exactly the wrong things. (Hacker, 1981) A look at the number of bankruptcies in business or the number of unresolved political problems in our societies might prove him right. It is fairly obvious: the administrative sciences do not have a well established body of knowledge that would enable our universities and colleges to teach future administrators exactly how business or societies may be run successfully. There is a lack of definitive solutions.
Doubters could draw further support from the fact that for thousands of years organizations have been run and have survived without managers specifically trained in administrative sciences. We don't have to look back at the ancient Egyptians or Romans to gain this insight; the last three decades of private and public administration in Germany might be called successful, and yet an overwhelming majority of managers in both sectors have been trained in fields other than administration. At least for the German public administrations one has to admit that the higher levels of management to an extremely large extent consist of -- lawyers. (2) Isn't this proof enough that even effective administration can be done without special training, by "amateur" or "gentlemen" administrators? The answer, we think, should be "no", for reasons based on the nature of public administration.
One of the properties that sets public administration in a special disciplinary category is its role of monitoring and, if necessary, influencing any sector of our societies. This means that the set of information and knowledge required of the science of public administration is unusually extensive. A second special property is public administration's function: the public interest has to be served. Because of largely differing value systems, there is of course no easy way to determine public interest. This means that specific procedures have had to be developed, and must be improved constantly for arriving at some sort of "common will", most often by means of a majority decision which, in turn, leads to finance and enforcement patterns that also are unique to public administration. The only means invented so far for coping with different values in society is politics: while the natural scientist strives for the one right answer, in administrative science the goal very often is to cope with several competing solutions, given extremely incomplete information. Bearing in mind the important differences between public administration and other fields of endeavor, one might make the claim that none of the traditional academic or professional fields deals with public administration sufficiently. Although economists, lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, historians, business administrators, and operations researchers do deal with public affairs, they all do it from their specific points of view. They regard public administration as one clientele among others.
Given the special, solution-defying difficulties arising from the unique properties of public administration, education in this field must remain rather broad. The burden of responsibility will - to a large extent - remain with the managers; they have to fill the knowledge gap with judgment, leadership, and action. This, of course, is and will remain the essence of "taking responsibility". However, with an eye to the need for guidance, like many scholars here in the United States and in other countries we in the School of Administrative Sciences Speyer strongly argue that it is a worthwile and necessary endeavor to promote public administration as a distinct field of knowledge.
Surprisingly, despite the newness of administrative science as a discipline, the teaching of administrative technique is by no means a new venture. There was a well-established science of public administration in middle Europe as early as the 18th century - cameralism. (Morstein Marx, 1967: 403) Its main purpose was to advise the state leaders in the management of economic and administrative activities: public finance, statistics, trade promotion, social planning, business operations, scientific farming, office work, and management of state-owned enterprises were among the topics taught. (Morstein Marx, 1967: 403) The idea and the university institutions of cameralism disappeared, however, during the ages of reason and liberalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Now, a rather different field of knowledge became dominant: constitutional and administrative law, whose main objective has been to establish and maintain boundaries for and limitations on government action.
It is rather obvious that in today's welfare state the emphasis has shifted again; governments and administrations set the development goals for all sectors of society: the threshold below which private action does not meet the standards of the public interest, and should therefore be replaced, supplemented or shaped by public administration activities, has been lowered; rather than to withdraw (as in liberalism), public administration influences private activities to a large extent in order to bring about public wellbeing; and a remarkably high percentage of the labor force is employed by governments and administrations. So, as in the age of cameralism, there is a need for reflection and education regarding the conduct of public affairs. Someone has to bring in the unique perspective of public administration. Someone has to find and integrate the relevant knowledge of other disciplines and fill the gaps with specific research.
Different from the five hundred-odd schools of public administration in the United States, (Dersin, 1981: 151) the Speyer School stands rather alone in its German environment. (3) It was founded in 1947 by the French military government which had the model of the Ecole Nationale d'Administracion (ENA) in mind. It is interesting, by the way, that the shape and functions of the ENA itself had been influenced to a certain extent by earlier German cameralistic ideas, (Morstein Marx, 1967: 405) which means that via Paris parts of cameralism have been preserved for the training of our civil servants. The Speyer School only in recent years has been joined by a few other institutions in the field.
A look at the institutional side of the training of civil servants requires to explain briefly the structure of the German civil service as the clientele for the teaching of public administration. Public officials belong to one of four career groups: the lower, middle, elevated and higher service. Although the probationary training of the lower and middle service also includes some schooling besides on-the-job training, we shall concentrate on the higher and elevated civil servants.
Higher Service: as a prerequisite for becoming a member of the higher service you must complete high school and a university study of at least four years; the probation period that follows lasts two and one-half years and is ended by a second or "great" state examination.
Besides the traditional law schools, three types of university studies for public administration can be distinguished: comprehensive graduate studies of public administration, leading towards a master's degree; schools or departments that offer a public administration option within their studies; and institutions with a university-like status which do not, however, belong to the regular university system.
Only one school in Germany offers comprehensive graduate studies, specializing in public administration, the University of Konstanz (since 1964). (Again, you would find the same situation all over Europe, which is very different from the United States with its many schools of public administration.) (König, 1981a: 5-6) Quite a few university departments, however, offer public administration options, mainly in law schools, and in business and social science departments.
The School of Administrative Sciences Speyer falls into the third category - an academic institution somewhat outside the general university system and specializing in public administration. It does have academic autonomy and the right to award master's and doctoral degrees as well as the right to confer eligibility for the university professor's career (a sort of "professorial Ph.D." - a traditional privilege of German universities that was established early in the 19th century). Institutions similar to Speyer can also be found in other European countries; in France (ENA, Paris), in Ireland (School of Public Administration, Dublin) or in East Germany (Academy for State and Legal Sciences, Potsdam-Babelsberg). (König, 1981a: 7-8)
Elevated service: here the preparation model used to be: completion of either high school (13 years) or middle school plus two years of vocational apprenticeship, followed then by a three-year probation period. However, there has been an important change in the last few years in that the probation period is combined with a college education in the various fields of public administration, offered by special "vocational colleges for administration" which are part of the federal and state governments. Their function is to provide two years of practice-oriented teaching of public administration on a scientific basis. This study is supplemented by a one-year internship. The process of converting the probationary on-the-job training into college instruction began in 1973 with the state government of Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart und Kehl) and has since been extended to all state and federal governments.
Continuing training: most of the institutions mentioned above offer continuing education programs in addition to their pre-service or probationary education. Some institutions offer continuing training only, and they also can be considered as centers of administrative science. One is the Federal Academy for Public Administration in Bonn, a division of the Federal Department of the Interior (similar to Britain's Civil Service College); it has a permanent staff of about 50 and runs some 300 courses per year. It is one of seven independent federal training centers (for the foreign service, armed forces, federal railways, federal post office and so on). Also the states maintain training centers, for instance the Institute for Public Administration of North Rhine-Westphalia in Hilden or the Bavarian Prime Minister's Office in Munich, to name only two.
For local administration at least two institutions should be mentioned: the Institute of Urban Studies in Berlin (DIFU) and the Institute for Local Government Studies in Cologne (KGSt), although the main purpose of the latter is to develop generally applicable practical recommendations taken from administrative science and experience.
Practice institutions: as in the United States, the picture describing the centers of administrative science would be incomplete without mentioning some agencies engaged in the practice of public administration. Very active in the adoption and implementation of administrative science findings are the Senate Agency for Organization and Personnel in Hamburg and the Economic and Consulting Bureau (WIBERA) in Düsseldorf, to name two.
This sketch of the German institutions involved in public administration science shows first the environment of the Speyer School, which started very much as a pioneer in 1947, but has been joined by some others, especially since the mid-60s when the need for more and different training of our civil servants became clear. Second, the sketch shows that in Europe public administration as a science, measured by years of establishment and numbers of schools, is not as well established as in the United States.
When the French founded the Speyer School in 1947, it was meant to provide public administration education for the three states within the French zone of military occupation. The ENA in Paris served as a model, but this model - adequate for unitary France - could not accomodate the German notions of regionalism and federalism in the long run. The several German states, by tradition, had their own ideas about an institution for the recruiting and training of civil servants. Therefore, after the constitution of 1949 (Basic Law) became effective, a new basis for the School had to be found. In 1950 it was converted to a joint agency: the states intended to use it as a teaching resource - along with their own - for participants in the preparatory service for judges, attorneys and higher civil servants. Based on an agreement, the federal and all state governments contribute to the school's budget and nominate the members of the Board of Trustees. Rhineland-Palatinate serves as the housekeeper state.
Today, the academic staff consists of 18 full professors (each of whom is provided with one research assistant and one secretary), and some 50 parttime lecturers, most of whom are outstanding practitioners in public administration or related fields. The school possesses a library and computing facilities.
The activities of the Speyer School can be roughly divided into research and teaching, with teaching further divided into postgraduate education and continuing education. As mentioned earlier, the training of higher civil servants in contintental Europe, to a very high extent, traditionally has been provided by law schools. Even today people speak about the "monopoly of jurists". The assumption of an interchangeability of the classical juridical careers of judges, attorneys, notaries or public prosecutors and higher civil service careers is still widespread; (Siedentopf and Grunwald, 1976: 14) their university and probation training follows virtually identical patterns.
Confronted with these European traditions and environments, the point of view of the Speyer School is that a revolutionary approach to changing the education of the higher civil service is not desirable nor would it be possible. The strategy, rather, is evolutionary: to supplement traditional curricula, to demonstrate that job descriptions more and more have to be enriched by skills and abilities that are not provided by legal training alone. This supply- rather than demand-oriented approach is one way, we think, in which the qualifications of the civil service can be adapted to the needs of the welfare state.
Approaches of a more revolutionary kind are not considered to be desirable, for two reasons. First, public law continues to be one of the dominant features in government and administration activities; therefore legal knowledge is a prerequisite for many positions. Second, administrative science is considered to have a very general applicability; the emphasis of today's knowledge about public administration is on procedures and methods and on conflict resolution. Much of this is true for legal education also: the lawyer is considered to be a generalist equipped with procedural knowledge and abilities that enable him to deal with a very wide range of problems. He is trained to solve conflicts and to restrict himself to objective and impartial statements. For these reasons, the tradition and the concepts of legal training, in our view, should not be overlooked by schools of public administration.
On the other hand we feel that there is a definite need to supplement legal education. First, there exist many more procedures and methods of general administrative applicability than are usually taught in law schools: statistics, communication, financing, organization, planning, decision making, computer use, personnel - to name some broad areas. Second, in law schools, familiarization with the legislative procedures of making law is often superceded by dogmatic questions of how to apply existing regulations. Modern administrators need knowledge of such administrative methods and of the procedures of making law, not only because quite a few of them are promoted to leading positions during their careers and are confronted with management functions; it is also a fact that the activities of the welfare state are highly interrelated and complex, that decisions often have a high impact on more than one section of society and their consequences have to be determined carefully. Neither "gentlemen administrators" nor jurists in modern administration can expect to get through their careers without coming across nonjudicial problems. Therefore, the relevant knowledge has to be provided, either during pre-service education or in continuing training or by learning on the job.
The Speyer School tries to contribute to this by offering both pre-service and continuing education with equal emphasis (Figure 1). As far as pre-service education is concerned, there are four different programs, all of which are post-graduate, admitting only students who already hold a Master's degree in fields with relevance for public administration.
The oldest program is the three-month "Speyer semester" offered two times a year to students, most of whom are serving their two and a half years of probation between their graduation from university and their second or "great" state examinations. During this preparatory service they go through several stages of professional practice (courts, governmental agencies, and so on), one of which can be the optional Speyer semester. This is also part of the preparatory service for trainees of the Federal Labor Administration. Together, these participants number about 400 each semester. Although Speyer's influence on the probationary training can only be of a limited, rather complementary nature, to date some 17,000 higher civil servants have been exposed to notions and concepts of public administration science.
In 1978 a Master's program has been established to which some 50 students are admitted yearly. It is a two-semester program, supplemented by an intervening eight-week internship and a six-weeks thesis. (König, 1981b) Unlike those in the Speyer semester, participants normally are not engaged in the two-and-one-half-year probationary service; but they too have already earned Master's degrees in such fields as business, law, social sciences or regional planning, and wish to deepen their understanding of public administration. Admittedly, one year of Masters studies is rather short, but considering the fact that we are talking about a postgraduate program and that most of the public administration programs in the United States, too, last only one year, it seems reasonable. Compared to the United States, the number of practitioners who do Masters studies is almost negligible.
Beginning in 1982, a Master's program is offered to students from developing countries. Admittance, at least for the first years, will be restricted to certain regions in order to have a somewhat homogeneous group of participants, and to junior members of the teaching staffs of the respective national schools of administration. This two-year program starts with a six-month language and adjustment course offered by the German Foundation for International Development in Berlin, and is followed by three semesters of Masters studies in Speyer. In our program of "teaching teachers" we invest the hope that they will be multipliers of administrative sciences in their home countries, which would give our program the highest possible effects. (Reinermann, 1984)
The fourth program in pre-service training is the long-existing doctoral studies program which leads to the degree of a "Doctor of Administrative Sciences".
Turning to the Speyer activities in continuing training, one has to bear in mind that, in our country, many civil servants have had no real education in administrative science in the first place. "Continuing" education actually is very often the participants' first exposure to concepts of policy making, organization, personnel, communication and so on, rather than an updating of this knowledge. Therefore, we consider continuing training as one more opportunity to acquaint civil servants with administrative sciences, to balance out university education, and we place a comparatively high emphasis on our four core programs.
We offer three types of standard seminars on recurring subjects which have been developed and are revised in collaboration with the State Departments of the Interior as the agencies in charge of personnel. The first we call entrance seminars because they are addressed to younger civil servants at the entrance levels of the higher service. The program consists of two parts - including methods of problem solving, organization and personnel, and public administration in its environment - each taught for one full week and the two parts stretched over one year. The second of the standard seminars is called management seminars, and is addressed to senior administrators with leadership responsibilities; it consists of four full weeks - perspectives of public administration; personnel management; organization, planning and information technology; and state and economy - spread over two years. For each of the one-week sections two professors of the Speyer School are responsible. They outline the specific contents, invite guest speakers and monitor the course. In recent years the Speyer Seminar for Information Technology in Public Administration (SpeBit) has also become a standard seminar. It addresses top managers of public institutions who learn how to deal with the key issues of information technology in public administration within one week. Each year some 500 higher civil servants are trained in these standard seminars.
Additional continuing training activities are conferences of two types, the first being open congresses on actual political and administrative problems, offered twice a year. (In recent years the fall congress has been organized by the School's Research Institute for Public Administration.) They last some three days and usually attract several hundred participants. Among the topics of the last conference were: The Public Sector in the Social Market Economy, The Self-Presentation of the State Towards the Public, Mandate and Management of Public Enterprises, 30 Years Constitution, and the Influence of Computer Use on the Structure of Administration.
Finally, some five Special Seminars per year are organized. They last one week each, concentrate on more specialized topics and have a restricted number of participants. Among recent topics were: The Education of the Elevated Civil Service, The Future Code of Social Law, and Accounting in Scientific Institutions.
A certain level of acceptance of the continuing training programs on the part of the public administrations may be inferred from the fact that while participation is voluntary, and participants in most of them have to pay, the programs usually are booked up.
Although administrative research takes up most of the time of the Speyer School academic staff, it can be described here in relatively brief terms. Besides individual research by staff members or doctoral students, research activities are carried out in the separate but related Research Institute for Public Administration, of which all professors are members. The institute has in its regular budget some 20 positions for research associates. All members of the permanent academic staff are entitled to apply for such positions in order to carry out a research project. In addition, several projects are financed by foundations and other external sources. Research projects quite often are initiated by public authorities. Research results, as well as conference proceedingc, are often published in the book series of the Speyer School (more than 100 volumes to date) or in research papers (79 issues to date) or working papers (89 issues to date) or other series.
As far as our subject, public administration, is concerned, we consider "administration" to be a characteristic and specific set of activities which can be identified in every man-made institution. This set of activities is to be distinguished from the purposes an institution fulfills, for instance production of goods and services, medical care, teaching or transportation. Administration keeps such operations going, sees to it that they are goal-oriented, that the division of labor is functioning, that influences from the environment are taken ino account.
Although any man-made institution needs administration to direct its operations, we strongly believe in a difference between private and public administration. In other words: the Speyer School is by no means "generic". We believe that institutions such as public enterprises, communities, states or the federation are so specific that they need to be supported by a specific branch of administrative science: that is by a science of public administration. There are, of course, some generalities and similarities in the administrative activities of different kinds of institutions. But we think Graham Allison was right when he asked: "Public and private management: are they fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects?" (Allison, 1980; (4)) Many atttempts to "let the fresh wind of business blow through administration" have failed, not because of incapability or stubbornness on the part of civil servants, but because of the substantially different underlying structures of the two arenas. These, we think, make it necessary for business and public administration to remain separated disciplines though they share some general administrative knowledge. In more detail - and probably very similar to public administration science in the United States - this field in our opinion should cover the following areas in reserach and teaching:
All of this applies not only to the executive branches of the public sector (as the term "administration" might suggest), but also to the legislative and judicial branches. For, in today's parliamentary democracies, these three powers are by no means separated but rather so much interrelated that clear-cut distinctions among their activities cannot be made. The science of public administration also applies to all levels of the public sector, that is, to federal, state, community and public enterprise administration.
Very typical of the areas of concern in public administration science is that they cannot be attributed to a single discipline. It is obvious that law, sociology, history, political science, psychology, economics, business administration, and others are involved; and the borderlines between them and public administration science are drawn variously, depending on one's point of view. However, strict borders between scientific endeavors seem to be not only unnecessary but counterproductive, because scientific progress very often gains from interrelations.
It is by no means unusual in the world of science that traditionally different fields of knowledge merge into a new discipline, thereby responding to new societal needs or to new scientific findings. During the merging process, interdisciplinary work is necessary in order to bring relevant knowledge together. We consider public administration science to be a promoter of interdisciplinary work, with the task of collecting and integrating the contributions of traditional disciplines to public administration, and of filling gaps by specific research. The difficult problems of the welfare state demand a discipline that is not only interested in specific legal, social or economic aspects of public administration but that considers public administration as its genuine object, in all its different aspects. In order to illustrate this, we call the various sciences that deal with public administration among other clienteles "administrative sciences" (plural) and distinguish this term from "administrative science" (singular), by which we mean a discipline whose exclusive concern is public administration.
One important strategy to support the process of integrating knowledge of relevant disciplines is the recruitment of faculty. Of the 18 academic chairs the School of Administrative Sciences Speyer holds, today six are dedicated to the various sectors of public law, two to economics, one to business administration, one to sociology, one to history, and two to political science. Besides these "administrative sciences", five chairs are dedicated to "administrative science", and address themselves to different topics of public administration including planning, organization, personnel, and informatics.
Administrative science being so much intertwined with many other disciplines, we think it necessary that first it have its roots widespread in these fields of knowledge so that new findings and developments can be readily learned and reflected. The professors of history, sociology and the other fields remain closely related to their disciplines (for instance they remain members of scientific societies and associations, and they publish in discipline-oriented journals). This supports the information flow between these knowledge fields and the science of public administration.
Second, the described recruitment strategy is applied in order to support, enlarge, and intensify interdisciplinary work among faculty members. In other words: it is expected that the sheer fact of combining different disciplines in one school will lead faculty members to care about contributions and points of view of other disciplines. Although each faculty member still is standing in his "disciplinary garden", he is supposed to "look over the fence" and use relevant aspects of the environment in his work.
Although interdisciplinary status is difficult to reach, it might be said that the Speyer approach works to some extent. The strategy is "osmosis" rather than trying to "pump" knowledge from one head into others. Here again, we believe in supply-oriented approaches. Conferences, committees, speeches, team teaching, team examinations, and so on provide media that bring faculty members together and expose them to views of other disciplines to a much higher degree than in traditional schools and departments. Each new faculty member is urged to move to the city of Speyer or the vicinity so that he is able to participate in the rather many activities organized by the school and the community. It is wise to read books and articles written by fellow faculty members which one normally would not read in order to be prepared for their reaction in committee meetings or on some other occasion.
Of course, life in an interdisciplinary environment is not always easy. One has to expect and get used to a certain amount of "showing off" by representatives of the respective disciplines, as well as a certain shyness or timidity in admitting that one is more or less a layman outside one's own field of research. Also, one should be prepared for more occasions of annoyance than in traditional schools or departments. Friendship between the different fields is not always enthusiastic; at least, however, we tolerate each other. Major drawbacks are that you give up the stronghold of a widely known discipline for the benefit of joining a rather new "band" which has not reached the same status. It might be wise not to become distanced from one's original discipline, so that one still has outside bases and footholds when, for example, external expert opinions are necessary on research project proposals. To keep track of the developments in one's home discipline is more difficult because of the lower level of disciplinary communication; on the other hand, however, this very aspect enhances the integration of new faculty.
Generally, those who want to do interdisciplinary work in public administration - and most of our faculty do because it is challenging and rewarding - consider the infrastructure provided by the Speyer School to be appropriate and encouraging.
Finally, let me comment briefly on how we try, both in research and teaching, to avoid becoming an "ivory tower", isolated from practical needs. Of course, each school or department is in constant danger of losing contact with the clientele it is supposed to serve. This danger is especially present in schools such as Speyer that are influenced by the European university tradition of "goal- und purpose-free" science, of science as an end in itself. It was the Prussian Secretary of Education, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who stressed the point that scientific activities cannot be structured, programmed or predicted as production activities, who demanded "loneliness and freedom" for the academic researcher and teacher, who believed that doing research would guarantee the best education of the student, rather than learning well-established and laid out facts. Pure curiosity, rather than the need to make a living, was to be the motive behind research and study.
It is interesting to speculate whether Humboldt would change his position, could he see the situation of today's societies. Although pure curiosity remains a prerequisite for research and although research remains a good means for education, the modern world has had its impacts on universities. Students are no longer only those whose careers were predetermined, regardless of grades and degrees; most of today's students consider going to school a means for vocational promotion and want to be prepared exactly for that. Society is no longer satisfied with a Nobel prize once in while; it wants the university to teach students much of the information that is relevant for their future positions; it expects concrete answers to specific questions.
Given this situation, the position of the Speyer School seems to be reasonable. Humboldt's idea still is to be found in the thinking of faculty members. For instance, some refuse to define clearly the field they teach, leaving students somewhat confused as to what kinds of questions to expect on examinations. Some feel that the burden of integrating the knowledge of the different disciplines should be left to the student. Curricular needs are taken into account more in continuing than in regular education; over all, our faculty members' concerns with students are much less than seems to be the case in the United States.
Although much has changed since Humboldt's times, it seems that faculty members are under less school-internal pressure and scrutiny regarding promotion and merit increase than are their colleagues in the States - an observation that is true for the German university system in general. Becoming a professor and being promoted depends very much on receiving offers by schools other than one's own. Thus, one's academic performance is evaluated by those other schools rather than by one's immediate colleagues. However, it is interesting to observe that the results of our respective incentive systems seem to be largely the same: the active, ambitious professor who tries to attract as much attention as possible by publishing, organizing conferences and consulting. So, although our promotion system looks comparatively rigid and inflexible at first glance, it has quite strong built-in competition and market forces to which faculty members respond - of course with exceptions to this rule.
Other special built-in stabilizers that have prevented the Speyer School from becoming an "ivory tower" include the board of trustees, consisting of practitioners of all federal and state governments, which has its influence in spite of "academic freedom" of the school. It is exactly for the purpose of having close contact with public administration that the large majority of the part-time lecturers are leading practitioners, and that in both our pre-service and continuing training programs traditionally many public officials are invited as guest lecturers. Further, the obligation to participate in continuing education forces the faculty to deal with subjects relevant to practitioners and to communicate clearly. Also relevant is the fact that quite a few research projects are initiated by and carried out in close contact with federal and state agencies.
At the end of this sketch of the Speyer approach to administration science one has to realize that this approach has not broken the so-called monopoly of jurists. Regarding public administration, much of the observation of Fritz Morstein Marx in 1967 is still true today: "The occupational 'insurance effect' of the juridical course of study as a common road to the bar and business position, as well as to both judicial and administrative careers, is a pertinent factor". (Morstein Marx, 1967: 409) As discussed earlier, Speyer has not tried to break the "monopoly" of legal education for general higher civil servants because of the value of that education to a career in administration. Rather it has restricted itself to an evolutionary approach: to rouse interest for scientific reflection in the important field of public administration, where about half of our gross national product is spent; to convince administration practice, where this is still necessary, of the contributions administrative science is able to make and of the necessity to include all - not only legal - aspects of administration in job descriptions; to prepare students for the very special environments and functions of public administration; to teach methods and concepts useful and necessary for today's civil service careers, by means of pre-service and continuing training; to provide future civil servants with ethical guidance regarding objectivity, impartiality, and justice; to contribute to research in public administration, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary. These are our concerns in the School of Administrative Sciences Speyer.
1. See, for example, the annual series Education for Public Service, Birkhead and Carroll 1980, and see Kraemer and Perry 1980: 87-102.
2. Moreover, in all continental Europe, including the socialist countries (see König, 1981a: 2) the scene is dominated by the fact that recruiting patterns prefer lawyers to a very great extent; for special functions they are supplemented by engineers, teachers, physicians, surveyors, and others.
3. For more details about the Speyer School see Becker, 1957; Ule, 1963; Knöpfle, 1972; König, 1977; Reinermann, 1984.
4. See also Kraemer and Perry, 1980, with reference to basic problems in implementing the idea of generic education for administration.
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Birkhead, G.S. and J.D. Carroll (1980) (eds.). Education for Public Service. Syracuse, NY.: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.
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(1) The author wishes to express his gratitude for the generous support rendered by Professor Kenneth L. Kraemer, Graduate School of Management at the University of California Irvine, and Director of PPRO (Public Policy Research Organization). He is also indebted to the Volkswagen Foundation for financial support.