Celebrating the Ideas and Contributions of John A. Rohr

• Author: David H. Rosenbloom,Stephanie P. Newbold
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399713519097
• Date: 01 March 2014
• Published date: 01 March 2014
• Subject Matter: Articles

Administration & Society

2014, Vol. 46(2) 128 –130

© The Author(s) 2014

DOI: 10.1177/0095399713519097

aas.sagepub.com

Article

Celebrating the Ideas and

Contributions of John A.

Rohr: To Great Thought

in Public Administration

Stephanie P. Newbold1 and David H.

Rosenbloom1

On October 26-27, 2012, the School of Public Affairs at American University

hosted a symposium honoring John Rohr’s contributions to the intellectual

development of public administration theory and practice. The Former Dean

of our School, William LeoGrande, championed our efforts to organize this

symposium and generously supported it with a sizable appropriation of funds

that allowed us to honor one of our field’s most prominent scholars who

enriched the democratic-constitutional foundations of public administrative

thought.

We chose to recognize John Anthony Rohr (1934-2011) as a great thinker

of public administration because he devoted his career to advancing the con-

stitutional legitimacy of American public administration. Our field largely

credits him for demonstrating unsurpassed excellence in the areas of public

service ethics, the significance of regime values in public administrative

management, comparative constitutional analysis, and most especially for

demonstrating empirically how the American Framers believed that good

administration was a corollary to good government.

Rohr’s work celebrated methodological and epistemological pluralism.

He challenged, and ultimately changed, the intellectual landscape of public

administration. As a champion of a constitutionally normative approach to

administrative thought, Rohr’s work laid the foundation for the establishment

1American University, Washington, DC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Stephanie P. Newbold, American University, Washington, DC, USA.

Email: newbold@american.edu

519097AASXXX10.1177/0095399713519097Administration & SocietyNewbold and Rosenbloom

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