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Training for Public Administration: A Symposium. I. The Social Sciences and Public Administration*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

R. H. Coats
R. H. Coats*
Affiliation:
The University of Toronto
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Extract

By “The Social Sciences and Public Administration,” the title assigned me by Professor Clokie, I am assuming he meant “Special Teaching in the Social Science Departments of Canadian Universities for Students Contemplating the Civil Service as a Career,” which is both more definitive and (being of eight words or over) even long enough for copyright. It is to “lead off” a symposium on “Training for Public Administration,” a vasty frame of reference indeed, taking in (some might go so far as to think) a course in the great school of Practical Politics itself.

Insinuating this role upon me, Professor Clokie pointed out that I had been a long time in the Public Service, and was now a teacher in a university. It is the logic of the redoubtable Pott, Mr. Pickwick's editor-friend, on Chinese metaphysics—an impregnable logic, says Mr. Bernard Shaw. In my case, however, whilst I was undoubtedly in the Service a long time indeed, at Toronto I am only what is called a “Visiting Professor,” i.e., one who lectures merely on what he knows, and can be let out at any time. Moreover, that new flower, the Course in Public Administration, which (again in the search for the particular) seems to represent a fortiori the “special teaching” aforesaid, was unknown in my generation as a student, and late-blooming in my generation as a civil servant. But one must not let one's style be cramped, and today therefore I take it as a sort of text, if only in the grand manner to which educationally speaking so old-fashioned a civil servant is accustomed.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , November 1945 , pp. 499 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1945

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Footnotes

*

These papers were presented at a session of the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association at Kingston in May, 1945. The programme was arranged by Professor H. McD. Clokie of the University of Manitoba.

References

1 Perhaps Canada has been lulled by Lord Bryce who told us—but that was a quarter of a century ago—that the Canadian service was “honest, fairly competent, and not given to bureaucratic ways.” Bryce may have known, but it was post-Bryce before so crude a fact as the number of Dominion civil servants was known to the rest of us. When the Prime Minister was accused by the Opposition of having expanded the service in a time of stringency (Oppositions lie awake nights over economy), a consistent figure on the point was unobtainable. A hurried meeting of Deputy Ministers revealed the difficulty, for the sake of which alone I mention the incident. It arose out of that almost unbelievable heterogeneity of the service. What is a government employee? It took the Bureau of Statistics, commissioned to set up an overall figure, two full meetings of Department chiefs and a fortnight's brooding to lay down a modus operandi, since when we can at least see the service (though still not in all its forms, as the plan was not fully put into effect) in the white light that beats upon a statistical document.

2 See Doren, Mark Van, Liberal Education (New York, 1943).Google Scholar

3 I had better relegate to a footnote a saying of Robson, W. A.: “The growth of thought is seldom seen by the educated.” (Civilization and the Growth of Law, London, 1935).Google ScholarSocrates doubted if virtue could be taught; Aristotle qualified, “not to the young.”

4 One is not unaware of Public Affairs, the interesting and useful quarterly published by the “Institute of Public Affairs” of Dalhousie University.Google Scholar But it is “Maritime,” and something of national scope is indicated.