Faculty Directory

Interview with Don Bantz

Recent and Current Areas of Interest

The center of my work has always been organizations. I have spent my whole life working in them, studying them, managing them and consulting in them. That really remains the heart of my discipline and passion. I am fascinated by what makes them tick, by the way they are structured, by how we might create new and more humane ones that don't chew us up and spit us out. When you think of creating new organizations you have to start with the bureaucratic phenomena, because that is where ninety percent of them are at. We can't seem to bust out of that mold. So I am always challenged to find alternatives to bureaucracy, because no matter how we try to create new organizations with time we tend to fall back into those old bureaucratic patterns. So it is a constant renewal effort to try to keep them alive. The central question for me is the nature of the human psyche, the social structure, and the need for power. The issue is so clear. Over and over again you see wonderful people put up into positions of power and they turn into fascists. I am always perplexed by what makes that happen. It's a matter of how you respond to the structure and how the structure molds your responses; how you become a molder of machines instead of men and women; how you adjust and kick into that power, that machine like mindset, and you become a new persona wrapped up in a structure which re-enforces that metaphor/those fantasies. This kind of phenomena seems to occur in all sorts of cultural milieu. I worked in Alaska to help set up these community controlled structures in antithesis to the BIA and HIS. We put those in place and a year or two later I was called in to help oust the director because he had turned out to be more BIA-like than the BIA had ever considered. They just turned into these awful things in many cases. These were community people. It was discouraging. It seemed that this was a response to the presence of hierarchy and personal ego - the way people worked to maintain their super-ordinate positions by manipulating their subordinates and their boards to build their power. That seems to me to be a universal phenomenon and it takes a very special person not to get wrapped up in that.

Are there particular authors/artists/thinkers whose work you interested and which you often ask students to examine?

Max Weber, of course, I always start there. I am always struck by what a powerful and prolific scholar Weber was both in terms of the range of his scholarship and the number of languages he mastered. I don't think anybody has said as much about bureaucracy beyond what he said and when that is linked to his analysis of society it is a hugely impressive and enduring grand theory. Then as a contemporary James Wilson is a writer who illuminates for my students in government what bureaucracy is and why it works the way it does. My philosophy of community based organization is based on Friere and that whole school of action. And I am still a radical by heart and Saul Alinsky, Miles Horton and Martin Luther King are a big part of my reading list. More recently women of color have gotten into my canon of readings. People like Alice Walker and bell hooks, especially in her conversation with Cornell West, have been influential. And recently some of the Buddhist writers have been relevant to my thinking about organizations. I was one of the pioneers in developing the idea of "Wellness" into organizations, their patients, and community life. So wellness is kind of a western concept embodying a lot of the mind-body-spirit concepts and this connects into some of the writing of Thich Nhat Hanh and other Buddhist ideas about personal and community life. The idea that you have to take care of yourself first and then go out and take care of the community. Because, if your not taking care of yourself, you can easily turn into one of those organizational Nazis.

Are there specific areas of interest or issues you want to work with students on in the current year?

Yes, I am usually interested in contracts that have to do with public policy issues that deal with the law. I quickly learned after I had done my Ph.D. work that the thing I didn't know was the law. So I taught myself for two years; it was the most useful skill I ever acquired, because every organization comes from a legal authority. You can talk about moral stuff all you want, there is no sanction that forces people to be moral, but there is a legal authority for every organization and that is where the power comes from. So I love to look at public policy issues from a legal standpoint and the whole process of legal reasoning - developing legal theories and precedents fascinating and exciting work. It is a wonderful way of teaching writing and reasoning, because it is so precise.

Specific Skills, Competence, Techniques:

In the graduate program, I always try to get people to know what the law actually says and to understand the legal landscape they operate within. Then I deal with stuff about how you read organizations. I use Weber to help do comparative administrative systems, since to understand our system you need to be able to compare it to others. I teach expository writing at the graduate level. I spend a lot of time working on formulating the research question. The way I teach my grant writing class is the way I teach writing in general. I work on focussing questions. Focus, Focus, Focus. And I give abundant feedback and rewrite with critiques and peer critiques. I am a very good writer in terms of producing clear focused, reasoned memos, arguments, grants and the like, and I enjoy helping students develop those qualities in their writing.

For Core it's the same skills but less advanced, group process skills, basic social science, and critical thinking. I always start writing at this level autobiographically - something that comes from your own personal experience.

What are key qualities you look for in student work? What techniques do you use to assess their work? How do you help students assess their work?

The quality of the student's contribution to the conversation of the program is the overarching thing that I assess. I look for passion and structure in what students do and say. They should be passionate about the things they are trying to do and have a structure that is appropriate to the audience. So number one is engagement and passion. Then if they have those qualities, all you need to teach are the mechanics of doing the process.

I also give students leeway in figuring out what to write about. A lot of teaching is just forcing them to find what is important for them. Actually the hardest thing for most students to do is to find a topic, a question, an idea that they are interested in.

I always try to lay the groundwork with students in terms of the students doing an assessment at the beginning of the quarter of what they are trying to do - a sort of base line. And then for each paper I make explicit the criteria I am going to judge by and ask them to comment on how they felt about the writing. Then they have to respond to my evaluation of it. I want to establish an on going conversation about their work. I have found that change is motivated by constant rich feed back. I try to turn papers back in a day or two. I think students need immediate feedback.

Teaching Style:
How would you characterize yourself as a teacher?

I set high expectations, model learning and try to create an environment where learning is fun. My theme in the MPA class for example was "Drive out Fear." They mostly came out of fear based education. So I do a lot of work on community building, group process, team building. So I just try to have fun. When I give lectures I try to be passionate, enthused about whatever it is that I am studying. It is passion that you have to model. Students perceive me as very demanding, yet flexible. I am willing to negotiate on an individual basis any assignment as long as the work is getting done. I am hoping that students learn joy. That they learn that learning can be a fun, creative process. I try to show that there are multiple ways of learning, that it can and should be a life long process. I want them to get away from the fear base, the sense that one has to learn because there is a test coming or they are going to be graded on the assignment.

What types of students tend to do well with you?

I take pride in trying to take all types of students and figuring out how to work with them. The students who work well are the ones who acknowledge that they have a skill or an area that needs work and that I am going to work with them in a non-punitive very supportive way. If you are willing to work hard and well and know the areas in which you want to learn, we will figure out a way to do the work.

What types of students have a hard time with you?

It is the students who deny or try to fake it, and shouldn't be here in the first place, who I have a hard time with. I don't put up with that B.S.

What do your student evaluations say about the way you come across to students?

Student evaluations say that I work hard, that I am passionate about my subject, that I engage them in a lot of different types of workshops and hands on work. I try to make every session different. They say that I make them work and that I make them learn.

Expectations about Contracts, Internships, and Evaluations
What qualities do you look for in a student who comes to you for work in a contract?

The first thing I look for is if they have some learning objectives figured out. If they haven't figured out their objectives they are not going to get very far. If you can't tell what you want to learn, what skills you want to acquire, what question you want to answer then you need to go back to the drawing board. I take mostly advanced students, but I look for a student with a good question who is ready to hit the deck running and willing to work. Students need to earn the contract in a way by having done some work ahead of time rather than just starting at the beginning of the quarter.

What information do you want to see when a person comes to look for a contract?

I try to take students with a clean slate and make my own assessment. I usually do that with some questions and talking with them.

Interviewer: Matt Smith