December 1999

BOV to Discuss Proposed School of Public Policy By Elena Barbre Plans are under way to create a School of Public Policy that would act as a catalyst for a wide range of public policy activities across the university. The school would include The Institute of Public Policy (TIPP); other programs would be linked by joint appointments. The goal is a nationally recognized, first-tier program for master's and Ph.D. education with a major external impact driven by a high-quality curriculum, outstanding students, a well-focused policy research program, and a forum for public policy debate. The proposal has gone before the university community and the Faculty Senate, which approved a "sense of the senate" resolution supporting the proposal. The proposal is on the agenda for discussion and a possible vote at the Dec. 2 meeting of the Board of Visitors. The school would be established as early as January 2000. Areas of fundamental concern in the School of Public Policy would be governance and the policy process, regional economic development, and the role of international commerce and institutions in the global political economy. Areas of specialization would focus on science and technology policy, organizational informatics, and fiscal federalism. Other academic units with policy-related programs would work with the school to continue to build their existing programs and strengthen the university-wide commitment to public policy related training and research. "Our goal is to become a pre-eminent school of public policy in the United States within 10 years--to be a place that the federal government comes to for advice and assistance," says Kingsley Haynes, director of TIPP, who would become the director of the new school. "We want to use Northern Virginia as a test bed for policy development, implementation, and evaluation, and to act as an international beacon for integrating regional and national support to carry out domestic and global international functions in the public and private sectors." A central part of the school's education goal would be the design and launch of a new master's degree in public policy, to be located at the Arlington Campus, with the intent of attracting the highest caliber of both full- and part-time students. The program would be significantly different from the Department of Public and International Affairs' Master of Public Administration, and would complement TIPP's Master of International Commerce and Policy. The new school would not house all public policy activities at the university; rather, it would support and complement existing public policy research activities in other academic units. This collaboration would be strengthened with cross appointments between the school and the Department of Public and International Affairs, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Department of Biology's environmental science and public policy program, the College of Nursing and Health Science, and the School of Information Technology and Engineering (IT&E). A visiting faculty program also would be established in the new school and shared by all public policy units across the university, and the school would share management of the Northern Virginia Survey Center with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Public and International Affairs. Already in the works are a joint master's program in enterprise engineering and policy with IT&E and the School of Management (SOM), a plan to expand interactions with the School of Law in the area of technology policy and law, and an effort to link current work in electronic procurement and electronic commerce to business and technology aspects of digital interaction in IT&E and SOM. "Washington is a very different kind of environment for developing a public policy program--a very rich environment," says Haynes. "At any other university, we would be the only avenue for public policy activity, but the best we can do here is to cluster public policy activities to create a national profile in a certain area. You have to leave room for other policy activities in their own right--they bring their own contributions to the table. Our school will be a focal point--a magnet. That's what we do here."