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Interview with Larry Geri

Recent Teaching History
MPA; 1994 - present
Risk: Prospects for Technology and Democracy in the New Millennium; Fall 1999 - Winter 2000

Recent and Current Areas of Interest

The questions I deal with are big ones. When I arrived here I had completed all the work for my doctorate, but my dissertation. So for the first two years I worked on the issues in my dissertation. The question that drove my dissertation had to deal with the Federal goverment's move towards relying on user fees to finance its operations. One question that Congress and policy makers really never asked when they started doing this for all kinds of different programs was "What impact is this going to have on how the Federal Government is going to operate?" "Will it make them behave in ways that are more entrepreneurial or exactly what will it do to them?" I studied four agencies that charge user fees and developed a data set and found that they did start acting differently. The bigger question that emerges out of this has to do with globalization and the reliance on market forces for some determination of how a government entity ought to operate. There are no really good data out there about whether this makes sense. On the surface it seems, at least, problematic. You have countries, like New Zealand, Australia, Britain, and Canada that suddenly have central governments that are working on this very privatized, almost free market, model. This raises enormous questions in my mind. Is this model something that enhances democracy? Or is it something that further serves to make the public sector the protector of the rich and famous? Does it allow these big agencies to really become more responsive and provide better goods and services? Or is it a way for the federal government to absolve themselves of responsibility by privatizing and downsizing and trying to lessen their commitment to providing public goods? What makes this interesting in some ways is that people haven’t really done much with these developments either theoretically or empirically so there is lots of room for study.
At a more practical level I spent almost thirteen years as an employee of the Federal government in the Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. I was lucky enough to find a little niche within a small group that I really loved working with and had a great time, essentially they paid me to fly all over Latin America. We were working with host country governments to try to control various plant and animal pests, like the Mediterranean fruit fly, that infest the mangos that get imported. This way the fruit flies don’t end up infesting Los Angeles again. The question that kept popping up in my mind was, why are so many of the people I see so miserable. You walk around the big bureaus in D.C. and you can’t help but be struck by how miserable people are. You wonder why that is and what can be done about it? The same thing is true at the state level. I have been struck by the fact that many of the students who come to the MPA program are, if not miserable, quite unhappy with the way state government is run and its impact on their lives and their ability to have an effect on it. So there is a structural question about what we as a society can do to make these organizations more humane and yet provide some sort of accountability. In general I am interested in the appropriate structural forms of government, but the question is motivated not simply by questions of external efficiency and accountability, but from the inside by the sense that our current organizations are not doing well for the people who work in the organizations.

Finally I am interested in a comparative focus in public administration and trying to find ideas that are imaginative and that show that there are lots of countries that do things more effectively and sensibly than we do. I have an honest curiosity about other countries and find it fun to figure out what they do and why they do it. I like to satisfy my curiosity about cultural differences. I have spent time in South Africa and am going back there again in August for a month. Just seeing the inter-play of the multitude of cultures there is fascinating.

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

One of the things about public administration as a field is that it forces you to be an incredible generalist. If you are serious about teaching it you have to pick up stuff from economics, political science, sociology. A person I find really useful is Karl Weick, Social Psychology of Organizations, whose approach is very unusual. Instead of talking about structures and functions and all of that, he talks about organizing and what it means to engage in organizing as an act. It is really the most provocative book on organizations that has been written in the last 15 or 20 years. It says organizing isn’t necessarily planned, but we as individuals tend to do things and then reconstruct our sense-making apparatus afterwards. When I first read this I found this to be a very powerful idea, that we can reconstruct our histories and our ability to make sense of the world as we go along within the social context of an organization. I appreciate the work of Max Weber especially his work on bureaucracy, but also his use of the comparative method. In public administration people tend to think of him as an advocate of bureaucracy which I think is simply to misread him. I see my work as in the general frame of his approach. The work of C. Wright Mills especially the Sociological Imagination is also a really useful text for students of sociology and organizations.
Joseph Wholey, one of my mentors has put together a quite dry but very useful book on Practical Program Evaluation that is very helpful in terms of explicit techniques for evaluation. It shows what evaluation as a practice can mean to an organization. Michael Quinn-Patton also writes very useful material on evaluation in organizations.

The most recent book I have read that is really fine is David Held’s book, Democracy and the Global Order. He is a British political scientist and he is trying to define what democracy means, how it works, and make sense of the trends over the past 15 or 20 years toward globalization and capitalism. He wants to think about what this means in terms of a global governance models. He is one of the few people who has taken on the task of trying to make some sense of what is going on and come up with alternatives to simply accepting the Multi-Lateral Agreement on Investments and letting the multi-nationals have free reign.

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

I don’t tend to do very many contracts. I am interested in talking with people who have similar interests to mine. Also people with a strong interest in particular public policy questions, that they are approaching from a relatively open minded point of view, who are eager to figure out the tools they can bring to analysis, and to get into the substance of the issue are good candidates for contracts.

Specific Skills, Competence, Techniques:

Certainly writing skills. The field of public administration values clarity, brevity, and a relatively structured approach to writing. In the MPA program the goal is for the students to be able to do an extended applications project that you can actually read through without falling asleep or wanting to throw it out the window. I think students can get better if you teach them to read good writers, give them lots of feed back, and to critique their own writing.
I work with them on methods or styles of inquiry. I try to help them think about coming up with interesting questions and having some tools for trying to answer them. I want them to be able to assess what kinds of tools are appropriate to figure out how to get an answer that will be perceived as valid and reliable. This demands critical thinking skills and having a healthy skepticism with respect to the claims in texts. I want students to have the ability to look at a piece of research to determine whether it makes any sense, whether the author has come up with a question worth asking, and how well the author has answered it. Part of this demands a familiarity with basic statistical techniques. But it is really more important to understand inquiry and social science research methods.

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

In terms of assessing writing, I do look for clarity, brevity, and structure. So in this program it is important to get students to write for public administrators as an audience, but they are also in school where writing is about exploration and expression. So there is a fine line of not losing sight of the second goal. You can’t just teach them how to write memos, or they are going to lose out on learning from the process of writing about what they are thinking and feeling. One thing that is critical is to get students to see if they can delimit their work by creating a thesis. It often takes two quarters or more to hammer into them the simple fact that if you are writing something or doing research having a thesis sentence and a good thesis paragraph will save you from a world of hurt. It provides you with some limitation on the scope of what you are writing. Once they learn that, they realize that they don’t have to write a dissertation every time they write an essay. Once they learn how to do this, it changes their whole approach to writing, because it forces them to figure out up-front what an interesting question is that is within the scope of the assignment. Then they can concentrate on developing and sustaining an argument. I also look for the quality of the questions and the ability to analyze something in depth. I look for improvement on all these cores.
When I work with students on their verbal work and their participation in the program, I talk with them individually about what kind of intellectual journey they are on and why they are in the program. I encourage them to use this as an opportunity to rethink what they are all about and to create an intellectual identity for themselves. I want them to figure out what questions they are interested in and to develop the skills necessary to answer those questions. So I often am looking for some sense of engagement at the personal level. Our program does tend to encourage people to think broadly, to think about why society is the way it is, and think about how it can be made better. So it really does encourage people to think about how society works and their involvement. When I talk with people who have been through other M.P.A. programs they often end up feeling that they learned a few skills, but they haven’t really gone anywhere intellectually.

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

First of all I have been in the fortunate position of having worked with students I really like at the personal level. So it has been easy for me to establish a good inter-personal relationship with the students I have been working with. When you are with students for a year at a time you can get to know them pretty well. I keep myself open to them and their interests. In my spare time I work at the Crisis Clinic. I tend to be a listener anyway, but clearly listening is the key skill there. So I spend a lot of time just listening to the students concerns and agendas, to get an idea of where they are. I also tend to want to be a professor, not simply a teacher. At a certain level you do have to profess certain things to your students. Then what works for me is to profess and listen to their reaction to that.
As a teacher, I am trying to become more adroit in terms of classroom strategies. This is important in terms of reading students and the kinds of learning styles in a particular group. It is about not using a one-size-fits-all strategy, but having an array of methods so that you are not just lecturing and leaving the active learners in the group just gasping for air and bored witless.

I am a pretty relaxed teacher and my natural tendency is to use humor as much as possible. I am becoming more demanding in terms of my expectations, in terms of workload, the quality of the work. I have found that it is true that students do respond to the level of your demands and if you ask more they will give more. You then have to deal with the aggrieved, but I have received enough feed back from students who didn’t feel challenged enough, to feel good about this. I certainly feel better about myself as a teacher. Students do need to know that it is possible to fail at this work and to learn from it. As a teacher I enjoy seeing that my students see the world in a different way after going through the program. That is very satisfying.

What types of students tend to do well with you?

The intellectually curious who have had enough personal experience so that they are not coming to the questions in the field as if they were entirely new – they have seen some of the dynamics played out in organizations. They are able to translate from the theory we develop and use it to illuminate their experience. And they can use the theory to affect how they will approach issues in the future.
Another group I work well with are those who have less experience but are simply smart and curious people who want to learn about something that I can help them with. They are able to work with me in figuring out what questions they find interesting and searching for ways to answer those questions that allow them to grow personally.

What types of students have a hard time with you?

Students who have serious limits or inability to step beyond some cognitive problems they may have. We don’t get many of those, but we do get people who are stuck in their ways and simply can’t adapt. Fortunately this has been a really rare occurrence.

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

They like my sense of humor; they appreciate my knowledge of the topics we have covered. They appreciate that I work hard to make their experience in the program an enjoyable and positive one, while also pushing them a bit.

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

I look for students who are organized, punctual, able to do the work and have most of the necessary skills to do the project.

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

They should have a reasonably clear idea of what they want to do before they come into the conference. They should not expect me to write the contract for them.

Interviewer: Matt Smith

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Last Updated: March 15, 2007