Remembering William Mosher: A Pioneer of Public Administration

• Published date: 01 January 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12270
• Author: Jeremy F. Plant
• Date: 01 January 2015

Perspective

Jeremy F. Plant is professor of public

policy and administration in the School of

Public Affairs, Penn State Harrisburg, where

he has been a member of the faculty since

1988. He is past chair of the Section on

Ethics and the Section on Transportation

Policy and Administration of the American

Society for Public Administration. His

research focuses on administrative ethics,

transportation policy, and the history of

public administration.

E-mail: jfp2@psu.edu

Remembering William Mosher: A Pioneer of Public Administration 13

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 1, pp. 13–14. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12270.

Jeremy F. Plant

Penn State Harrisburg

When today’s student of public

administration thinks of the founding

f‌i gures of the f‌i eld, the list is rather small:

Woodrow Wilson, Charles Goodnow, Luther Gulick,

Leonard White, Mary Parker Follett, Louis Brownlow,

and Charles Beard. Less likely to be mentioned along

with these well-known authors is an individual who

bridged the academic and professional sides of public

administration, William E. Mosher.  e f‌i rst dean of

the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Af‌f airs

at Syracuse University, William Mosher was in his day

a well-regarded scholar in the area of personnel man-

agement, but today he is better known for two lasting

contributions that continue to resonate: the develop-

ment of the master of public administration (MPA)

curriculum and the creation of the American Society

for Public Administration (ASPA).

William Mosher came late to the f‌i eld of public

administration. His initial f‌i eld of study was German

culture, which he studied at Oberlin College and

in graduate studies in Germany and then taught for

more than a decade at Oberlin. His transition to

public administration came about in the turbulence

of World War I, when, on the advice of Charles

Beard, head of the Bureau of Municipal Research

in New York City, he moved from the quiet life of

a college professor to become actively involved in

personnel training for supervisors in war indus-

tries. Personnel administration became his primary

research interest, culminating in the f‌i rst major text-

book on the subject, Public Personnel Administration,

coauthored with J. Donald Kingsley. But Mosher’s

interest in the training of personnel led him to the

position with which he is most closely associated, as

dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Mosher became its f‌i rst director, later dean, in 1924,

and through his leadership created the foundation

for the modern MPA degree, stressing a general-

ist professional orientation. (For a more detailed

account of Mosher’s career, see the excellent article by

Charles S. Ascher in the Spring 1946 issue of Public

Administration Review.)

Public administration in the 1920s was still largely

concerned with local government administration,

ref‌l ecting the absence of a true national administra-

tive state as well as the f‌i eld’s roots in the munici-

pal research bureaus. Mosher initially directed the

Maxwell program toward local government manage-

ment—realistic given its location away from major

centers of state and national government activity. But

as the New Deal unfolded, Mosher found himself and

others in the f‌i eld moving away from the local orienta-

tion to see problems in a national context. Mosher

was part of a group charged by President Franklin

D. Roosevelt and Basil Manly, vice chairman of the

Federal Power Commission, to study electric rates

nationally, a project that moved him to the forefront

of policy research during the New Deal.

As the 1930s drew to a close, Mosher moved forward

with plans for a national professional association that

would link the various strands of the f‌i eld of public

administration together—local, state, and national

public administrators, researchers and consultants

from the research bureaus, and students and faculty

at the emerging academic programs across the nation.

As recounted by Charles Ascher, the key to Mosher’s

leadership on the issue was his chairmanship of the

executive committee of the Governmental Research

Association (GRA) in 1939–40 (Ascher 1946, 103–4).

In Ascher’s words, the bureau orientation of the GRA

was no longer able to satisfy the needs of university

faculty and professional administrators involved in

the explosion of governmental activity at all levels

of government in the 1930s:

Indeed, the founder-members [of the GRA]

had over a decade viewed with some doubts

the inf‌i ltration into GRA of university profes-

sors and public administrators.  ese sought

in its annual meetings a forum for the discus-

sion of issues of public policy and the place of

administration in a changing society …  e

sentiment crystallized that this country was

ready for a society of public administration for

Remembering William Mosher: A Pioneer of Public

Administration