Alumni

Public Service at a Liberal Arts College
A Faculty Member's Thirty-Year Perspective

By Paul Fischer

When I arrived in the fall of 1971, Lake Forest College was steeped in the traditions of the liberal arts. The business major had been eliminated a few years before as part of a liberal arts purification campaign. Pre-professional education clashed with the image of a quality liberal arts institution. The only remnant of that pre-professional past was the education major that fit uncomfortably into the prevailing intellectual terrain.

While I was very excited about teaching political science at a quality, small liberal arts college, my training and background had been at large universities and in urban settings; there, the more applied social sciences and training for careers in public service, a different type of “pre-professionalism,” were an integral part of the curriculum and mission.

Combining the traditional liberal arts culture with my interest in encouraging students to enter public service and applied social science careers became my abiding and consuming interest. It began modestly with the development of an internship program in politics and economics. With the support and guidance of Rosemary Hale, a respected economics professor, we persuaded a skeptical faculty and administration that internships, as long as they were rooted in the academic discipline, could be an important supplement to both majors. Then, as today, to ensure academic standards, department faculty supervise the internship program at Lake Forest College. The internship also includes an important research component that links the intern’s experience to the more traditional course material, demonstrating the connections between course work and “real world” situations.

The second phase of my campaign to integrate public service and the applied social sciences into the College’s curriculum involved my courses in urban politics. Early on, I engaged my students with urban issues in the surrounding communities. Chicago’s North Shore, from Evanston to Zion, became a laboratory for my classes. We focused less on the theories surrounding urban politics and more on the particular public policy issues that were confronting those communities. The hiring of new faculty specializing in urban history, and sociology, as well as community psychology, offered interdisciplinary opportunities that had not previously existed.

This growing interest in the Chicago region and urban public policy led in 1976 to the creation of the Wood Institute for Local and Regional Studies, the College’s most ambitious commitment to a more public service/applied social science curriculum approach. Hoping to use private funding, the College created a program whose dual task was to prepare students for careers in urban-related public service and at the same time provide professional consulting to nearby communities. During the relatively short life of the institute, affiliated faculty worked closely with cities and towns such as Lake Forest, Highland Park, and Waukegan on a number of important local concerns, from economic development to tax reform.

Unfortunately, faculty interest and commitments were split between the institute and traditional departments where tenure decisions were made. The institute began to flounder, and by the early 1980s, it withered and died. The model, however, of faculty using social science tools and providing students with professional experiences of working on community-based problems and issues would survive on a more modest and individual basis.

An important turning point in my interest in urban public policy and service came in 1979, when I won a fellowship to Washington, D.C., as a member of President Carter’s urban policy staff. My two years in Washington were intellectually and professionally exciting and challenging. I was immersed during my first year in the writing of the president’s 1980 Urban Policy Report and in my second year in controversial initiatives dealing with desegregation of public housing.

I returned to Lake Forest College in the fall of 1981 with a renewed interest in applied social science and public policy research. I had become passionate about research that creates outcomes with a real and hopefully beneficial effect on people’s lives. The expertise I had attained in the field of race and subsidized housing led to a new, subsidiary career as a researcher, consultant, and expert witness for a number of important public housing desegregation cases around the country. 

This work continues today with ongoing research and consulting on the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation, on new strategies to develop more affordable housing in the Chicago area, and on civil rights litigation in Baltimore, Maryland. Supported by grants from a number of Chicago foundations, my research has been the basis of several significant studies and legal cases. Since my return to Lake Forest College, I have tried to find a way to carry out this research agenda in a small undergraduate liberal arts institution. Most of the researchers in these fields are from large universities with an army of graduate students and institutes that support this type of activity. I am usually the only professor from a small liberal arts college on any research team or at a policy-specific conference.

Since I returned to the College in 1981 and became dedicated to this area of research, I have engaged my students as my research assistants. Every one of my projects — including expert witness testimony, reports to government agencies and foundations, and research papers — has depended on Lake Forest College undergraduates. The key has been the Richter Program, where I have recruited students at the end of their first year to assist me during the summer with whatever policy work I am doing at the moment. They become immersed in everything from “grunt work” — like gathering and analyzing census data or a public housing authority database — to participating in meetings with government officials, community-based organizations, public interest attorneys, public housing residents, and other scholars in the field. Some of these students continue with me during the school year.

The work with Richter students in the freshman year is followed by public service/public policy internships in the junior year and my senior seminar on race and housing as a culminating experience. What many of them eventually come to understand deeply is how the classroom can connect to the real world; how the research tools learned in a politics class have a practical value to people in the larger community, and, most important, how exciting a career can be that combines academics and community service. Some have continued with an interest in public housing, others with careers in local government, and others in different public policy fields; but all, I believe, more deeply appreciate what a difference one person can make in improving the lives of others in the public realm.

These individual efforts are now being supplemented by renewed interest in public service and urban public policy at the highest levels of the College. Under the leadership of President Schutt, the College is discovering in new and more extensive ways the value of the Chicago connection and how the Chicago area greatly adds to the liberal arts experience. Relationships with government agencies, nonprofit community-based organizations, and the world of urban issues and problems are important parts of that effort. In that initiative, I see growing interest in public service as part of the undergraduate experience and as a career option for many of our students.

When I arrived at Lake Forest College, it was a place hesitant to accept pre-professional learning, applied research, and public service in a liberal arts curriculum. Over 30 years later, that reluctance is gone. We find new ways to prepare our students to be active, engaged citizens — citizens who can contribute their skills and expertise to solving many of our society’s most difficult problems. I rejoice!

Paul Fischer is a full professor in politics and for the past 33 years has taught courses in American politics and public policy.  Besides running the department’s internship program for most of that period, he also coordinates the ACM Urban Studies program as well as the American University Washington Semester program.