Professionalism vs. participation

So, I had my first class of the year tonight - hooray! It is quite nice to be back in school. I think that it's a good sign of how much I really like my program that I haven't been dreading coming back, but actually looking forward to it.

I have to say that I was worried about the class as it got started this evening; the professor has a speaking pace that is very ... slow. He's not monotone, and he's not boring; but after 5 minutes I had a real fear that class was going to feel excruciatingly long. I did feel kind of long, but in the end I felt like he'd presented some interesting topics, and he had an amusing sense of humor (of the dry wit variety, to which I can relate very well as a speaker).

One of the interesting topics he brought up was the conflict between a society built on democratic (and sometimes radically anti-government) ideals and the whole concept of professional public administration. He mention that as a country and a profession we've never quite come to terms with the fact that public administrators, who are not elected or even in most cases appointed officials, are the biggest class of policy-makers we have - far more influential than our elected leaders (not to mention generally more focused on managing the country than political posturing to retain their position). This topic has come up in a couple of classes before, as has the idea of a "politics-administration" dichotomy that is supposed to keep public administrators focused on implementing the policies decided in the political process. But the reality of the complex systems we've set up to govern and manage our society is that our elected leaders don't end up having the time or the knowledge to work out all the details of how our public systems work, and they leave that to the staff of administrative agencies - who become policy-makers every time they create and administrative rule and decide how it should be applied.

On the one hand, there's the argument that we need administrative staff with professional training who can use their discretion based on specialized expertise to determine the minute details that bring vague and far-reaching policies into daily practice. On the other hand, there's an argument that administrators with no direct accountability to the people over whom they exercise power should not have power to make such important decisions about where public resources go and what happens to them when they get there. For the past year, I've kind of thought of this as an academic discussion; but I realized today that it is incredibly personal, and a tension I've been wrestling with for years.

So much of my vocational and avocational philosophy is about community and citizen empowerment, and recognizing the right and the ability of regular people to play a meaningful, dominant role in the decision-making that affects their lives. But at the same time, I'm in the middle of my second degree program that trains people to be professionals in their field - presumably based on the assumption that to do architecture or to manage organizations well, you generally need significant training in the tools and techniques of the trade. The very idea behind these schools is that, excepting the rare geniuses among us, the untrained individual will design or plan or manage or administer very poorly; and in practice, rare genius is rarely recognized unless you've gone to the trouble of getting the credentials to prove what you know.

This is a potentially serious philosophical conflict. How do I argue for open access to governance and decision-making on the principle that we all can participate without the need to be specialists - and then at the same time, defend the value of specialized training in making sure that people are well-prepared to be good decision-makers? If enough of this kind of training can be given to the general public in a simple, inexpensive way that allows them to participate fully, then why do we have all of these specialized schools (and more importantly, why am I spending my money on them)? And if this kind of training can't be gotten expect with specialized study, then doesn't that imply that there is a limit to how much or how well our citizenry will actually be able to self-govern?

Folks will probably argue that it doesn't need to be either-or, there's a balance, different roles for different times, etc., etc. But I feel like there's a little bit of a cop-out there, and a refusal to recognize that the conflict, while negotiable, is still real and sometimes very, very challenging. This is a question that gets played out over and over again, as public agencies are asked both to do their jobs efficiently and professionally and to be accessible and responsive to the demands of the public. It may be almost impossible to satisfy both of those requirements.

I have to head off to class now - but this is an item for further discussion! Heck, I may even turn it into my paper topic; isn't that clever of me?