by Edwin Dorn, Dean LBJ School of Public Affairs
	During the 1960s I made a commitment to public service. Those were the heady and hopeful days of the New Frontier, the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Society. But the decade of the '60s also was a turbulent and tragic time. We lost our leaders--JFK, MLK, Malcolm, Bobby, Medgar. We became involved in a costly and divisive war in Southeast Asia. And, not long after the words "I have a dream" rang from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the words "Burn, Baby, Burn" rang from the streets of Watts.

We still don't have a balanced perspective on that period. Indeed, many of our most heated political arguments today are over programs or policies developed during the 1960s--Medicare and affirmative action, for example. During several years at the Pentagon, I presided over a military personnel system that was developed in response to the anti-war and anti-draft movements of the 1960s. And today, I preside over a school that was named after one of the pivotal figures of that epoch, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

"There's a lot of argument over how large government should be. . . . One thing is certain: we're going to have government. No society can exist without it. And if we're going to have government, we should try to have one that is responsive and efficient."

Change A lot has changed in the 30-plus years since I was an undergraduate here in Austin. This town is a lot bigger. The hair on my head, once black, has turned gray. And what's inside my head, once strong images in black and white, now contains many more shadings. Back then, I believed, along with many others of my generation, that government was the solution to our social and economic ills--that public service was noble, and that business was merely a matter of crass money-making. Now, my views are more richly textured. Indeed, one of the startling worldwide changes over the past 30 years is the virtual disappearance of the socialist economic model. Capitalism may not have been proven right, but communism certainly has been proven wrong. We certainly didn't get all the answers right during the 1960s. But I think we were asking the right questions--questions about who we are as a people and about what our role is in the world, questions about racial injustice and economic inequality.   The LBJ School These are big questions. One of the joys of being at the LBJ School is that I get to engage them again. In fact, those questions constitute much of the agenda that I have in mind for the LBJ School. Let me go through a few of them. Who are we?--As an undergraduate, I was taught that this was a question for theologians and philosophers. Today, I realize that it also is a question for public policy analysts. Who are we? Well, for one thing, we in the state of Texas are about to transform the meaning of the words "minority" and "majority." Within the next decade, African Americans and Hispanic Americans together will constitute a majority of the state's population. Whites, or Anglos, will be the largest single minority group. This demographic change has profound implications for our public institutions. Right now, UT's racial and ethnic demographics are misaligned with the demographics of the state. This misalignment is not politically sustainable. A voting and tax-paying population that is mostly black and brown will have trouble supporting a university whose student body remains overwhelmingly white. So, the forces of demography are transforming the way we think. At the university, for example, we need to stop arguing about things like "affirmative action" and "diversity," because those terms do not convey the nature of our challenge. Our challenge is to align the demographics of the university--and other institutions--with the demographics of the state. Where do we live?--One of our challenges is to figure out how to think regionally and how to get the political jurisdictions within a region to work better together. Central Texas used to consist of geographically discrete towns. I remember when places such as Georgetown and Pflugerville and San Marcos were distant. Well, today we're all part of a large, interdependent metropolitan region. From a business standpoint, this is a single market. And when businesses make location decisions, they look at the quality of labor that is available in the region, not just in a single political jurisdiction. They average out the high school graduation rates from a half-dozen school districts, not just one. Similarly, crime and environmental problems cannot be confined within a political jurisdiction. A good crime control program in one jurisdiction doesn't matter much when crime flows across jurisdictions as easily as automobile traffic. But our political boundaries are not aligned to the economic and social realities. And I don't think this region is ready for metropolitan government. So, our challenge is to figure out how to work across jurisdictions to educate our children, stimulate our growth, protect our environment, and control crime. What is our role in the world?--Every day, I can stand outside my office at the LBJ School and watch traffic flow along one of this nation's major arteries of international trade. I-35 is the "NAFTA Corridor," the main road carrying goods from Mexico to Canada. Every day, firms such as Motorola and Dell are putting millions of dollars' worth of goods into the international commerce. We may not yet feel the aftershocks of the Asian financial crisis, but you can bet that executives at our high-tech firms are keeping a close watch on the financial seismograph. The Iron Curtain was torn down in 1989, President Bush's first year in office. We've now gone through two presidential election seasons, and we still haven't had a full-fledged debate over defense. Why is that important? Money, for one reason. This nation spends about $250 billion a year on defense. Just over a billion dollars every working day. That's more than the combined defense expenditures of our NATO allies; it's also more than the combined defense spending of Russia, China, Iran, and Iraq. We're spending roughly as much as we were spending at many points during the Cold War. Why? Where's the threat to our national borders? What's the threat to our vital interests abroad? What, indeed, are our obligations as the world's sole superpower? I'd like to see the LBJ School participate in finding the answers to these questions.   Leadership It isn't enough to understand, in an analytical or academic manner, what's happening. We also must understand how to act on what we know. In short, we need leadership. We need to help young men and women appreciate the importance of leadership, give them some practice at it, and let them know that leadership can be exercised from any position on the field. Unfortunately, we in this society don't do a very good job of preparing people for leadership. Think about this for a moment. Our schools teach academic subjects and technical skills. We're required to study history and geography and literature. But leadership is an extracurricular activity. One of the things I began to appreciate in the Pentagon is how systematically the military goes about developing leaders. They begin with the most basic: how to stand erect before two or three people and get them to respond to a simple command--right face, left face. Over time, they learn the difference between staff leadership and command leadership, how to use information, power, and personality. The colonels and Navy captains who served as my military assistants were mastering another leadership skill--how to teach your boss his job without appearing to do so. All three of them earned their first stars, but before they could pin them on, they went back to school to become exposed to another order of leadership. By contrast, the Department of Defense (DoD) didn't do nearly as good a job of preparing civilians for leadership. It was possible, in DoD as in most government agencies, to rise from the ranks of technician into a senior management job without ever taking "Supervision 101." Our failure to teach leadership has had two unfortunate consequences. One is that we often put the wrong people in leadership positions. Think about it. Who's most likely to get promoted to sales manager? Probably the person with the best sales record. Is that the best criterion? Leadership is a skill, just as surgery and sales and computer programming are skills. If it's a skill, it can be taught. A second consequence is this: if we don't have a systematic way of teaching and assessing leadership skills, then the way we select leaders is likely to be based heavily on "instinct." If we're in a leadership position, the people we're likely to think have the greatest leadership potential are people who look like, talk like, and act like us. In short, our current approach to leadership tends to perpetuate the old-boy network. Leadership training is one way we can help more women and minorities break through the glass ceiling. So, one of the things I want to do at the LBJ School is to upgrade our teaching of leadership.   Conclusion Let me conclude this way: the LBJ School helps men and women learn how to shape and manage the public's business. The questions I raised earlier--who are we, where do we live, what is our nation's role in the world--are key to our program. The answers to those questions are essential to the shaping and managing of the public's business. The public's business is important. It must be done well. There's a lot of argument over how large government should be, over which programs are good and which are not, over what should be done by the federal government as opposed to state or local government. No matter the outcomes of those arguments, one thing is certain: we're going to have government. No society can exist without it. And if we're going to have government, we should try to have one that is responsive and efficient.

Dorn named LBJ School Dean