Sunday, March 09, 2008
Radford professor shares in limelight
Shanna Flowers
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Of all the people James Perry could have asked to write a nominating letter for a prestigious scholarly award, he asked Radford University professor Reginald Shareef.
Perry is a nationally recognized leader in public administration, the study of how public organizations are managed. He is a chancellor's professor at In- diana University.
The honor, awarded by the American Society for Public Administration, is tantamount to journalism's Pulitzer Prize. It is given for lifetime academic contributions to public administration.
Shareef said of Perry: "He could have picked anybody in business or the field of public administration. The guy's a real humble guy."
"One doesn't have to be from Harvard," Perry said in a telephone interview Friday morning. "Reggie was probably as good as anybody. We sort of kept in touch based on our professional interests. He consented to do it."
The two men have been professional colleagues for nearly 20 years and share worries that too many organizations are being run with more emphasis on profit and less on values and ethics. They will be together Monday.
After nearly 35 years as a scholar, Perry will receive the Dwight Waldo Award in Dallas. Waldo is considered the father of modern public management, Shareef said.
Waldo, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and later Syracuse University, believed organizations can have efficiency and ethics in management, and they should be co-equals to avoid putting the public trust at risk, Shareef said. He and Perry subscribe to that line of thinking.
"We're somewhat critical of our colleagues in business who are sort of full of themselves," Perry said matter-of-factly, hinting at the philosophical wedge between some public and business administrators.
The two men met 17 years ago, but Shareef knew Perry's work long before then.
When Shareef began working on his doctorate in public administration in 1980 at Virginia Tech, the native Roanoker often came across Perry's writings.
Perry was a young and increasingly influential scholar in his field. At the time, Perry was on the faculty at the University of California at Irvine.
More than a decade later, in 1991, Shareef had earned his doctorate and was teaching a summer course in the Master of Business Administration program at Indiana University, Perry's new home.
As Shareef recalled last week, he asked one of the secretaries about Perry, a man whose academic writings he had followed and admired for years. The secretary urged Shareef to call Perry.
He didn't.
About a week later, Shareef's phone rang. Perry called him. A professional and social acquaintance evolved.
"I'd bounce ideas off of him," Shareef said. Perry was working on a book and invited Shareef to write a chapter for it.
"That's the kind of break young scholars dream of," Shareef said. "It gives you so much credibility."
"It's just the kind of nice things this guy will do," he added.
Last September, Perry, who has a doctorate from Syracuse University, realized his body of work might be considered for the Waldo. He said people generally ask someone on their faculty to nominate them, but Perry thought of Shareef.
"I've always had a lot of respect for Reggie," said Perry, a Wisconsin native.
Shareef's nomination notes Perry's achievements, including publishing 125 articles since 1974, co-authoring several books and serving as a mentor for countless students.
"I have known Jim both professionally and socially for over 20 years," he wrote. "He is a prodigious scholar, supportive colleague, and outstanding human being."
Writing, of course, is nothing new to Shareef. Many roanoke.com readers will remember his passionately written online column from 1999 to 2005. That cemented his role as a public intellectual.
He said the title is used by public administration scholars who translate the dense academic writing about public policy ideals into language the general readers can understand. In his column, Shareef did that.
His column often applied public administration's hierarchal theories to the real-world situations playing out in Roanoke, such as the issue of merit pay for police officers.
I asked Shareef how a child from Roanoke grew up to become a public administration scholar and public intellectual.
"I've always had an interest in organizations and how they operate, how you get socialized in organizations," said Shareef, who received his undergraduate degree in business administration from Virginia State University.
Shareef said that he probably fits "within what [W.E.B.] DuBois called the 'Talented Tenth,' " but emphasized he is "not a race man" or someone who exclusively studies black issues.
DuBois was the turn-of-the-20th-century black intellectual, scholar and political thinker. He coined the term "Talented Tenth" to describe the pool of educated blacks -- or top 10 percent -- poised as leaders to elevate the black masses by destroying "the libels of intellectual inferiority." Though Perry said his selection of Shareef to write his nominating letter had nothing to do with race, he noted that there are far too few black scholars in the academy of public administration and public intellectualism.
"I'm very disappointed he's not at Indiana University," Perry lamented. "We just need to get more people, more minorities in the academy. People in Roanoke need to know they have someone in Reggie who could be at many other places."
