By Raymond Cox

In 1999, an alliance was created that remains unique within ICMA today. Named the Advisory Board on Graduate Education (ABGE), it was created to serve as an advisory group for the ICMA executive director. The purpose of the board was—and continues to be—to offer the director insight and comment on how ICMA can work in collaboration with the academic community to advance the association’s goals.

The concern then, as it is now, was how to create a network of academics and local government managers who could identify ways to promote the profession through a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree, as well as to identify academics who would collaborate on research and teaching initiatives. ABGE was composed originally of managers with university ties, often those who were already teaching part-time as adjunct faculty. The first chair of the board was long-time manager Mark Levin, who currently is clinical associate professor, Indiana University.

From the first meeting, a small cadre of faculty came as observers. Just a year later, some of those faculty would help revive the urban management education committee of the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA). That small group made it one of its goals to create a more formal link between ICMA and NASPAA.

Step 1 was to be part of ABGE’s agenda, and by 2001, a report on NASPAA activities was a formal part of its agenda. Academics from the NASPAA group—renamed the Local Government Management Education Committee in 2007—also were formally incorporated into the subcommittees of the board.

In those first years, primary topics for discussion concerned how the academic community could support two aspects of the ICMA agenda: international initiatives and filling the management pipeline. Although superseded by the broader Next Generation Task Force, a concern was ensuring that a steady flow of students committed to careers in local government management would be available, and this has remained ABGE’s priority.

Conversations on various projects, including what would become ICMA’s Local Government Management Fellows (LGMF) program, were ongoing as early as 2004. In part because this was an advisory board rather than a task-driven committee, ABGE was free to explore topics that were more complex and contentious for both managers and academics. The drift of public administration programs toward a public policy emphasis and the growing frequency of the hiring of those with an MBA degree were discussed.

These are topics that continue to occupy ABGE. In 2009, as part of the on-going work of NASPAA’s Commission on Peer Review and Accreditation, a small task force from both the Local Government Management Education Committee and ABGE was appointed to help define the appropriate competencies for a specialization in local government management within an MPA. Over the ensuing two years, the group worked to identify those competencies and spell out how they would be incorporated into a curriculum.

In addition to contributions to the LGMF program, one of the most successful efforts was the “managers as faculty” initiative. The idea was to help managers who wanted to become part-time faculty and transition to a second career in the academy. In 2003, a panel discussion at the ICMA annual conference was held to examine this topic. In 2005, the panel discussion was revised to be a workshop where managers who wanted to become part-time faculty could learn how to enter the field of teaching from managers who were already teaching and could offer advice.

Now more than a decade later, the annual conference workshop continues, ensconced in a Monday at 4 p.m. time slot. Updating the work completed by Jim Banovetz in 1989, a new edition of the guidebook Managers as Faculty was released in 2007 and updated again in 2015.

Also in 2007, as part of ABGE’s efforts to promote teaching among managers, a series of commentaries on issues related to teaching were produced called “The Adjunct’s Corner.” That compendium was reformatted as an electronic report in 2015, available at icma.org/adjunctscorner. ABGE has discussed relaunching a new iteration of this publication.

In 2012, the academics who had long been active participants in the work of ABGE were recognized when one of them was made vice chair of ABGE. Currently, there are co-vice chairs who head two subcommittees of the board—the Filling the Pipeline and the Academic Connections committees. As the result of long discussions in breakout groups in 2013, efforts were made at the 2015 conference to more fully engage the academic community. In 2016, a series of papers designed to offer an academic perspective on topics of importance to managers was presented. In 2017, ABGE’s meeting will be extended three hours so that the discussion may be a seamless part of the meeting.

The organizational model has given this group the flexibility to explore many different avenues for cooperation between the academic community and ICMA. ABGE has established an outstanding track record. It was a trail-blazer on a variety of projects and programs to reaffirm the close connection between public administration faculty and the local government management community.

It continues to explore the intricacies of that collaboration. In large part, due to the work of the managers who have served and to the leadership of Mark Levin; Scott Lazenby, city manager, Lake Oswego, Oregon; and now Sam Gaston, city manager, Mountain Brook, Alabama, ABGE continues to be a forum for looking to the future of the profession.

Raymond Cox, Ph.D., is professor, Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio, and co-vice chair, ICMA Advisory Board on Graduate Education (rcox@uakron.edu).