By the time this column hits print, it will be the year 2001—a new year, or new millennium, depending upon how one calculates commencement of the latter.
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Rules in Black and White
It was a warm and sunny spring day, and the park was filled with families and children playing. At the eastern perimeter of the park, on a low fence constructed of railroad ties, three young African-American boys sat talking quietly. An IPD patrol car pulled up directly in front of them; the officers got out of the car and demanded…
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Confusing Sin with Crime
Is anyone else sick of hearing Katie Couric discuss semen-spotted dresses? Does anyone else find graphic discussion by pontificating network anchors about presumed Presidential sexual behavior unseemly? The other day, I picked up a newspaper: Monica Lewinsky had the front page pretty much to herself, the fact that…
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By the Book: Public Administration Meets Legal Theory
Before there was public management, there was political theory: what should government do? What actions by the state are to be considered legitimate? What is justice? What is public virtue? As Thomas Barth reminded us in this journal last October , those of us who teach public management too frequently neglect these seminal questions for the necessary but inevitably more mundane skills of the profession?budgeting, planning, human resources management, policy analysis. But these practical subjects did not emerge from a void; they are inextricably bound up with our constitutional system, and that system in turn is the outgrowth of great philosophical debates about the proper ordering of human communities. It can be extremely rewarding for students to visit those debates. (One would love to say ?revisit? but that would be inaccurate; virtually none of them have any familiarity with this intellectual history.)
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The Elephant in the E-Living Room
The third annual Bulen Symposium on American Politics, held last Monday at IUPUI, was devoted to “epolitics.” The discussion was lively. Depending upon the speaker, we learned that the Internet has lessened (or increased) political participation, is used more by Republicans (or libertarians), circulates devastating (or puerile) political humor, and will replace “butterfly ballots” with reliable electronics (or will enable fraud of hitherto unknown magnitude).
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