Many things can happen at conferences such as these -- meeting new and interesting people, which I have done. Discussing topics of interests, in many cases topics that few would find interesting enough to discuss, and experiencing the local iterations of life experienced by others in their habitat, which I have also done.
Yesterday, I attended several presentations, a kind of mini-course format, on several topics. First up was a discussion on Youngstown, OH, and efforts to deal with violence. Interesting to say the least -- and yes, this is a PA topic. It is also a criminology and CJ topic. See how this works? Oh, the gist of this presentation was that Youngstown like so many similarly situated cities (rust belt, deindustrialization process, dwindling populations, etc.) has challenges with what I would like to call "reverse spatial mismatch." People have left the urban center, leaving fewer and fewer people to pay taxes, work, and consume. The workers who have now left center-city, living in the marginalized areas, some might say the old-suburbs, commute into to the center city to work. Violence is rampant. What to do? Check out the Youngstown's CIRV program.
Then there was the doctoral candidate studying decentralized vs. centralized policing internationally and whether there is a relationship between these two factors (which has many factors within them) and trust by the community of police. This young student, Grichawat Lowatcharin, created a Police Decentralized Index to evaluate his hypotheses. Great research topic. Not sure of his success, but like Thomas Edison pointed out, "there is success in knowing how not to make a light bulbs."
Another doctoral candidate wanted to test her hypothesis against the model of CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) and crime prevention on campuses. Looks like it will be a very interesting research project.
Of course, I had a brief tit-for-tat with another professor who clearly thinks police -- the institution -- and police officers are to blame for a great many of our problems in America. The rest of the room enjoyed the debate. At some point, I had to allow the final word from the other professor -- for those of you who know me, you know how difficulty that was for me, after all, she was probably an expert. LOL Anyway, several of the attendees shook my hand at the conclusion of the discussion -- not sure why they did that.
One young academic in progress from Washington, D.C. and I had a great conversation about what it is that police officers do that most people do not know about. While a PA doctoral student, she was interested in studying that. I gave her some pointers, etc.
The second session and by far the most interesting was on Virtues Ethics in Public Administration. The co-presenters for the topic were Professor Rebecca Gordon, University of San Francisco and Professor Danny Balfour, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, MI. So, the presentation started with a test of the two (yes, I said two) attendees -- me and one other lost soul, it seems -- where the question was asked of us -- "What is the purpose of human life?" Now, you all might have simple answers to this questions, but knowing this was a very smart person, I had to come up with some lofty answers and I did. To my surprise -- I was never very good at philosophy, at least not until I had several adult beverages under my belt...then I am very philosophical. Now, my answers were pretty much right on -- "Be," "Happiness" and...wait for it, "Enlightenment." All seems pretty cool answers and were mostly right on.
Professor Gordon then began a lecture on Aristotle and how he went about answering this question. Finally, we discussed why do governments exists? The answers were not so easy or forthcoming. The take-away is that governments exist to provide an environment where "citizens" can pursue excellence in what they want to do -- within the idea of "community" and what Aristotle called "friendship." By the was, this discussion grew to about 5 people and got very interesting and touched on many topics, such as Anonymous, ends justifying the means, J. S. Mill (one of my favorites), St. Thomas Aquinas, and Alasdair MacIntyre's book After Virtue. Read it, I plan to.
So, here it is Saturday and I am about to embark on another day of learning and connecting.
I will post more comments soon.
Dr. GM Cox
Assistant Professor
Director, MPA Program
Tarleton State University
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