A Public-Service School Is Greatly Needed

To the Editor:

As the leader of the movement to build a U.S. Public Service Academy, I commend Pablo Eisenberg for bringing attention to the academy (“Why We Might Not Need a Public-Service Academy,” Opinion, January 29). He is absolutely right: We need more discussion of this important idea. Of course, I disagree heartily with his conclusions, and I suspect that other people will as well once they take it upon themselves to learn more.

Mr. Eisenberg’s litany of skeptical questions can be boiled to three main concerns. First, he argues that with the spirit of public service now sweeping the country there is no longer a need for the academy because young people by the thousands are queuing up for administration jobs. While I too am excited by the renewed interest in government work, I harbor no illusions about how long this spirit will last or how broadly it is shared. According to the Partnership for Public Service, many young people have inflated expectations of starting salaries in the public sector. Furthermore, many are fired up to work for President Obama in Washington but not necessarily in the critically needed fields and geographic locations where we have shortages. Once the hard realities of public-sector work sink in and the economy improves, that spirit may ebb.

Why not take advantage of this very real, but likely temporary, surge in excitement to build a permanent institution that will endure long after President Obama leaves office?

Mr. Eisenberg’s second objection is that existing institutions already do a fine job of preparing people for public service. Indeed, many universities, from Tufts to my alma mater, Duke, have established excellent programs aimed at encouraging young people to pursue service. These programs, however, tend to have very broad definitions of service — everything from volunteering to nonprofit work to being a community liaison for a corporation satisfies the service requirement.

A tiny handful of very small programs, such as Princeton’s Scholars in the Nation’s Service, actually focus on government work, and none of them demand a service obligation of five years as the academy would. By and large, American higher education has not made public-sector work a priority, which helps explain why we have such tremendous public-sector shortages at the local, state, and federal levels.

Finally, Mr. Eisenberg suggests that there are other, better ways to encourage public service, including the oft-repeated idea to create public-service scholarships.

Creating more public-service scholarship programs is a worthy, but limited, idea. We already have a variety of them — from the Truman to the Hollings to the Pickering to the Federal Cyber Service Scholarship. None of them have the power and symbolism to match West Point or the other military academies.

Such scholarships cannot offer the intensive culture of service that a separate institution devoted to public service would instill in its students. Scholarship money would benefit individual students (and colleges) but would not create a unified campus culture that develops a strong esprit de corps around a national public-service mission.

For three years, my colleagues and I have been mocked as idealists, belittled as naïve, and dismissed as irrelevant. Yet we continue to gather strength because there is something powerful about this idea, something that speaks to who we are as Americans. We are not, as Theodore Roosevelt might say, “cold and timid souls” who simply criticize existing ideas without fighting for their own. We are a bold, audacious people, and we do not shy away from grand projects simply because they are expensive or daunting.

Chris Myers Asch
Executive Director
U.S. Public Service Academy
Washington

To the Editor:

Mr. Eisenberg’s article is replete with misguided, misinformed, or misleading statements. Ironically, those statements serve to reinforce the author’s contention that a clear grasp of the concept has yet to reach everyone interested in it.

He apparently misses the essential purpose of the proposed academy. It is not “to entice more public servants,” nor is it an idea “for promoting public service.” Rather, it will be a national institution focused on developing lifelong leaders to strengthen the arena of public service in America.

Mr. Eisenberg wonders if we need such an academy, and the answer is Yes, if sustaining a flow of competent and dedicated leaders for our public sector is an imperative for our country in the 21st century. Yes, if the development of a stream of leaders of character is necessary for the long-term health of public service in America. Yes, if our nation needs an unwavering source of selfless civilian servants in good times and bad.

Dave Palmer

The author served as Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from 1986 to 1991.